In the first reading Isaiah tells King Hezekiah that God says, "Prepare your affairs and your family. This is it. You’re going to die. You’re not going to get well."

And in the response, also from Isaiah, Hezekiah prays, "In the very prime of life I have to leave. Whatever time I have left is spent in death’s waiting room."

As we gather together at this final Eucharist at Cornwall, drawing together two weeks of process, discussion, discernment and now declaration, it would seem that today’s readings are asking us to pause and realize some important things. Two years ago at Cornwall I, at the close of the opening ritual, we heard a short fable entitled, ‘Feeding the Beast.’ If I may refresh your memory, the story went like this:

One fine morning the residents of a small village woke
to find a very big but not unfriendly beast well settled
in the centre of their small town and ordinary lives.

Being by nature trusting and kind,
the people repressed fear and welcomed the beast.
In spite of its enormous height and girth,
and the mass of its settled flesh, the beast posed no threats.
All he did, in the most matter-of-fact way, was say, “Feed me.”

The villagers complied.
Upon devouring what he had been fed,
he simply repeated his demand,
without inflection, “Feed me.”

Eventually, without vote or complaint,
feeding the beast came to be what the village was about.

Charles Lambert, Post-modernism is Not What You Think,
(Malden, MA. Blackwell Publishers, 1997) p. 5.

That story has different meanings:

* the people were good people: trusting and welcoming.

* the creature in their midst posed no apparent threat.

* the people - without vote or complaint - kept doing the one thing: feeding the beast.

* the people had become stagnant.

Restructuring, as I understand it, is for the future, the new future, the new wineskins; it is for mission, and to transform our minds and hearts as brothers, and not simply to feed the beast, no matter how commendable that is.

King Hezekiah was going to die. Notice the imagery Isaiah paints of this man at this moment:

"Hezekiah turned away from Isaiah, and facing the wall, prayed to God."

                    - in humility, he faces his God and prays.

And what is his prayer:

- he begs of his God for more time.

- he reminds his God of how he has lived

"faithful in your presence and lived out of a heart that was totally yours."

‘A heart that was totally yours’ - Philip reminded us on our first day that our heart cannot be totally God’s if the space in our heart has become filled with all sorts of other things and people, leaving little or no room for God.

Would we, in our prayers, be able to say to God that we have lived out of a heart that was totally God’s?

And then Isaiah tells us that the king wept as he prayed - he wept painful tears. And we have heard some pain, and possibly felt the pain of these past two weeks.

If these past two weeks have been lived as an intellectual exercise, we haven’t touched the heart of being brother yet!

And God heard Hezekiah’s prayer: "Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll add 15 years to your life." 15 years! Not life forever for your kingdom, just 15 years. But God was giving him a new beginning.

We have been given a window of opportunity like Hezekiah - to move forward in North America. Today’s Gospel tells us that the law - our restructuring process and our declaration of intent that we have committed ourselves to - was made for us. We are not subject to things written in stone. We have the freedom. We are the ones who will create a new and common future for mission that transforms our hearts and minds - if we want to. There is a quote from TS Eliot that expresses the challenge for us. "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."

Hezekiah’s story continues in today’s response, also from Isaiah 38:

But there is still hope, there is hope of new life, of resurrection.

A fresh infusion of life! Something that we can hope for.

Perhaps we leave this place a second time with this attitude that we’ll sing at the end of this Eucharist:

"See, I leave the past behind; a new land calls to me. Here among you now I find a glimpse of what might be." (Jerusalem, My Destiny, Rory Cooney) - that glimpse is all of us here together.

And I leave you with another wonderful image borrowed again from TS Eliot. "In the end," he writes, "there is only the dance." Let us leave Cornwall II committed to become engaged in this dance of a new future together.

All pictures used from Cornwall II were taken by Br. Thomas Collins.

Top: The Callan Novitiate Team and novices of North America, gather for a group picture at the assembly.  (L-Rt: Kevin Bernard (Novice Master), Bob Mc Govern (Staff), Mike La France (Novice), John Buckingham (Staff), and Hank Magnusen (Novice).

Middle: The Chair of the Restructuring Committee for the past two years, Paul Hennessy, explains the process the team followed as they carried out the mandate of Cornwall I set out in 2002.

Bottom:  Another member of the Restructuring Committee, Kieran Murphy, handles many of the daily announcements that were needed to run an effective and efficient assembly.