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Opening Address of the XIXth General Chapter of the Salvatorian Sisters
Sister Therezinha Rasera, General Superior
Rome, November 5, 2006
Dear Sister Chapter Members,
Dear Father Dennis Thiessen, SDS, facilitator of the XIXth General Chapter,
Dear Father Joao Batista Libânio, SJ, speaker and moderator for the first week of the Chapter,
Dear Sisters invited to provide a specific service to the smooth progress of the Chapter,
Dear translators and other guests.
It is with great joy and with a deep sense of gratitude to God that, in the name of the General Team, I welcome each of you in particular. With jubilation and hope, I want to extend the warmest and most affectionate welcome!
We are here in this XIXth General Chapter of the Congregation, together and in the presence of Jesus, the Savior, and in the name of all the Salvatorian Sisters, Novices and Candidates, to bring to life that which the Spirit will inspire in us.
The chapter process began more than a year ago, and it was striking to see the active and effective participation of each Unit. Such dynamism, communion and responsibility are an impetus, a sign of the effort to live dynamically, faithfully and boldly, the Salvatorian Charism in the most varied places where we are serving the people.
Thank you, dear Sisters, for your liveliness, your persistence and your missionary commitment, on the part of each individually, even though often it has taken place in the shadow of the cross. For us on the General Team, after five years of journeying together and having experienced the grace of personally knowing all the Sisters in the Congregation, as well as the mission, the potential and the challenges lived in each Unit, it is with very strong emotion that we celebrate the end of our mission with this General Chapter.
The General Chapter is the preeminent place for sharing and for listening in community to the voice of the Spirit.
It is a privileged place to nourish a passion for the Savior and for his Kingdom.
It is a unique meeting where we can get to know each other and love each other more.
It is a special time of discernment, of open hearts and minds, letting the Spirit bring down barriers and walls, all the fixed ideas, preconceived notions, fears and unbelief that perchance separate us.
It is time to let the spirit unite us around one goal: to be faithful to that which God asks of us as consecrated persons, living in a world where there is clamoring for justice in every kind of poverty and suffering.
Dear Chapter Members, those of us who are here have been sent by our co-Sisters. No one came in her own name, but through the trust of others who designated her, and this is not just a human act fulfilling our regulatory statutes. It was an action of the Spirit that called us together, because the Spirit acts through human persons. That is why we are responsible for living this historical moment, welcoming the light of the Spirit that will guide us.
The theme of our XIXth General Chapter,
"Salvatorian Women in Solidarity for Hope and for Life,"
was chosen unanimously by the Coordinators of the Units during our Congregational Council (CC) in Rome in July, 2004. Besides being current, we can say that it is urgent! During the CC, we reflected and prayed deeply upon the reality of Salvatorian world described in the reports. We can say that we Salvatorians are giving concrete responses to the needs of the people where we are inserted. It was clear that all the Units are taking on the Mission Priorities of the last General Chapter, especially in responding to two aspects of these Mission Priorities, the situation of marginalized women and children.
In the preparation of this XIXth General Chapter, our Congregation was confirmed and called by the Spirit to deepen the elements of this theme. We have done this on the personal and community level, in a spirit of listening, study, critical analysis, openness and creativity, in order to bring about profound changes in our way of living our religious life and Salvatorian mission.
During this time, I have meditated on the meaning of each element of our theme and its impact on the process of re-founding our Savatorian Charism today. The vocation of the Prophet Jeremiah and his mission confided to him by Yahweh has come to mind many times: "Look, today I am setting you over nations and over kingdoms, to tear up and to knock down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant" (Jr. 1:10). Our theme has to do with the dream we have in common of being:
1. Women - who are discovering themselves in this world of androcentric vision, structures and language that so often exclude our gifts and feminine potential. As women, we dream of living fully our identity and our mission on this earth. We dream of overcoming the divisions and the gender stereotypes, imposed for hundreds of years by a society that judges us as being incapable of thought, as being fragile beings, subject to being ridiculed, abused and violated in body, heart and mind. For this reason, the Word of God to Jeremiah has meaning for us today: to destroy within our very hearts identification with these negative models of the feminine imposed by our cultures and build new truly human relationships of gender.
2. Salvatorians - our beings as women have a quality that is not a privilege, but rather a personal call from God. We cannot choose to be born women, but we can choose to be Salvatorian women. As with Jeremiah, God sends us to something specific! Our vocation is an historical one, born in a concrete situation, when a man, Father Jordan, welcomed and executed faithfully the call of God to bear the universal message of the salvation of Christ. Accompanied by the strength and fidelity to this same call of a special woman, Mary of the Apostles, they left us this inheritance, the Salvatorian Charism. Being a Salvatorian woman is a specific way of being a woman in the world and in the Church, calling for constant work in our way of being and our expressions - destroying and building our identity, so we can make a difference and live our specific vocation.
3. Solidarity - this quality of being in solidarity calls forth for us, at this historical moment, a component of deepest and most dangerous prophecy. This is so because we are living an unprecedented crisis on our planet, brought about by a change of era, but especially, by a globalized capitalist system that exploits human beings and all of creation in view of producing wealth: a wealth that is not distributed and that brings division, war and contradiction, that brings about immense migrations of peoples seeking survival, that turns nations into slaves, even entire continents, in order to insure the privilege and power of only a few. It is dangerous to be in solidarity in this world because solidarity, first of all, challenges the existing model of governing and organizing the world. However, solidarity is a human quality that resides in the deepest heart of men and women. We all have had this experience, that a gesture of solidarity easily brings another and then another…We women received a special gift of sensitivity to others from God, because our nature and being call us to maternity. The capacity for the maternal has woven our bodies with thousands of special sensors, linked to our hearts and our spirits, in order to capture what is happening in the world about us. This being attuned is also our way of acting, our impulse to meet others where they are. These and other feminine gifts that have to do with a going out of ourselves are closely linked to the prophecy of Solidarity, and we must develop them to the maximum, like the prophet: "I am in anguish! I writhe in pain! Walls of my heart…! I cannot keep quiet…!" (Jr. 4:19).
4. For Hope - in our world marked by great pain, war, catastrophe, where we witness to unspeakable horrors every day through the media, Hope is of the greatest urgency! Beginning with ourselves then, we see that we need to rediscover the meaning of our hope. The meaning of hope is based in Jesus Christ, who died and is resurrected. The people of Galilee, a people who lived in the shadow of death, as Saint Matthew (4:12) describes, have seen a great Light! Jesus; He is the sign of Hope for a marginalized people. When the disciples come and ask Him "…Are you the one who is to come, or have we got to wait for someone else?". Jesus does not explain but invites them to hear and see the concrete signs of hope: "…the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor" (Matthew 11:3-6). Hope has to do with a mystique based on the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus - it is a mysterious and powerful force of life, but it is also concrete action making it visible and palpable. The prophecy of Hope for us Salvatorians is an urgent matter because our people need to be raised up and their interior strength nourished, in order that they may believe that another world is possible.
5. For Life - the invitation of our theme to a prophecy of Life has close ties to the foundations of our charism and therefore, it is familiar to us. Upon reading the Spiritual Diary of Father Jordan, our Founder, we can see an evolution in his understanding of the will of God. He is involved in and imbued with the reality of his time, and he sees and hears the cries coming forth. He gives a name to what he sees, calling his time a perverse epoch (SD I 61, 3): a vale of tears (SD I 61, 4). From the first lines of his Diary, the element of Life will remain as a strong aspect of his spirituality and one of the most important elements of the Salvatorian Charism.
Thus it seems to us that Father Jordan entered into the unfathomable reality underlying the entire meaning of life: life is eternal! In the face of the paradox of the finiteness and relativity of human experience, he questions the meaning of life like the psalmist: What is man that You should care for him? (SD I 1, 4). In the same paragraph of his Diary, he writes about this meaning: He (the Lord) visited him with his grace. Further on, he will summarize this experience with this beautiful conclusion: Cast your eyes upward, where permanent friends are constantly directing you towards the eternal home! Seek to please the One in whose company you can remain permanently (SD I 2, 7). A profound awareness that life is eternal because it has its origin and meaning in the eternity of God seems be central in Jordan's unfolding journey.
We must consider what life is in Father Jordan's experience. It seems that the basis for it will always find an expression in the Gospel of John where Life is Light, Life is Love: "life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark" (cf. John 1: 4-5). The Light is Christ who shines through the world's perversity! We are able to contemplate throughout the Spiritual Diary and other writings that these images of Burning Fire and Light as a Torch, metaphors frequently used by Father Jordan, express well what was in his heart. From these images we can capture his enthusiasm, his apostolic boldness, his tenacity, his perseverance, his interior strength unflagging before all things. With his eyes fixed on the horizon, he goes firmly on to the end, confronting that which seems to us humanly impossible to confront.
Father Jordan does not see eternity as a future and distant reality, and this does not really conform closely to certain theological thinking of his time. He weighs life in another way. Eternity is above all something of the here and now of human life. "This is Eternal Life, to know You, the One True God, and Jesus Christ, Whom You have sent." (John. 17:3) Later he will include the entire cosmos in this concept when he makes the Spiritual pact; the created submits the entire world to His Power, that is, all humanity, present and future, so that they may know Him, love Him and serve Him and thus save themselves. The created will bring all irrational creatures into the service of the All Powerful (SD I, 202). Life is at the center - life as a whole, human life and the life of the cosmos.
The right to life is the first and most fundamental right of humanity and all created beings. All other rights flow from this. It is also a natural right, inherent to the human condition, preceding even freedom. The first responsibility of human freedom is to assume - responsibly - above all, the care of one's own life and the life of the entire universe. Along with this, the right to life also entails a duty, because life is not a personal possession. God the Creator is the lord of human life and of all creation. Life is at the center of the message of Jesus, "I came that you might have life, and have life in abundance!" (John 10: 10). Because of this, care for life becomes the very center of our Salvatorian identity, vocation and mission.
My very dear Sisters who are meeting here these days on behalf of the whole Congregation, may we be able to take two important steps on our journey: A STEP outside the path of our historical moment and another step into the essence of our Salvatorian vocation to:
- Go beyond a traditional, activist, self-sufficient and safe religious life towards a religious life that is humble, simple, humanized, and sharing the same destiny as the poor;
- Go beyond an inner-centered spirituality made up of many words and far from the reality of life towards a mystique based on the Word of God, nourishing our passion for God and our passion for humanity;
- Go beyond a style of professional and well adjusted religious life with its rules and systems towards a religious life that is prophetic, bold, purposefully putting forth new alternatives for a possible new world;
- Go beyond the offers and temptations of consumerism, secularization, individualism, towards a religious life centered on defending the dignity of human life and all of creation;
- Go beyond the superficial idioms to a religious life that lives from the inside, from the essence the human heart, fully using its humanizing strength and capacity to love;
- Go beyond the safe and established to live on the dangerous and challenging frontiers where the marginalized of our world are crying out, requiring of us a less structured, less bureaucratic, poorer religious life, but one that is more free and more of a pilgrim, like the swift eagle, the light of morning…;
- Go beyond our fears and human limits to let God shape, transform and save us and always send us again to every kind of situation in our lives, so that we may be credible and luminous signs of the Gospel of Jesus, our Savior.
With these words, I want to invite you to enter into a prayerful climate of openness and sensitivity and respectful listening to each other and to the action of the Holy Spirit in us.
Asking for the blessing of the Holy Trinity, the protection of Mary, the Mother of the Savior, the intercession of our founder, Father Francis Mary of the Cross Jordan and of Blessed Mary of the Apostles,
I declare open the XIXth General Chapter of the Sisters of the Divine Savior -
Salvatorians.
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