Rodrigo Guiomar, an Augustinian Recollect novice, felt that God was calling him in a simple way, with the example of the religious.
Rodrigo Guiomar has always loved poetry. That is why, as a child of the many who run around the streets of Breves (Marajó, Brazil), he had the desire to be a teacher, specifically of poetry and literature. “At a certain point in his life I was struck in a simple way by the life of the friars in the mission,” he recalls. In his area, several Augustinian Recollect religious give their lives, as others did before them, for the Marajoara people. That was what conquered Rodrigo: “The dedication, their testimony of life, their dedication, their love for all without exception as if they were brothers…”.
At that moment he asked himself a question that he still asks himself today: “How can someone so distant become so intimate? Likewise, God in that intangible that tangibilizes his love in each person’s life. “It was there that the Lord called me,” Rodrigo says. He entered the formation house of St. Thomas of Villanova, in Belem do Para. It was the beginning of the vocational journey which, like any other journey, had good and hard parts. “There was always fear… but joy and satisfaction always accompanied me”.
However, in February she experienced an episode that shook everything up: her parents divorced. “For me it was a great sadness because I thought that I was the cause or was to blame for this separation.” In those moments of dismay and tribulation, she heard “a friendly voice”. God uses anyone to speak. The important thing in this life,” he told her, “is to follow my vocation, my calling, and to give a sincere and authentic response from the bottom of my heart”.
This is how he decided to become an Augustinian Recollect. As he himself says, his call “was not an extraordinary call”. “The Lord did not appear to me glittering, with all his splendor”. God called him in a simple way, through the example of simple people and with simple words in difficult moments.