THE GEOGRAPHY OF GC25

In calling this talk the Geography of GC25, I really mean by this that it too has its own landscape, and it could be a help to us, as we set out to explore our own inner landscape as Rectors. It’s obvious from the outset that GC25 didn’t stop at analysis but went on to provide detailed approaches to the life and mission of Salesian communities today. So, before we do anything else, let’s get our bearings from the most recent authoritative statement of the Congregation about Salesian community life.

What I have begun to call the ‘inner landscape’ is possibly, in Salesian discourse, called ‘ongoing formation’ or maybe better, ‘continuing formation’. GC25 offers a summary of this in the Congregation today.

The first thing to note is that GC25 puts the community at the centre of everything. This is a subtle, or maybe not so subtle, difference from GC23 and GC24 which saw the community as a strategic place for educating the young to faith or for forming and involving lay people. GC25 sees the community as a subject, one capable of being prophetic, of communion, of planning. The model which emerges is that of the charismatic community envisaged by C. 3 which gives us our place in the Church and amongst other religious groups.

The Rector Major, in his concluding remarks on GC25, underlined the importance of seeing ourselves as subjects. As he says there, ‘it is not so much the community dimension that has been considered, but the local community as the subject…it gives realization to the full personal involvement of the community’. [p.149.]

It follows from this that each community will in a sense have its own particular geography, some of which it shares with every other Salesian community in the world, others which are particular to it. The Rector Major puts it this way:

‘The [Salesian Community as principal subject] is invited to give willing acceptance to the call of God that comes through historical and ecclesial events, the indications of the Word of God and our Rule of Life, the appeals of the young and the needs of the laity and the Salesian Family’. This list clearly includes shared features like the constant guidance of the Word and the Rule and the common factors of our history, and it includes things that will differ from place to place in the appeals of the young, the needs of laity and Salesian Family. But what is clear too is that the Rector plays a special role here as one who can remind the community of the solid and constant factors, such as Word and Rule, and our history, and one who can also guide the community in its listening to appeal and needs.

Then he goes on to say: ‘The community then examines more deeply its own situation and discovers its own availability and resistances, its resources and lack of them its possibilities and limitations. It learns moreover to recognize fundamental challenges and face them with hope and courage; it can put to itself appropriate questions that demand a reply’. Here we have a very practical programme that obviously requires the leadership of the Rector, and some practical skills as well.

And finally, ‘the community considers the practical guidelines that have been given, and decides on the conditions needed for putting them into effect’. Again something practical, but implying discernment as the community seeks to know the conditions.

You might say that communities have been doing this sort of thing all along. Have they? They might have been doing many of these things by dint of their very existence, but the point that Fr. Chavez makes then, and has continued to make since, is this: we have come across a new form of religious life, along with new evangelization, new educational method, new pastoral model, new formation….and behind it there has to be a new Salesian.

The new Salesian at the heart of it all is the one who personally makes the search for God and the pursuit of holiness his top priority such that this is obvious to those we work for and that it not only doesn’t impede what we are doing but makes our work more effective. And it’s rectors in the first place who need to grasp this reality.

But GC25 certainly doesn’t leave you with the feeling that all this is too much to achieve, too airy-fairy and difficult. To the contrary. We start by taking the community as it is. Nothing can substitute that reality called our community, and it falls to the rector to help, coax, cajole, encourage, facilitate the group to refound itself constantly, and renew itself.

NEW THINGS TO LEARN

Today’s rectors have to be different than they were 20 or 30 years ago, though as I hope we’ll see when we look at Don Bosco and the first rectors in action, it is a difference of perception that now helps us see more clearly how Don Bosco was, in fact our ‘first rector’ and what we need to do to model ourselves on him.

Our first tasks are of a spiritual and relational kind and involve our ability to work with attitudes, motivations, affections, abilities. This is how we reach out to persons in depth.

One of the new tasks for today’s rector is that of community discernment. It gains frequent mention in GC25. It is something that happens in the light of the Word of God and the Constitutions on the one hand, and ability at fraternal dialogue and sharing in common on the other. You are not left wondering at the end of GC25 how to go about it: each of the five working documents that make up GC25 follow a discernment process – rectors can do no worse than to begin with that model. As an example. Our community as a setting for formation and animation. There are two quotes from the Acts of the Apostles to begin with, reminding us that we begin from the Word of God. There is a reflection, then on God’s call, and by implication, though not mentioned there, the Constitutions. We could call on C. 3 at this point, for example. This is then followed by an examination of the situation, generalised a bit at this level of the Congregation but a good guide just the same for a community version of it. This leads to challenges, with some pertinent questions asked, which then leads into guidelines for action.

Wonderfully, we discover that this was already in our Constitutions, e.g. 66, but now with GC25’s practical example, we have something that adds practical substance to C.66.

Another learning point has been lectio divina. GC25 renews the constitutional invitation to give central place to the Word of God. There are many times and places in the regular community rhythm where this centrality is noted: eucharist, meditation, liturgy of the hours, preparation for the Sunday liturgy, celebrations of the Word. But now LD is offered as ‘ a preferred instrument for growth in community life and a school of prayer’. It is proposed as a personal and a community exercise. I could do no better than to propose to you a careful reading of the Rector Major’s latest Letter to us where he expands his comments on listening to the Word and on the practice of LD.

Yet another learning point for most of us is that sharing of our life as we live it. My experience is that we have never been very good at this – we share it by dint of being together, or at the level of giving information as to what’s happening next in our sector, but as for a deeper sharing of how life is for us, with all the listening, dialogue, acceptance of differences and fraternal correction that is true sharing – no. I hope that in the gatherings we have in these days we can model for ourselves some of this, and I’m also convinced, as I said in the previous introductory talk, that it is about creating space where the soul feels safe to venture. There are probably practical techniques involved here too.

The learning goes on. I am still speaking from GC25 which confronts us with all these processes and ways of being new Salesians in new communities. In spiritual terms, it is one thing to hear GC25 highlight the primacy of God in our lives, the Grace of unity and transparent ways of living out the following of Christ, and another to realize that we have to learn how to make these so. These are obviously part of the Rector’s spiritual leadership.

Pastorally we have to learn how to move from a mentality of what’s urgent and active to one of planning and process. And in his appeal to us to ‘return to the young’, something the RM repeats, I see from a privileged position, in each of his letters to provinces after the extraordinary visitation, we see that we have to learn how to create powerful gospel and spiritual environments for the young today, perhaps in places where we have already created powerful social institutions.. The same return to the young implies one other final learning – how to individually accompany each young person in his or her seeking for God’s call.

So, quite frankly, GC25 gives us a lot of things to learn! Some of these are quite new, while others are subtle twists on themes we already have deep in our hearts and possibly in our practice but are invited to renew.

FORMATION

Strengthening the community in charismatic terms and as a renewed group of renewed individuals, means, of course formation at every level, but we habitually speak of two levels: initial and ongoing or continuing. The Rector is a formator and in some ways every member of the community is too, of self and each other!. GC 25 is a practical handbook on formation, with one working document, no. 4 specifically focused on this. GC25 reminds us of:

• the importance of the quality of daily life (#15) – this particularly in terms of those rhythmic moments like common prayer, assemblies, recollections, retreats, scrutinies, community day.

• The role that each confrere plays: his personal life project (which he is invited to discuss with the Rector)¸his growth as a mature individual; his vocational identity as Christian and Salesian; his acceptance that the Preventive System is a way to holiness; his membership of a team; his sense of enculturation

• The role of the rector which is obviously even more central at this time of renewal of community. The Constitutions remind us that our first task is that of animation of the community C.64, and attention to individual confreres, especially through the friendly chat. The Rector’s role is a triple one – spiritual, fraternal and pastoral. Since it is such a complex role, it is important for us to keep our priorities clear. Just to expand on this a little. As a Religious Superior in our day, it is good for us to keep up with the understanding of Religious Life current today – that also helps us to better explain Salesian Consecrated Life, since part of our spiritual and charismatic role is to keep the Salesian spirit alive. Our pastoral focus is not something we do alone – we have a council and our community, with plans and different roles directed to our mission. And maybe enough has already been said about our fraternal role, directed to our brothers in community. We remind ourselves finally that the Salesian Rector achieves these dimensions through his priesthood. Our community is our parish.

CONDITIONS

GC25’s final working document of the five sets out the conditions so that each community can achieve its renewed being and fulfil its tasks. There are four of them:

• The community will have a community project

• Each community will have the right number and quality of confreres

• The relationship between community and work will be redefined

• Each province will have an Organic Provincial Plan.

CONCLUSION

The landscape or territory covered by GC25 is a rich one – fertile on the surface and with many lodes of rich material beneath to be quarried and mined. I spoke in an earlier talk about ‘triangulation’, by which I mean that we locate ourselves by taking three points or perspectives and relating them carefully. One of these points has to be the reality of today, of the Congregation as we find it, of our own situation. The second needs to be an historical point of view, our Salesian origins – and the third is us. And since we are all different, it can also help to layer these triangulations on each other, so one can draw fruit from another’s experiences and insights. I hope we can do something of this in personal and group sharing.

If it all sounds a bit much and you are left floundering, then you could do worse than to turn to Don Bosco’s written list of suggestions to a very young Rector called Michael Rua. These eventually got renamed as a letter or keepsake for all Rectors. You have it in your collection of readings provided for you. The language mightn’t be that of 2004 but you’ll recognize familiar landscape I’m sure. Happy reading!