When Ryokan wrote,

“Oh that my monk’s robe

Were wide enough to embrace

The suffering of the world”

He was invited

To recite before the king

And handed a poet’s crown.

My bet:

If Ryokan pounded

On the Emperor’s palace gates

And from his monk’s robe poured

An eighteen-year-old boy maimed in battle

A hungry child with empty rice bowl

Prisoners on death row

Missiles of mass murder

Women with bound feet and tied tongue

Then Ryokan becomes

A dangerous revolutionary

And is hanged by royal decree 

                             (Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB)

I was almost forty years old before I began to ask the really important identity question for the first time: ‘Who am I?’ Till then I had blithely gone about the business of every day, with few ripples breaking the even surface of my life. I had taught in schools, lectured in our University College, dabbled in formation, been involved in administration and leadership. I was at ease with what I was doing. I thought I knew what it was to be a Christian Brother. I enjoyed my work and liked my life in community.

It was around this time that some uncomfortable questions began to emerge. Was this all that life was about? I saw men and women working in our schools who also had to struggle with the tensions of married life and bringing up families on a teacher’s salary. My life seemed so much easier. How was I really different from them? What did it mean to be Indian in a Congregation with a strong Irish culture? How Indian was I? How much did I link my fate with that of my people? What did it mean to be a minority Christian in a huge country of diverse religious beliefs? These and similar questions kept disturbing my peace.

Today I believe that I can recognise in those first halting questions the relentless love of a God who was opening my heart to a wider reality. It was at this time that I had an experience which exposed me to the reality of India and the Indian Church – an experience which made me see my life as superficial and brought me up against the real poor of India. This was my moment of truth, my Damascus event.

In retrospect my past seemed so shallow. I really did not need three vows for what I had been doing! I realised that I had been living in a sort of dream world insulated against the terrible beauty of life. For the first time I really heard the voice of the God of the poor, a voice that disturbs and challenges.

God will enter into your night,

As the ray of the sun enters

Into the dark, hard earth,

Driving right down

To the roots of the tree,

And there, unseen, unknown,

Unfelt in the darkness,

Filling the tree with life,

A sap of fire

Will suddenly break out

High above the darkness,

Into living flame.

          (Caryll Houselander)

I had the sense (we would probably call it ‘grace’) to realise that what God had done for me was to give me a sense of who God really is. I believe deeply that my interaction with the poor brings me up against my own fragility and shows me a face of God I do not otherwise see. It is this belief that I wish to share very briefly in the next few paragraphs.

“Often in history Religious Life has been construed as a safe enclave of the unperturbed righteous. Secure in the enclosure of convent or monastery, Religious could construct a life that was admittedly austere but largely protected from the material uncertainties, the political struggles, the moral ambiguities, and especially the spiritual chaos of their time.

“Increasingly, the dismantling of Religious Life as total institution has reinserted Religious into the cultural milieu of contemporary society. Genuine solidarity with the people of our time, “especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way”, is not simply a matter of imitating the lifestyle of the materially poor. It is a matter of entering deeply into the dynamics of our culture in which so many people are victimised in a staggering variety of ways, from material destitution to political oppression, from religious persecution to discrimination because of race, gender, age, or sexual orientation, from devastation by foreign and domestic war to ruin by “natural” disasters precipitated by ecologically ruinous policies.”

                                                (Sandra Schneider: Finding The Treasure)

The God of Justice that disturbs me and dislocates my life through “regular contact with poor and marginalised people” forces me to re-think all the neat categories and boundaries that make up my life. My quest for justice, Gospel justice, is really nothing else than my following a larger God. When I limit my world to the small picture I believe that I am a disciple of Jesus by ‘doing good’ to the people in my immediate world. This never forces me to ask the wider and harder questions. Once I raise my eyes and look beyond, I see the larger scene and am forced to ask why things are the way they are. I am forced to seek the prophet’s agenda.

Solidarity with the people of one’s time is not a matter of extending charity to people poor, ignorant and God-deprived. Solidarity, as Jesus made clear, is a matter of sharing deeply in the experience of my fellow human beings, because the experience is inescapably my own. In the final analysis, as Sandra Schneider says, it is Jesus screaming, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” who tells me what prophetic solidarity must eventually entail.

She continues, “Prophetic solidarity with the people of our time expresses itself as a generous and resolute living of the questions: of alienation, doubt, oppression, incoherence, meaninglessness, hopelessness, and danger on every side. Religious are sent to participate humbly and fragilely in the darkness, to experience it as their own, but without losing heart, in an unshakeable hope in the God who saves.”

The Congregation’s invitation to quest for justice is driven by our God who wishes to draw us ever deeper into God’s own love for humanity – a love that knows no boundaries. This is such a basic idea and one I have no difficulty acknowledging. But when I bury my head in the sand, immerse myself in my little world, and remain indifferent to the pain and suffering of my brothers and sisters, then I really do not acknowledge this God.

                                                                  Brother Philip Pinto (Rome)