THINK OUTSIDE THE FRAME

It can be difficult to view the picture sometimes if you live inside the frame.

I want to apply this idea of thinking outside the box or the frame to our Salesian life, and maybe open up some new possibilities for Rectors in so doing.

We are a wordy Congregation, and we have many important and clear ideas emerging from all these words. I have a corpus of a million words taken from official Salesian texts since the beginning of Fr. Viganò’s time as Rector Major. And I have hardly scratched the surface. . I am working on a long-range project of drawing up a Salesian Knowledge Base which is independent of language but can be translated into any language. All these words and all these ideas fill up every space and have the possible effect of exerting control over our thinking – now there is a difference, I would contend, between being faithful to the charism, and exerting control over people’s thinking!

I will give you a practical example of this sort of thing at high levels of government and animation. It occurred at the very last of the old Australia-Asia region Team Visits, when the gathered provincials and councils, along with the Rector Major and a number of general councilors, met in Australia. As is his right, the Rector Major had given firm direction prior to the Team Visit as to its purposes and priorities. But for many different reasons, the actual needs of the Anglophone group who were the subjects of this meeting at the time did not meet these specifications, and they were urgent.

The Anglophone mind seems to work a little differently to the Continental and Romance language mind. The difference, put starkly, seemed to us at the time to be that one group was beginning from clear principles and asking us to draw conclusions that could already be foreseen in the light of those principles. The other group, us, on the other hand, wanted to arrive at principles that we could not have provided at that point, but we had experiences that we believed could be genuinely explored and with the help of the other group’s wisdom we might arrive at clear principles. Deductive versus inductive thinking in other words.

It was a moment of high tension, with some provincials threatening to catch a flight home if things didn’t change, the General Council standing its ground and poor old Martin McPake, the peacemaker in the middle! To give due credit to the RM at the time, he eventually said look, we are on their turf, right out of our own territory, so let’s make it their show – over to them. That saved the day.

I like to think that Don Bosco did his own share of thinking outside the frame. He took traditional ideas and processes but often did things with them that people had not previously considered possible or even desirable. The Oratory is one such frame that he changed. He didn’t succeed all the time. The first draft of his Constitutions were definitely full of outside the frame thinking, outside the Roman frame especially – on extern Salesians, on the style of life, on the very nature of religious life. He stubbornly refused to change certain things and eventually bowed in others. But even his final solution to the extern Salesian via the Cooperators was still thinking outside the usual frame – his third order was not based on ascetic features, like every other example he had before him, but on practical charity.

How might we think outside the frame? I will offer you a range of ideas, none of them carefully elaborated, but more as starting points. They are in no particular order. You can take them or leave them.

MEETINGS

Let me start with something practical. We all have experience of community meetings where all that happens is that people on the floor, to use a dance image, keep treading on one another’s toes. So what to do? Change the dance, I suggest. Look for other, perhaps even unconventional ways to hold your meeting. I’ll give you one example:

The Quakers have what they call a Clearness Committee. The notion behind it is this. An individual in the community wishes to resolve a problem, but is unable to think clearly enough about it for all kinds of reasons. On the other hand, there could well be wisdom within the community, but we all know what that can be like – we become afraid of judgements, well-intended advice, criticism and in the end, we often have to arrive at our own solution anyway if only we could think clearly.

Assuming that the community style of life is heading in the direction of making the soul feel safe, of care for one another, at least within normal human terms, here is a possible way forward.

The individual writes up the problem in no more than 3-5 pages and sends it to the group beforehand. He states the problem, provides relevant background factors and offers hunches about what may still be on the horizon regarding the problem.

When the community meet, a facilitator and a secretary are involved. Obviously the meeting begins with prayer and quiet reflection – almost wordless prayer if possible. Then for a good period of time, maybe up to an hour the one firm rule is this. Community members may ask questions of the focus person but NEVER give advice nor even ask a question which implies advice like ‘why don’t you…’. Questions are honest and a good guide to the right sort of question in this case is that the focus person could not have foreseen already what the answer was, but has to think about it. Responses by the focus person are not lengthy, no life-story stuff, and he always has the right not to answer.

5 minutes or so could be given just to allow people to mirror, that is to say what they think they have heard – again no advice. Then the gathering spends a few minutes affirming the focus person, who has been through a fairly intense period of being a bit vulnerable.

This is not a solution for every problem or every meeting, and it’s certainly not a normal part of our meeting practice, but it could be adjusted in terms of its non-essential features so long as the essentials are there, and could help resolve some problems if we think of it in terms of the faith-sharing that we are encouraged to do. We don’t have very many models for that faith-sharing as yet. The aim is not to have a problem resolved by the end of that meeting but to have allowed communal wisdom to shine through honest questions and an individual to have some clearer ways of coming to a solution for himself, maybe afterwards.

CONFLICT

Most of us think that conflict is terminal and fatal, and to be avoided where possible. Leaving aside the definition of community in our Constitutions, it seems to me that it is the place where the person you always dreaded having to live with resides. A corollary to that is that once that person goes, another seems to take his place! It seems to suggest that conflict is never far around the corner in community living.

But of course my humorous definition of community is far from what it really should be for us. We are brothers caring for one another, sharing and forging a common mission, celebrating Eucharist together and so on. Private and competitive conflict is damaging. But communal conflict, that is public encounter, is an opportunity for the whole group to grow. A healthy community includes conflict at its very heart, checking, correcting (this is the real context for fraternal correction), and enlarging the knowledge of individuals by drawing on the knowledge of the group.

If we re-think in slightly different language the preventive system which Don Bosco wanted as our spirituality in community, the way we live with each other, we can see that it is fear which is at the basis of conflict. We all have fear – of exposure, of being seen ignorant, of being ridiculed. What was Don Bosco’s antidote? Create a safe, welcoming and hospitable environment. That’s our community.

Community is not opposed to conflict. Community is precisely the place where an arena for creative conflict is protected by the compassionate fabric of human caring. And what makes this kind of community possible? We already know the answer deep down – love.

Conflict is more than open conflict too. Tension is another word for conflict. IS there anything wrong with tension or put perhaps in a better way, can tension be made to work for us rather than against us? Rectors can be tempted to rush in with a word of response, say, in a community meeting, maybe with the though of calming things down. But some solutions come from within the other person if we can just resist telling them what to do! That’s why I asked the other day that you practice questions of the ‘educative’ type, ie questions which draw out understanding rather than hint at solutions. I’m not sure it can be done so easily on command. I have a feeling it’s a skill we have to learn over time.

I’m aware that conflict is very much a cultural issue too. I have worked in situations where you have to be very wary of consensus quickly arrived, where silence does not mean acceptance. It is worth exploring reasons for a community’s agreement on certain things to make sure there is consensus at the basic level….for the right reasons. This may immediately introduce conflict! The basic rule here, I think, is not to yield at the first sign of basic disagreement, but do yield if a solid and objectively founded disagreement is in evidence. A year ago we had a problem where lots of kids wanted to come and stay with ‘the Brothers’ because they liked them, liked to be with them, liked the liturgies etc. But we were a formation house not a boarding school…on the other hand we knew that one false move by way of ‘freezing’ the kids out, sounding too restrictive, sounding unwelcoming, might take years to over come. We spent a week arriving at a community decision, mostly ‘on the mat’. I think Fr. Klement turned up for his Visitation as we were arriving at the final decision. At least he saw the end of the process.

RE-THINKING OURSELVES AS MONKS!

How often, over the years of Salesian existence, have we tried to argue that we are not, and were never intended to be, monks. We are Religious in shirt-sleeves, have minimal prayer times and so forth. But then you do begin to see a kind of split-Salesian personality: in actual fact we have more prayer together and our prayer and community processes are rather more rigid than many another Congregation. We often hear ourselves saying that our community life is too formal, almost monastic. Are we monks or not?

I’d like to suggest that we are, and let’s be happy about it! But we are monks for the right reason. We are living out the monastic archetype to a Tee. This archetype is a primitive archetype in all societies not only Christian ones. It is the archetype of one who makes the search for God the priority feature around which all his or her life is organized. This is the sense in which we are monks. The fundamental question, one which the present Rector Major often focuses on, is this primacy of the God-search in our lives.

If we really are monks, then, in this deep sense, there are some conclusions:

1. Since the archetype always exists, we can be confident that Religious Life will always exist…not every form of it, but some forms.

2. We should not hesitate to claim what is ours – absorption in the God-quest.

3. We can go back to the ancient disciplines of monastic life and reclaim: the study of sacred texts, the practice of prayer and contemplation and the gathered life of the community. We are encouraged now to do the first through lectio divina. Prayer and contemplation just are part of our lives and need time and in a busy day at school, that time usually has to be early in the morning, but deep down it’s about the practice of receiving love from the one who knows us, and loves us, and we are encouraged to seek to make our work, our teaching, our every moment prayer and contemplation – you may not have to ‘make up’ meditation in the morning if you missed it, at least not in the formal way. You seek to find it in the daily task. The gathered community helps me apply the texts, and guides my experience of prayer but it also tests the fruits of my love. Community is mutual testing and mutual encouragement.

The language and processes I have been talking about are not first recognized as Salesian. This use of fresh language and concepts is one way of thinking outside the frame. Another is to ask different questions.

Think of community in ways that deepen the real agenda – and that, for us, happens to be practical charity to our neighbour, especially if young and poor. Don Bosco was clear – we achieve holiness through the exercise of practical charity. So re-think community in that mode.

We know what the Preventive System says about how we act as educators, but have we ever asked a different question – does it say anything about how we know? Behind every educational approach there has to be an epistemology. I note that Don Bosco’s very first comments about ‘knowing’ were at age 10 when he claimed to know his companions in a special kind of inner way, and made a game of it but they loved him for it. Is that saying something about a striking kind of epistemology? The PS is all about relatedness…knowing and learning as insightful and communal acts. I’m just raising the questions here, not giving answers. Like you I’d have to explore them. Of the three virtues that Don Bosco says he was told to work on in the first dream – humility, robustness and acquisition of knowledge, are all epistemological virtues: humility allows us to pay attention to the other. Humility encourages the Rector, for instance, to maintain silence in a meeting when the easy or quick response may not allow the real question to be heard.

Acquisition of knowledge is clearly to do with epistemology. The question is how knowledge is acquired or why. DB did not acquire it to master people. Why did he go to the Convitto, when I n fact he could have gone straight into some pastoral and priestly ministry after years of study? Because he wanted to improve his relational, pastoral skills. Acquisiton of knowledge is always in function of the mission…..he had enormously wide interests, and this was part of what made him attractive to young people, and useful to them. But I would look for his epistemology or rather for the epistemology of the Preventive System, in all the implicit ways of knowing and teaching it encourages. Look at the importance of the environment, the educational climate we create, for instance.

Robustness can be too quickly made a virtue of physical strength. Epistemologically, however, it may be represented as the courage to speak one’s truth in robust discussion. Standing by clear principles, following clear paths.

Another way of coming at this question of epistemology may be to look at the clues provided in our contemporary Salesian documentaation – what are the words that keep cropping up in our Salesian discourse these days: ‘organic’ plans, ‘projects’, ‘communion’….all words which might point to a basic epistemology behind Salesian life.

Or when we ask a question, do we go the next step? Some questions don’t take us far enough. There are days when we say to ourselves, ‘what sort of men do I have in my community’? And we might be tempted to answer in damning terms – difficult, limited, unimaginative… whatever. But there’s always another question to be asked – is there a deeper analysis possible? Is there any reason why we mightn’t understand so and so’s fears? It could be because I’m just as afraid. This leads to the conclusion that any effort we can make to understand one another’s inner lives is time well spent, and it’s bound to make for compelling conversation. It will also make for better leadership on our part. There are skills to be learnt, for example, about asking questions – not the sort of question asking that we learn about as teachers, but a new set of questions that best elicit inner responses or responses that lead inwards, from people. That’s a guide not only for community meetings but for the friendly chat.

I possibly have to leave it at this otherwise it goes on too long.