“Certainly we can say that we all feel at the beginning of a new era founded on fidelity to the ancient heritage, that opens upon wonders of real spiritual progress” (John XXIII).

A new season of spiritual experimentation

The Groups start with a three-year basic course that is called ‘Peace-Path’ articulated in 12/13 regular meetings throughout the year, each lasting about 2-3 hours and an intensive course in the end of the year (all together lasting about 50 hours).
All three groups, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year can be followed in person or online.

In these three years, we examine and rediscover all the fundamental passages, from our ego-centered self to our new humanity, the passages that every one of us is called to live every day in the tiring pilgrimage towards final liberation.
So we work on the ‘heart’, because it is only from the heart’s transformation can an action come about that’s not alienating and destructive.

“Those who are very active and think that they are embracing the world with their preaching and with their external works should remember that they would benefit the church much more and would be accepted by the God much more, let alone speak of the good example they’d give, if they spent at least half of their time with Him in prayer. Certainly then, with less effort, they would obtain more with just one work than with one thousand, simple through the merit of their prayer and through the spiritual strength gained in prayer. Otherwise, everything will come down to the pounding of a hammer in vain and doing little to nothing, and sometimes doing nothing at all or even doing harm” (Saint John of the Cross).

The essential contents of the three-year course are:

The Cultural level:
The anthropological turning point and its characteristics in this time of globalization
The modern era and the XX century as phases of the preparation for the turning point in progress
The renewing of historical Christianity

Psychological level:
Our soul is not unified
Family genesis and the structure of my self-centered self
The emotional states of division: fear and anger
The originating schism and its underlying despair
From ‘myself-in-conversion to ‘myself-in-relation’: an act of faith
Behind my ego-perfectionist there is the shadow of a rebel
Extracting from the shadow its light
The spiritual characteristics of my True-Self
Love I still haven’t expressed: my mission

Spiritual level:
Concentration of the mind and interior consciousness
Meditation as a practice of auto-observation
Meditation as switching-off of the ego
Learning how to die, learning how to be born
Death and faith: the mystery of Baptism
The mystery of Maria: my immaculate birth
‘Myself-in-Christ’ grows from ‘myself-in-relation’: listening and rebirth
Contemplative experience of the mysteries of salvation
Therapeutic and revolutionary characteristics of my ‘Messiah-self’.

“It is crucial to know ourselves well, but I wouldn’t want to reassure you by this, not even if you arrived in the highest of heavens (…) But I believe that we’ll never know ourselves well, if we don’t try, all together, to know God” (Saint Therese of Jesus).

The rising humanity is integral: therefore it is peace-loving

The most specific element in our laboratories consists of integrating three learning levels and formative levels that are normally separated: the cultural, psychological and spiritual levels.
We believe that today only their correct integration is functional for the emersion of the new humanity.

Each and every one of us has the need of the strong interpretive keys in this present moment of a new culture of transformation. But we also need to know ourselves better, to know our blocks, our egoistic defense systems, our fears, our rages, our hatred and in this way even our most authentic desires, our needs, our spiritual aspirations etc. Thus, we are in need of a specific psychological self-learning.

“The oldest generation looks with concern its own children and their more or less strange behavior. But children tend to live the unconscious life that was never lived by their parents, the things that their parents have ignored or never dared to face, at times even deceiving themselves. (…) Parents have nothing to be surprised about except for their own lack of preparation, and the ignorance that they have of their own psychology, that at times is the fruit of a seed planted by their own parents: lack of preparation and ignorance perpetuates unto infinity the course of ‘not-knowing’ oneself. My solution to this problem is to educate the educators, create schools for adults” (Carl Gustav Jung).

Finally, we are in need of spiritual practices that are real experiences for us; we need to go from a preeminently represented religiosity (abstract concepts, moral laws, exterior rites) to a personally-fulfilled spirituality.
Only an authentic spiritual realization of the celebrated mysteries can renew and give sense to liturgical celebrations.

In the ‘Peace-Path’ groups, the three levels of understanding are expressed in three practices:

Study; Exercises’ of self-knowledge; and meditation which becomes prayer.
For the part more directly spiritual, we use the meditation techniques of oriental origin, as forms of preparation for Christian prayer.
Only the authentic silencing of our ego can open us to the real listening of the Word of the Lord that regenerates us.

“Authentic practices of meditation, with their origin from the Christian East and great non-Christian regions that attract today’s man, divided and disoriented, can offer a good way to help a person of prayer to stand before God interiorly calm, even in the midst of extreme solicitations” (Joseph Ratzinger).

“In a period of history in which many structures and life styles are falling into pieces while we are constantly left with nothing but our own personal resources and intuitions, the need of a spiritual direction is becoming more evident. From the idealistic point of view, anybody would benefit from a spiritual guide. However, it would be wrong to believe that there is only one spiritual guide. It is important to start thinking about an entire community or ministry where people help each other, practicing spiritual disciplines, living in a way that makes us sensible to the constant presence of God in our life” (Henry Nouwen).

Creating relations based on the liberation, recreating the world

The fundamental principles that the Groups aspire are:

* welcoming people in transformation
* non-specialized experimentation
* lasting human relationships
* the spirit of enthusiasm

Above all we create a welcoming place for those people in upheaval in this extraordinary phase of crisis and regeneration.
Contemporary men and women often suffer this crisis in solitude, feeling guilty or ashamed. We welcome them and show the evolutional meaning of the crisis that they suffer from.

Moreover, our research is a real experimentation, an authentic research and therefore we try to transmit, in our Groups, that sense of liberty that every research should have.
We use, as we’ve shown, different schools of knowledge, but without any specialization or abstract concepts.
All knowledge is used with precision and care, but only in view of the transformation that it can give.

The groups however, can help people to experiment the small and big miracles of rebirth only through relationships that are regular and lasting.
We need to feed the mutual confidence, the affection and the joy of being together, communicating to each other our pains and our delight.

“To be a witness means to give your life for our friends, to become a “martyr” in the original sense of the word. To be a witness means to offer your experience of faith and to make your doubts, your hopes, your failures, your successes, your solitude and your wounds available as a context in which others can confront their own humanity and their own search for meaning” (Henry Nouwen).

Fundamentally, it is a positive spirit, even enthusiastic, the spirit with which we are called to live this unique phase of the history of our planet. We cannot be trans-figured without the trust and the passion for ‘newness’ which is however nothing more than the spirit of ‘man’ which is being born within us.

“Only passivity is dangerous. A Poet is he who breaks for us our habits. (…) and may he tell everyone the joy of living this special time. Because the moment is great and new, in which to know ourselves again”. (Saint-John Perse)

“If a new era of civilization, a non-savage one, needs to blossom, the most profound need of that era will be the sanctification of  profane life, a fecundation of the socially-temporal existence operated by the spiritual experience, the contemplative energies and fraternal love” (Jacques Maritain).

A new culture of transformation, a new pedagogy of Rising Humanity

The goals of the ‘Peace-Path’ cultural movement are multiple:

Above all, we collaborate in the elaboration of a new culture of the anthropological transformation taking place, a new culture (in a political sense also) of peace, that regains strength over and over again from the interior work of pacification, refusing any ideological reduction that presumes to construct peace without however changing the human war-heart first.

“In the future, peace will be possible only if found in each individual first – if every man liberates himself from hatred for his neighbor, whatever his race or nationality, if he overcomes this hatred and transforms it into something different, perhaps in the long run – into love, if that’s not too much to ask. This is the only possible solution” (Etty Hillesum).

“The period that lacks its foundation is hanging over an abyss. Granted that there can be a turning point for this period, this can happen only if the world turns upside down, that is, upside down beginning from the abyss” (Martin Heidegger).

The favorable time for a change

The ‘Peace-Path’ groups are reviving the Christian experience of the new birth, using all the learning instruments that the modern world and in particular XX century offered.

In the cultural traditions of philosophy and art, from psychoanalysis to contemporary physics, through the crisis of democracy, within the catastrophes of totalistic regimes and the world wars we can find the signs of the terminal desegregation of self-centered self that reveals the urgency of a new birth.

The entire history of the last centuries’ modern world, more precisely, the period from the Reform onwards, can be interpreted as a preparation for this anthropological turning point in which we live in. This is the period in which Christianity goes through a bitter internal crisis purging itself of all the self-centered elements that have characterized the life of faith up until now.

“We can state with absolute certainty that a new historical period is beginning now. (…) Our existence reaches the point of the absolute option and its consequences: the highest possibilities and extreme dangers” (Romano Guardini).

If the mystery of Christ’s New Humanity   reemerges with a new power; firstly it asks the Christian churches to be purified and renewed. The prophetic gesture of John Paul II, on the first Sunday of Lent of 2000 asking for forgiveness of all the sins committed by the Church over the centuries, marks in that sense a real and new beginning in the history of Catholic Christianity.

“On today’s first Sunday of Lent, I see an appropriate opportunity for the Church, gathered spiritually around the Successor of Peter, to implore divine forgiveness for the sins of all the believers. We forgive and ask forgiveness!” (John Paul II).

Therefore, the ‘Peace-Path’ groups are involved in this phase of great labor within the Catholic church, in order to collaborate with its profound reform, completely faithful to its Tradition, which is according to its nature ‘permanent renewal’. In fact, Benedict XVI emphasized in May of 2011: “Not so rarely tradition and progress are sadly set against each other. In reality however, the two concepts integrate each other: the tradition in itself includes in some way progress”.

“I continued to preach ‘the decay of others is also in ourselves’, and I see no other solution, really, I see no other solution but to turn within ourselves and tear out our decay. I no longer think we can improve something in the exterior world unless we improve it within ourselves first. It’s the only lesson of this war: we need to turn within ourselves and nowhere else” (Etty Hillesum).

‘Peace-Path’: interior liberation ————> the world’s transformation

‘Peace-Path’ is a cultural movement that is expressed through the groups of interior liberation, within which the Christian faith is launched as a concrete and continued experience of new birth: the of melting our old ego-centric self, dominated by fear and hatred, and emersion of a new spiritual self that is happier and more free.

This changeover from the substantially war-oriented humanity to a more pacific one, capable of peaceful relations, is manifesting as the only evolutional possibility for the entire mankind. The ego-centric self is proved, decade after decade, to be a principal incapable of running the human life on this planet but rather destruction-oriented.
The processes of globalization are revealing apocalyptically, which means in a very clear way, that the ego-centered government of the planet is unsustainable and the necessity of a complete change that is first of all interior.

“We need to look at all the good possibilities that there are, our hopes, the new possibilities of life. And finally, we need to see in this actual moment the need for change, a new turning point, we need to announce it, announce that it cannot occur without an interior conversion” (Benedict XVI).

Humanity needs a changeover! A change that the more illuminated great minds are announcing, even those who do not share the Christian vision.
Therefore, Christians can communicate in a new way with non-believers or people with different religious affiliation, offering the Christian key of interpretation of the anthropological change currently happening, that is a new level of realization of the mystery of the New Humanity, a post-war and relational humanity, inaugurated by Jesus Christ.
Thus, the time begins for “announcing dialogue” (dialogo annunciante) never before envisaged.

“I believe that we are at a turning point of epochal transition to a “climatic” global economy, and radical repositioning of the human presence on this planet. The era of the “mind” is about to be replaced with the era of empathy (…) The autonomous and exclusive self, implicated in the concept of the private property, leaves a spot for an inclusive, relational self, participating on the global public square, virtual and real” (Jeremy Rifkin).

This context of anthropological turning point in 1999 gave birth to the ‘Peace-Path’ groups under the leadership of Marco Guzzi.