"There is a tide in the affairs of men", says Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , "which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

Philip Pinto, in his letter to the Congregation reporting on the meeting on restructuring, describes our response to over forty years of post-Vatican II challenges: "Like Elijah's Israelites we keep hobbling from one foot to the other without committing ourselves."  Vatican II is now over forty years behind us.  All that time ago we were urged to renew, using our "founding charism" and "the signs of the times".  What "shallows and miseries" await us if we cannot, individually and then collectively make decisions and act on them?  What "fortune" lies ahead if we individually and then collectively follow Jesus at his moment of being forsaken to commit our spirit to his God?  Is this not the right, if not the only time we have to let go of our old vocation and step out together and reconstruct the congregation into the new vocation we seem to be being called to?

If we go back a few years to the post-Vatican era chapter documents we find evidence of wrestling with legalities: the emergence of directions, not goals.  There were the deeper attempts to search for the heart of our being Brother in the world.  It has now become harder and harder to analyse, define, debate and definitively describe our life in clear terms. The Spirit is about; our God is elusive and getting bigger. Everywhere in our new documents are hidden treasures, gifts to God's beloved, to be carefully extracted and contemplated.

"Look if you like, but you will have to leap" (W.A.Auden). Or what?