Such beautiful words from our Holy Father

"We do well to take up the dreams of our elders, so that we can prophesy in our day and once more encounter what originally set our hearts afire.  Dreams and prophecies together.  The remembrance of how our elders, our fathers and mothers, dreamed, and the courage prophetically to carry on those dreams.

"This attitude will make us fruitful.  Most importantly, it will protect us from a temptation that can make our consecrated life barren: the temptation of survival.  An evil that can gradually take root within us and within our communities.  The mentality of survival makes us reactionaries, fearful, slowly and silently shutting ourselves up in our houses and in our own preconceived notions.  It makes us look back, to the glory days – days that are past – and rather than rekindling the prophetic creativity born of our founders’ dreams, it looks for shortcuts in order to evade the challenges knocking on our doors today.  A survival mentality robs our charisms of power, because it leads us to “domesticate” them, to make them “user-friendly”, robbing them of their original creative force.  It makes us want to protect spaces, buildings and structures, rather than to encourage new initiatives.  The temptation of survival makes us forget grace; it turns us into professionals of the sacred but not fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters of that hope to which we are called to bear prophetic witness.  An environment of survival withers the hearts of our elderly, taking away their ability to dream.  In this way, it cripples the prophecy that our young are called to proclaim and work to achieve.  In a word, the temptation of survival turns what the Lord presents as an opportunity for mission into something dangerous, threatening, potentially disastrous.  This attitude is not limited to the consecrated life, but we in particular are urged not to fall into it." --Pope Francis

Full text of Pope Francis' homily for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord