By Sr Teresa Joseph, FMA –
Founder, Foundress and Founding Charisms are always thought of with awe and wonder. There is certain charm into which a reader is drawn into as he/she reads the life of the founder/foundress. What is the secret behind this charisma? A pilgrimage into the life of a few founders may gladly take us by surprise.
St. Mary Mazzarello – Co-Foundress of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, familiarly known as the Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco, had a vision and she heard a voice saying to her: “I entrust them to you.” To make that vision a reality she made education and education of poor and abandoned girls her mission. Blessed James Alberione the media marvel of the 20th century Church and the founder of the Pauline Family had a very special vision: “to do something for the men and women of the new century.” He embraced the apostolate of the press to be his life, work and mission.
Sons and Daughters of a Grace-Filled Time
We are living in a grace filled time. It is a time in which we render thanks to God the Father Almighty for the countless blessings and graces He has showered on our Congregations. It is also a time to become ever more aware of our vocation and mission in the Church and in the World in order to respond to the challenges of today in a meaningful way.
This retrospective glance at our founders is meant to be a cenotaph of our heart. Through it we acknowledge with gratitude, the foreseeing love of God that has accompanied our Congregations manifested in multiplicity of ways.
The history of every Congregation is made up of persons, places and events. Each of these has stories to narrate and messages to communicate. The charism of different Congregations has taken deep roots in various cultures thanks to our pioneer missionaries and thanks to all those who boldly dared to follow Jesus more closely without counting the cost.
Passion for Christ and Compassion for Humanity
Passion for Christ and compassion for humanity has been spelt out by various founders in countless ways. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, most of them have seen the growth and expansion of their charisms. The humble beginnings were never serious blocks for many to go beyond the place of origin and to grow and branch out. The growth of the charism is indeed a strong reminder to recapture the “original spirit” and to make it alive today in creative fidelity, that every one may have life and have it in abundance.
Surrounded by Many Companions on the Journey
Our founders were never alone. They were surrounded by men and women who were passionately in love with God and felt the burning urge within to do something for God’s people. A peep into the documentation available in religious Institutes undoubtedly reveal various messages of appreciation, greetings, encouragement and support that are found throughout and are concrete signs of God’s foreseeing love that tells us that we are surrounded by many women and men who journey with us in our apostolic endeavours and that we have to be ever alert to seize every opportunity for networking for the Kingdom.
The founder’s charism is embellished also by our parents, relatives, friends, benefactors and well-wishers who have contributed in one way or another during the course of time.
Those priests and religious who have already accomplished their mission here on earth and have returned to the Father’s home are interceding for us and truly their life of witness and dedication will continue to inspire us as we commit ourselves with renewed enthusiasm to our mission in the Church. A more conscious commitment from our part could be the best accolade to their generous contribution towards the growth of the charism.
Alan J. Roxburgh in his book The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality writes:
“Liminality requires leaders with the theological, political, and social skills to elicit new communitas. This involves not just technique but the art of memory and expectation in which the lived experience of the past is indwelt in order for it to become our experience once more. This requires leaders whose identity is formed by the tradition rather than the culture. It also requires leaders who listen to the voices from the edge. This is where the apostle, the prophet, and the poet are found. These are the metaphors for congregational leadership today. The pastor’s ears must be attuned not primarily to the popular, the latest trend, or the expert, but to those who recognize that marginality is the church’s reality”
According to Victor Witter Turner (1920-1983) liminality is a term that describes the transition process accompanying a change of state or social position. A group goes through a “tunnel” experience when it is moved into a marginal situation within a culture. Separation, liminality and reaggregation are the three phases of transition in any rites of passage process. Liminality is indeed a threshold experience. Margins therefore become the privileged place to experience the sacred. Communitas indicates that sense of relatedness that persons experience free from structural roles and status and “may have the effect of strengthening the bonds of communitas even as it dissolves antecedent social structural ties.”
Revisiting our Founders with the new Sensitivities of Today
Today, to make religious life both relevant and meaningful, it is a must to revisit our founders. We have to revisit them with the new sensitivities of today. A close look at our foundresses and founders will take us to simple, humble origins of our Congregations. Our pioneer leaders were certainly not protected by mighty structures. There was some kind of an extraordinary charm that attracted those around, including their close followers and collaborators. There was simplicity, poverty, freshness and of course sacrifice and sheer joy in abundance.
They leaned not on their strengths but on that of the Lord Jesus. Trust in divine providence, with God everything is possible, St. Joseph you please see to it, Mother Mary is in our midst etc were their often repeated expressions.
How can we create communitas today? In the context of liminality how can we articulate today our Congregations’experience in modernity? Have we taken sufficient time to meditate upon the past experiences of our founding fathers and mothers? Are our memories fresh enough to take delight in the lived experience of the past? Are we daring and willing to make those experiences our own?
Suffocated by the latest trends and surrounded by experts on every imaginable topic, have we lost the taste for poetry? “Poets are the articulators of experience and the rememberers of traditions.”
Recently I was talking to a Provincial who had just finished her Provincial Chapter. She said something that made me think: “Teresa, with all these can we expect change? Will we change? Yes, we really meet quite a number of religious who really want change. Are we afraid of change because we are not aware of our traditions? Today, more than ever we need consecrated men and women who have fallen in love with tradition and are capable of re-elaborating their experiences in its light. Religious Congregations to a great extent are going through a liminal stage today.
“Liminality, the optimal setting of communitas relations, and communitas, a spontaneously generated relationship between levelled and equal, total and individuated human beings, stripped of structural attributes, together constitute what one might call anti-structure.”
Communitas is created in the climate of equality, in the absence of structurally defined roles and status. It is that feeling of oneness that some of us must have experienced while on a pilgrimage: the walking together, singing together and everything else did in the company of each other as equals creates communitas. Turner, assigned a specific purpose to communitas: “liberation of human capacities.”
Calling Charisms into a Dynamic Dialogue
It is amazing to hear religious expressing the need to come together to share the charism and mission. It is indeed a wonderful way of getting to know each other. Such sharing can certainly create communitas. “Communitas is not circumscribed by space and time, but is always contemporary.” Coming together of religious has to be done in simplicity and openness and will open the way to liberation of human capacities. According to Turner “Those who experience communitas have a feeling of endless power.”
Turners speak also of location of communitas in society.
“Communitas breaks into society through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. Liminality, marginality, and inferiority frequently generate myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art.”
Going Beyond with the Founders Vision and Mission
The capacity to create communitas and our ability to articulate today our Congregation’s experience in modernity has to be done in the context of faith. Only in this way we can allow the face of God to shine forth through us.
We have to get involved continually in discerning the needs of our times and have to be flexible enough to re-adjust its structures and activities to respond to them.
“Jesus was truly the new marginal person who was not only in-between but also in-both worlds. He was the man who lived in-beyond racial, cultural, gender, and class divisions, but was also the man of the whole world. He was therefore the new marginal person par excellence.”
Following Jesus in the footsteps of our founders is a constant challenge. Nothing is impossible because Jesus the new marginal person par excellence journeys with us and the little what we do is done in His name.
This article first appeared in In Christo.
Sr Teresa Joseph, FMA is a Salesian Sister of the Bombay Province. She holds a masters degree in Science of Education with specialization in Catechetics from Auxilium Rome and a PhD in Missiology with specialization in Inter-religious Studies from the Gregorian University Rome.
Sr Teresa is a freelance writer and contributes articles for various journals in India and abroad. Her recent publications include Dream Big Dream True and Family of Truth: The Liminal Context of Inter-Religious Dialogue. She has launched and co-edited an animation book for the family titled Stay Connected in the Circle of Love (2007).