No true restructuring/change will come about if I am not willing to begin that restructuring/change in myself first. It is too easy for me to mouth words and to spout pious platitudes, but if there is no follow up on my part, it is all a colossal waste of time. I believe the same is true for all of us: restructuring/change must begin with each of us personally. And that means I must be willing to let go of what holds me back, to leave my comfort zones.

I must also admit that the concept of restructuring/change frightens me to some degree. I don’t know exactly what form it will take nor what it will require of me. I don’t know if I will be able to meet the challenges to which I will be called. As Philip succinctly put it, I am not completely sure if I am more attuned to the God of comfort, than I am to the God of challenge. I just don’t know … and that is unsettling. I am not sure if I am ready, or willing, or even able to "put out into the deep" in faith and let the Lord be Lord in my life. I THINK I am, I HOPE I am, but life offers me no guarantees. I guess that is what restructuring/change is all about really for me: Trusting in the Providence of the Lord, and being willing/able to risk. Gabriel McHugh challenged the Congregation and therefore each of us in the late ‘70s with his prophetic words: "Where are the risks in your life? If there are no risks, perhaps there is no life". I ask myself that question constantly. And I must admit that often I cannot respond positively to it. So I more likely than not lose myself in "doing good things for God" rather than face the challenges presented to me daily by the God of good things.

Restructuring/change for me therefore means that I must constantly, deliberately, freely, courageously, blindly put my trust in the goodness and wisdom of the Lord and be willing to risk. I also believe that for too long many of us (including myself) have been more focused on our "doing and teaching" so that we have conveniently forgotten that we must first BE before we are able to DO: be human, be of God, be brother to ourselves and others … and then from there go out to serve others. The old Latin adage "Nemo dat quod non habet" is as true today as in the past. I can’t give to others what I do not have. I’d be a phony, I’d be like "sounding brass" or "tinkling cymbals". And people would see right through me.

So restructuring/change for me personally (and hopefully for the Congregation as a whole) must be more than cosmetic, must be more than superficial, must be more than structural. It has to be transformational, it has to ask the tough questions and require me to answer, these questions I would rather not hear nor less want to deal with. Therefore and only in this way will I – in my hearts and in my acts - become renewed, reinvigorated, revitalized so as to respond courageously and openly "cueste lo que cueste" to the challenges that the Lord today is putting to me through the "signs of the time". The all important benchmark question in restructuring must be: "What would Edmund do here and now, in this situation, with these people, under these circumstances?" To do any less would be to deny our heritage as Christian Brothers. It ain’t going to be easy. But who ever said it was going to be easy?

◊◊◊

Ken Grondin