The Story

It was two hundred years after our story had begun. It was time to pause in gratitude for the life of Edmund and the life of the Congregation. But it was a time when new wine was bursting out of old wine skins; the comfortable securities and stabilities of an earlier time had passed.
    Such was the time we gathered for the Chapter of 2002. Over land and over sea we came, Christian Brothers from all around the globe and, for a time, our friends from the Presentation Brothers and the Edmund Rice network, men and women alike. And as we gathered, we started to talk with each other about all that had been happening among us, our joys and our pain. Candles of good news emerged, and we found joy in each other and in our companions who assured us that we were not alone in the dark.
    What we came to see was that the breaking open of our stories, of our simple humanity, was profound prayer. As we got in touch with our fractured humanity, we found ourselves touching divinity. Suddenly we recognized who it was that had been in our midst all along, that burned at the heart of our stories and our experience. All these years we Christian Brothers had prayed the words, “Live Jesus in our hearts.” How obvious it now seemed.
    The breakthrough moments were, as always, fleeting, but they were moments to live by. The key had been lying before us all along, in the very word by which we are named: brother. In the intimacy of sharing as brothers our search for meaning in the crumbs and fragments of our stories, together we found God present in our midst. In our listening for God, we had discovered a shared route as Christian Brothers, to replace our tendency to travel on individual paths. We had discovered anew that our way to God as Christian Brothers, our distinctive way of living and loving, was to take literally the meaning of relating as brothers. We had started our discovery of what it could mean — and what it would cost — to truly live Eucharist.
    What had we discovered? Nothing that was not already written in our Constitutions, and nothing that we had not already glimpsed individually in our best moments as Christian Brothers. Quite simply, our hearts had been re-orientated by the experience of being opened to each other. And, being opened, we found ourselves turning instinctively to identify with the pains and burdens felt in our whole earth community. Our hearts burning with this new energy, we felt a renewed fire for mission.
    Like the disciples of that first Emmaus walk, we had known what it was to have our hearts burn within us, and we had found an energy that enabled us to turn around. Not away from the Four Directions of the 1996 Chapter, but away from our lack of confidence in the God who was leading us that way. We saw the need to deepen the spirituality out of which we live those four directions. And so our move to the margins has become reaffirmed with a strong prophetic call to engage in the quest for justice and to constantly critique our education ministries. Our internationality is expressed in a prophetic letting-go of old wineskins and moving towards a radical restructuring. Our growth through fragility is evident in a deepened consciousness of the need for healing and reconciliation. And our view of the Edmund Rice network is advancing towards an even deeper appreciation of what is unfolding and of the gift of our companions in Edmund’s spirit.
    Our experience invites others to deepen their own Emmaus journey and to make their own ongoing discovery of the same gift. Our conversations arising from this experience signal something new that is beginning among us, but those conversations need to carry on and involve all of us. What happened at the Chapter can also happen in any gathering where we are prepared to enter the same eucharistic rhythm by trusting each other with our stories, starting just with the fragments of any ordinary day in our lives.