At a recent seminar in Rome, Brother Jack Driscoll led members of our Roman communities through readings from the Torah with particular application to our Chapter Insights. In discussing features of the lives of Noah, Abraham and Moses, Jack expounded so clearly his conviction that reconciliation is fundamental to any renewal. The world is hungering for healing; not everyone is open to and is prepared to accept the grace of healing. It is obvious that around the world many people die in their anger. Dying in anger does not exclude Christian Brothers. As Christian Brothers we sometimes feel as if we have a greater claim on reconciliation and healing than anyone else in the universe.

Stirring events over the past decade or two in places such as Eastern Europe, South Africa, Rwanda, West Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland, have pushed reconciliation to world centre stage. The struggle to overcome oppressive regimes consumed most of the energy that individuals and communities had at their disposal until suddenly it appeared as if their goals had been achieved. A visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg highlights this for one country. What came after was the difficult task of construction of a new society. The process is painfully slow and always difficult as we well know in our own story. Part of the difficulty is the weight of the past on the present, a burden compounded by memories of violence, betrayal, and oppression. The lifting of that burden comes about through reconciliation.

Healing and reconciliation have been significant elements in our own journey over the two centuries of our existence and at no time more so than over the past decade. It is not surprising that the Congregation Chapter of 2002 offered an Insight to us which calls us forward:

As Brothers we are called to accept as gift the growth that comes from facing our pain and loss in a troubled world and suffering planet. As we learn to offer and receive healing and reconciliation, we find our wounded hearts bear within them the hope of new life and a renewed sense of joy.

At our recent International Symposium on Restructuring, it became clear that the 'New Wineskins' are primarily focussed on transformation of minds and hearts, a personal renewal as much as a Congregational renewal and certainly beyond administrative changes.

Fear and Hate in our world

In the supposed peace of today's world, we have to admit that fear is everywhere. The search for the appropriate enemy is rather non-stop and frantic. The search for someone to blame for every ill in the first world is becoming destructive of our societies. First world society is rife with litigation but little justice, and in a world rife with greed and violence, we have a poverty of imagination around 'reconciliatory emancipation'.

We love to hate - we see examples of where activists hate the rich, whites hate blacks, feminists hate men, Jews hate Palestinians, Hindus hate Muslims. We just change the vocabulary to make it sound well thought out.

The deepest hatreds can often be within our own group. Look at the near hatred between liberals and conservatives in our own church.

Fear is always behind hate. Sometimes it looks like control, but even those seeking to control are usually afraid of losing something. It is almost as if fear justifies hate. What better way to veil vengeance than to call it justice. What better way to cover greed than to call it responsible stewardship. To be trapped inside our small ego is always to be afraid.

When we don't transform our pain, we will always transmit it to others.
The cross is finally about how to stand against hate without becoming hate ourselves.

Owning our weakness

Rolheiser claims that the foremost spiritual task of the second half of life is to forgive - others, ourselves, life, God. We all arrive at mid-life wounded and not having had exactly the life of which we dreamed. There's a disappointment and anger inside everyone of us and unless we find it in ourselves to forgive, we will die bitter, unready for the heavenly banquet.

A basic step in a growing spirituality involves facing ourselves squarely, seeing ourselves as mixed up, paradoxical, incomplete, and imperfect.

The insight is constant: our darkness, our sins, our doubts are really a thirst….for 'God', for the 'spiritual', for whatever might alleviate the painful side of the human condition, for whatever might somehow fill the empty hole in our human being. Every age has its pain but spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

We cannot be redeemed until we recognise the flaws in our soul and try to mend them. A nation cannot be redeemed until it recognises the flaws in its soul and tries to mend them. A Congregation cannot be healed until it recognises the flaws within and tries to mend them. If we do not permit recognition of our flaws, we permit no redemption. We can be redeemed to the extent to which we recognise ourselves as broken humanity.

It's at the very point of the vulnerability where the surrender takes place - that is where the God enters. The God comes through the wound.

And at the same time, inherited and entitled victim-hood will get us nowhere.
It simply keeps us playing the same old games in a new, very subtle and disturbing way. It is not the powerlessness that Jesus taught us from the cross. It is pretending to be powerless, but, in fact, for the sake of power and control over others. Jesus neither played the victim for his own self-aggrandisement not did he make victims of other people.
The message of the crucified Jesus is a statement about what to do with our pain now.

The decision to forgive ourselves or somebody else is a vote to live in the present moment. If we refuse to forgive someone, we are really saying that we prefer to live in the past, and to be able to blame somebody for it.

Jesus the Healer

Forgiveness, as witnessed in a great variety of New Testament writings, is essential to Christian holiness. It is claimed that two thirds of the teachings of Jesus are directly or indirectly about this mystery of forgiveness. The disciples learned that if they expect their prayer to be efficacious they must forgive those against whom they hold grievances. The parable of the Prodigal Son contrasts the forgiveness of the Father with the meanness of the elder brother. All of this offers us a more lively awareness of what Jesus did in his healing ministry.

'Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard; the blind see again, the lame walk'.
After Jesus' resurrection, the uneducated apostles continued his healing ministry and the people continued to show up in crowds. The first persecution in the infant church was occasioned, not so much by the apostles' preaching the resurrection, but by the power of healing in the name of Jesus.

Given that Jesus placed so much emphasis on healing, both by word and example, how comfortable are we with the stance taken by ourselves around the world towards reconciliation and healing.

Transformation

In a book currently circulating 'The Spirituality of Imperfection', the authors Kurtz and Ketcham, claim that the core paradox that underlies spirituality is the haunting sense of incompleteness, of being somehow unfinished, that comes from the reality of living on this earth as part and yet not part of it. For to be human is to be incomplete, yet yearn for completion; to be uncertain yet yearn for certainty; to be imperfect yet yearn for perfection; to be broken yet crave wholeness.

Among the most powerful of human experiences is to give and receive forgiveness as we know from personal experience and from our observation of others. Forgiveness is the only hope-filled and love-filled answer for an unfair world. Forgiveness is a creative response to building a just world.

Reconciliation is not a skill to be mastered but something discovered - the power of God's grace welling up in our life. Reconciliation is more spirituality than strategy, more discovery than achievement. Reconciliation becomes a way of life, not just a set of discrete tasks to be performed and completed. It becomes a stance assumed before a broken world rather than a tool to repair the world. It is God who initiates and brings about reconciliation.

When we forgive we choose the goodness flowing through ourselves and we also experience our own goodness in a way that almost surprises us.

Living a new way

Our Chapter's call to live the spirituality of the heart is an encouragement to enter into the contemplative, to allow ourselves to move into a deeper relationship to life, love and morality rather than to stay with fault, guilt and hurts. A deeper relationship is what creates the new energy needed to move beyond old hurts and old faults.

It is in our weakness and brokenness that we do have much to give. Do we recognise that our own experience of healing and forgiveness offers us great insights into the needs of our world today? By owning and sharing our own brokenness we empower those around us to look at their own brokenness without being ashamed.

Vanier has pointed out that somewhere in each of us we're a mixture of light and darkness, of love and hate, of trust and fear. We crave release, but we refuse to release - and so long as we cling, we are bound.

Our Chapter's call to transformation of minds and hearts is a call to personal and communal liberation.
We heal, says St John of the Cross, not by making new resolutions but by living in a new way.
 

Br. Michael Godfrey (Rome)