The thought above is by our interviewee, Silvia Fernandes Gouveia (photo), from the Brazilian city of Guará, in the state of São Paulo. She is an educator, a biologist and a businesswoman. She is also the current president of the Emanoel Ferreira Spiritist Centre, where a dedicated and hard-working team carries out important social projects, as she explains in the following interview.

How did you become a Spiritist?

I was born into a Spiritist family. I lived in the city of São Paulo until the age of four and still have vague memories of the children’s groups I used to attend at the Fabiano de Cristo Spiritist Centre. We then moved to the countryside and my family continued to practice Spiritism and to hold the weekly Gospel in the Home meetings. That was the base for the eventual creation of the Spiritist Centre, later. My parents did a wonderful job with us and have left an important legacy for my siblings and me.

I remember that once, in my early teens, an uncle of mine questioned my religious convictions. He told me that we were already free to choose and to be the masters of our destinies, as we were no longer children. I explained to him that Spiritism hadn’t been imposed on us. We had been taught to reason and to question everything. That exchange, in fact, strengthened my faith, my understanding of Spiritism and the way I see life.

The Spiritist Centre you lead is known for its unity and harmony? What do you attribute that to?

Thank you for your kind words. We have a leadership system that I describe as shared management. Every one strives to do their best at our Group because we all have the freedom to act in our area of work. We encourage every volunteer worker to, every now and again, focus on themselves, their possibilities, their weak points and work on that, taking into account how that personal development can help the improvement of our Spiritist Centre. It’s important to work on this inner reform and to understand that we are all working towards the same goal. But each one of us may be going through different personal challenges. A Spiritist Centre is a beautiful, wonderful, therapeutic, educating and restoring space where we can all carry out that inner reform. Christ doesn’t need soldiers to defend his house. All he needs is people who love him and who, by loving themselves, will be able to love their brothers and sisters too.

What is your Spiritist Centre’s main goal?

It is to help all of us understand the Gospel and Spiritism and put those values into practice. Everything we do, including charity work, is aimed at the dissemination of Spiritism, the core works of Allan Kardec and their main ideas.

Tell us about your monthly pizza.

The monthly pizza is a tradition that began at our Spiritist Centre more than 20 years ago. We ran a children’s home at the time and, before that, a hostel. And the pizza campaign was essential to raise the money to keep those projects going.

The monthly pizza is like a pizza club, which we could compare to a book club. The people who buy are mostly the same. They get a pizza at home, with their toppings of choice, on the last Saturday of every month. Together with the pizza, we send a Spiritist message glued to the box. Our pizza team is very organised and efficient and helps us raise funds for our projects.

Tell us a bit more about the Spiritist movement in the city and the integration with non-Spiritists.

We owe a great deal to the people of Guará. They support all our charity work and social projects. We execute the projects and organise them, but all the resources we raise come from the sale of pizzas, arts and crafts and from donations from the local population.

The charity work carried out by the Spiritist Movement is well respected in the city. And we have the cooperation from other religious groups. Local Catholics, for example, donate to us all the food (grains etc.) they use to decorate the streets of the city during Corpus Christi. Our work with the orphanage has helped build our reputation in the local community. We owe a great deal, indeed, to the population of Guará.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for this opportunity to open our doors to the world. An image that really touches my heart is that of Paul of Tarsus, or St Paul, going from village to village spreading the word of Christ. I love this idea of him walking among the people, forming groups wherever he went. There’s also the 1862 journey of Allan Kardec, which was remarkable. We all need to feed our hearts. I’m part of this gorgeous, holistic, wonderful movement. Christianity was born from the interaction between different people. We can and we should – it would be wonderful if we did it more often – visit each other, like Chico Xavier used to do, in the kitchen, drinking coffee and speaking to his friends after finishing his daily duties in the Spiritist Centre.