Our charism statement from the 1982 Spirituality Conference, was in tune with the world-wide awakening that we found when we examined the structures of our society through the lenses of the Christian Gospel.  Our own call was supported in a wider global context. It was the time of the church’s own  renewed call for a  preferential option for the poor.  The Spirit was working as well through the foundational principles of other religious scriptures and the disciplines of the social sciences: Justice for all.

Whatever the debate about our traditional work in education, in our own small way we have entered here and there into exploratory programs for the liberation of the oppressed by reaching out to give voice to indigenous cultures, to inner-city street kids, to victims of civil war and international refugees. 

What kind of underlying, identifying, reconstructed role can we find to agree upon for our future life as a Congregation in the Church and the world?  As we examine again the way the Spirit has been leading us as recorded in our documentation, there is a gathering clarity around the term Brother as holding the seed for our future.  Can “justice for all” be embedded in the consciousness and style of  relating of any Brother, in any circumstance, as a spirituality, and for the whole of his life?  Can we teach the world something new about justice not just by including ourselves as active workers on the margins, but as our essential identifiable role?

Our recent Chapter expressed its findings in the form of insights into the heart of being brother. One such insight, A Prophetic Call to a Quest for Justice uses the phrase: “radical relationships of equality”. It sounds obvious enough, like all descriptions of justice, but if we examine closely our own social and cultural practices, which we take as givens and therefore inherently just, we may find just the opposite.

During the Passover five-month immersion, the participants are asked to examine and describe any manifestations of  inequality they observe in the societies where they are hosted.  In this unusually leisurely, outsider view of a culture, an extraordinary clarity comes into focus as to the radical nature of  this call to equality.  It is radical in the sense that it shakes up our assumptions by which we have been operating in our societies quite comfortably. 

There are not-so-subtle structures of inequality such as political dictatorship, moneyed elites, religious ranks and castes, male-female inequity, and vertical traditional social structures.  These structures formalise and make permanent social groupings, institutions and practices in which we are not equal as human beings, even as we say we are equal in God’s eyes.

Rankism is a secular term now used to describe any form of the abuse of a social rank, even sometimes very subtle, that benefits one’s self at the expense of another.  For example, just consider the use and abuse of uniforms, and the so called “badges of rank” within the military.  Now it has been extended way beyond the military into other circles, trivial and deadly serious, including the Church.   We have to have social and organisational structures that give some people power and responsibility on behalf of, and from the people they lead or manage.  Sometimes they have to be identifiable.   St Paul never interpreted Christ’s call to mean bland uniformity, but he uses the harmony and mutuality of organs in a human body to hint at the inherent equality of all people deep down, whatever their  role in society.

Brotherhood is still eluding us as a clear “role” in the church, even though there are rich traditional uses of “brother” connoting so much more than narrow sibling status,  such as long-standing alliances of mutual care and responsibility within tribes, “one-talks” and raced identities.  However, maybe a search for the best model of traditional cultures’ construct of brotherhood is not where we need to look.  Maybe what we need is to immediately search for a globalised, international, simple human  presence that is equalising.  Someone coined the phrase “brother is a verb”.  That too may help us see a beginning - this style of being present in a contemporary world that is being torn apart by structures of inequality, even the subtle taken-for-granted forms of competitiveness deep within our educational institutions. 

We want to be “successful”; we want our students to be “successful”.  Does the world however need more successful people?  Doesn’t it need peacemakers, carers, moral leaders?   This huge agenda is a radical one and  calls for very subtle and micro, informal  behaviours to be practiced.  Can we own brotherhood in this radical sense and construct  it into a newly identifiable form of gospel life, one that is quite distinct from a clerical church and our socially complacent secular structures?

The first step in this renewal is always to recognise when we are ourselves acting from a position of inequality.  Maybe this is what Edmund agonised over when he realised his wonderfully kind family was somehow implicated, through its position of wealth, in the poverty around him.  To become part of the solution instead of being complicit in the problem was the foundation of our Congregation.

If this became a clear pathway in our own initial and on-going formation we would be consciously converting ourselves to being with the victims of inequality in conversation, friendship, advocacy, residences and  life-styles, demonstrating these radical relationships of equality.  We would  became known, where it mattered,  as a group of people following Christ’s example of really being and feeling at home with human beings in good times and bad.  And we would be able to contemplate our God there.  "As long as you did it to the least of my brothers, you did it to me.”   Learning to feel at home at the margins is our immediate task; then we would see what we are meant to see: what Jesus saw; what Edmund saw.

Br. Peter Hancock (Sydney, NSW)