REPORT OF THE SYMPOSIUM

SPRINGFIELD – MASSACHUSETTES
8 – 11 JULY 2004

A. INTRODUCTION
First of all we would like to express our great thank to the general council who gave us this great opportunity to attend this symposium in connection with the celebration of 200 years of SND de Namur in Springfield United State.

Symposium and Participants:

According to the history of international meetings of the Sisters of SND de Namur, this kind of event was the first time they held since the congregation was founded 200 years ago. There were 525 participants attended this symposium who came from the 8 provinces of SND Sisters in United Stated and other countries such as Congo, Nigeria, Brazil, England, Korea, Japan, Zimbabwe, Belgium, France. Some Sisters of SND Coesfeld who live in Unites State also participated in symposium. We were the only two Indonesian sisters at this symposium. It was a great opportunity that we knew other Sisters of SND de Namur from many countries as well as the Sisters of SND Coesfeld of USA province. We really felt that the same spirit of Mother Julie Billiart inspired us all. We felt and tasted our unity in spite of coming from different countries, culture, background, language etc. In this togetherness we could support to one another the way of keeping alive the charisma of Mother Julie Billiart and the spirituality of congregation.

The content of symposium:

We indeed felt we got enriching experiences by the whole program of this symposium, especially in renewing our living of St. Julie’s rapture of action.
The prayer weavers that lead by the liturgy committee invited everyone to create a communally reflective atmosphere and a sense of mutual presence to one another throughout the symposium. Through the discussion sessions, the talks at the plenary sessions and the breakout sessions we all were invited to go back the root and source of the congregation and its spirituality.
It was a kind of reflection and a review event. We together tried to reveal and explore to one another how to see, deal with and live with our religious live in the context of living religious life in this time.
- Do we have a new sight or vision in mind about our religious life?
- What is our dream about the religious life according to the context, the situation now and

the reality of the whole world?
- What is the role of the religious life nowadays?
- What kind of understandings do we have in mind about community of religious life?
- What can we provide to the young new members or generation about the religious life in order to believe the calling as religious women according to the times and the reality of the whole world especially in realising our mission in our own community as Sisters of SND de Namur, SND Amersfoort and SND Coesfeld?
- What dream do we have in mind about the future of our congregation? How do we realise our dream in our reality world?
Those questions brought back the participants to review the way of living vows in context of religious life now and as Sisters of Notre Dame based on the spirituality of the foundresses of the congregation, Mother Julie Billiart and Mere Joseph.

B. SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM

ON THE 8TH OF JULY 2004 - 1ST DAY OF SYMPOSIUM.
Opening:
The symposium was opened at 16.45 with opening ritual. Some participants who came from several countries were asked to bring some symbols such as globe, cross, banner of welcome Anti racism symbol, Holy Name symbol (the first school of SND de Namur in USA) and candle as symbol of light. We both also asked to bring light and put it on the constellation tables in the meeting hall. This opening session was so wonderful. We found it as a colourful and multicultural event. The songs, the symbols, the clothes they wear from many different cultures and countries really touched and showed us ´we are sisters to one another´ of the whole world because of the spirituality of Mother Julie. Here we felt and learned about breaking down the boundaries that blocked the ´sisterhood´. In spite of having different cultures, languages, views and even we never met them before; we felt our unity as one source of Spirituality. We indeed felt the sisterhood of the Sisters of Notre Dame. The spirit of Mother Julie Billiart who really totally trusted to the goodness of God has lead the way of living vows of Notre Dame Sisters in whole process of their vocation.

The First presentation:
Through keynote presentation that was given by Sr. Camilla Burns, the Superior General of SND de Namur, was clearly emphasized that this spirit as the great influence towards every SND sister in taking rapture of action of living the vows in according to the needs of the world in this time.
In her presentation about "Rapture of Action: An Invitation to Wider Fields" gave us view about Julie Billiart, founder of the Sisters of Notre Dame, who had a deep understanding of the transforming power of prayer. Mother Julie invited us to go beyond meditation into "wider fields.”
Through this talk, we all were invited to explore the understanding of "wider fields" as the "rapture of action.” Rapture to action´ also asked us to dare to be in self-empty in order to fully experience the presence of God through our daily life. The great spirit and the relationship between Mother Julie Billiart and Mere Joseph are also viewed as a basic way of realising the spirituality of the foundresses through all formation and mission fields of the Sisters of SND and to show to all people ´How Good God is’.

RAPTURE OF ACTION:
AN INVITATION TO WIDER FIELDS
By Camilla Burns, SNDdeN

What a gathering! What a celebration! One-fourth of the Congregation is present in this room! Imagine – for every Sister of Notre Dame here present there are three others in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America or North America. What a marvelous visual display of the vision of Compiègne. We are a magnificent testimony to Julie and Françoise, the two daring women who dreamed us into reality. And we are the women who dare to dream Notre Dame into the twenty-first century.
My task in the opening of this Symposium of Rapture of Action: Passion for the Vowed Life is to focus on the phrase: Rapture of Action. I would like to begin with its origins in our Tradition, some of our interpretations throughout the years and a way to think about it in the context of today.

I. Origins in our Tradition
The first record of the phrase “rapture of action” occurs in the Themes of St. Julie. The Themes are the instructions of St. Julie recorded by the first sisters. The account of their origin is given in the beginning of the book.
One day when we were all in St. Ignace, writes one of the first sisters, our devoted Mère Julie found us there practising our writing. "See,” said our Mother, "let us find a means of improving ourselves in several ways at one and the same time. You shall write your essays on the instructions given every evening, and after they have been corrected, you can copy them out in good handwriting on fresh sheets of paper as practice in writing. In this way you will train your minds, nourish your souls, learn how to express yourselves properly, how to spell and write, all at the same time, and so make progress in everything at once, besides having the advantage of occupying your time as well.”
Is it no wonder that Sisters of Notre Dame excel in multi-tasking! It is deep in our roots.
There are several different editions of these Themes and the one from Cincinnati makes further comment that “Most of these exercises were corrected by Rev. Mother St. Joseph.” Now we are getting a lesson in delegation.
The edition from Ashdown Park expands the purpose of Mère Saint Joseph’s Cahier. “Many of the Themes were corrected and some were written by the hand of Mère Saint Joseph, in her anxiety to safeguard for future members of the Institute the true spirit of a Sister of Notre Dame.”
With the able assistance of Sr. Colette Valschaerts, our General Archivist, I have discovered at our General Archives in Namur that the earliest record of the use” rapture of action” in the Themes/Instructions of St. Julie is in the hand-writing of Mère Saint Joseph. I think it is noteworthy that this is one of the few instructions of Mère Julie written by Mère Saint Joseph. Both foundresses were intimately involved with this instruction, St. Julie as author and Mère Saint Joseph as scribe. I would like to speculate even further that these two women discussed this topic many times before it was finally formulated as an instruction. It is a statement of profound depth expressed with a disarming simplicity, which is also a characteristic of our tradition. The document is dated 1814 which is two years before Julie’s death so we can also appreciate that she is in a time of integration both of her own life and her understanding of the Congregation. We have in our inheritance, a manuscript of deep wisdom.

The title of the document written by Mère Saint Joseph is merely “Theme” while the Ashdown document is named, “A Sister of Notre Dame must be a mystic” under the major heading of Theme VI, “On the Supernatural Life.” The Cincinnati document is titled “Ecstatic Life.” It is the opinion of Sr. Colette Valschaerts that the document of Mère Saint Joseph is closest to the words of Mère Julie. The differences are minor but in deference to the oldest manuscript, handwritten by Mère Saint Joseph, I am using this version. It reads as follows:
I read in St. Francis of Sales that the commandments of God are conformable to reason, and that to live according to these commandments does not, of itself, raise us above a life of nature. But there are various vocations and inspirations for the execution of which God must necessarily raise us to something higher than a merely natural life. It is not only living a good civilian and Christian life, but loving poverty, humiliation and suffering, to live in the world in a manner contrary to all its maxims. It is no longer living for ourselves. None can, of themselves, raise themselves in this way above nature, unless God draws them out of a merely natural state. It follows that this life is a long- continued rapture and perpetual ecstasy of action and operation.
It is to this sort of rapture that we are called and to which we can aspire without fear. God grants us the grace to become ecstatic persons. So it is a real transformation. We may say with Saint Paul: “I live, now, not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Furthermore, no ecstasy is recognized as genuine unless it results in this rapture of action and operation.

One wonders how these two women came upon this expression. Ideas do not originate in a vacuum but certainly something in the thinking of the day caught their imagination. The instruction makes reference to Saint Francis de Sales who belongs to the seventeenth-century French school of spirituality. In her book Françoise Blin de Bourdon: Woman of Influence, JoAnn Recker makes the following comment about the connection with Saint Francis de Sales.
Faithful to her friend’s spirit of active contemplation, which Julie described as “rapture of action,” Françoise combined the mystical and the practical in her description of the spirituality of the congregation. In this respect, both Françoise and Julie were influenced by the seventeenth-century French School of Spirituality. Saint Francis de Sales, had been schooled, like the nobility of his generation, by the Jesuits of the Renaissance, who were predominantly humanists. Their theology was formed by both the threat of Protestantism and the pressing need to show that the honest person, as depicted in classical literature, still needed Christ for happiness. They believed that God was indeed revealed in the beauty of creation, but most of all in the ennobled humanity of a saint. Believing the heart to be the center of human activity, Saint Francis saw that the challenge to confront Protestantism was to lead a devout life outside the protective shelter of the monastery or the hermitage. This called for a new path to holiness, one that combined contemplation and action. And, as he saw it, friendship was to be one of the pillars supporting the living of this kind of life.

It is noteworthy that the theme of Friendship which has been so richly incorporated in our recent documents not only includes the friendship which birthed our founding but must also be recognized as a pillar of the spirituality in which our foundresses were immersed. Friendship was a mainstay to support this new path to holiness, one that combined contemplation and action.
Julie probably came in contact with the French school of spirituality through Abbé Dangicourt, the nephew of the pastor to St. Eloi, who came to Cuvilly to help his uncle. Abbé Dangicourt had a good academic background, a degree in theology from the Sorbonne and a sound priestly formation. Julie was eight years old when he began to mentor her in the spiritual life.


II. Past Interpretations
Beyond the Themes of St. Julie, there is not a great deal of commentary on the rapture of action that I have been able to locate in the early documents of the Congregation. There is an interesting reminiscence of Sr. Reine who was a contemporary of Mère Saint Joseph. I think she expresses the idea without using the word by describing the prayers and increased fervour that Mère Saint Joseph had requested after the death of Pius VII. He is the Pope Julie visited and Françoise was the only one who knew what transpired during that visit. Sr. Reine makes the following report:
Some Sisters were desirous of prolonging the exercises of piety; some slight complaints even were heard. It was during the reign of William, and the number of religious being limited, work was very heavy; sometimes we were obliged to sacrifice part of the evening meditation; the glory of God and His service made this dispensation legitimate. Our dear Mother was troubled about it and in a Conference she gave us the secret of converting our whole day, our whole life into one long prayer. “As we cannot prolong our meditation and our exercises of piety, we must make our work itself a prayer; our thought, our words and even all the beatings of our heart must be united with those of Our Lord Jesus Christ and have as their sole end the glory of God. To pray always is to act according to grace and to the light given us by the good God and to embrace with love the continual renunciations which are inherent in our holy vocation, immolating ourselves always in adoration of the holy will of God. If we accustomed ourselves in this way to making our work our prayer by an untiring quest of God, we should in a very little time arrive at an eminent degree of intimate union with God, and our life would become an uninterrupted prayer. This spirit of prayer, prayer of faith and sacrifice, is in perfect harmony with the apostolic vocation and active life of a Sister of Notre Dame.”
There is a more direct reference in THE INNER LIFE OF THE SISTERS OF NOTRE DAME (1929) but it is mainly a quotation from the Themes without extensive commentary.
The most detailed study of “rapture of action” has been done by Sister Mary Linscott. I would say that because of Mary’s work, the phrase “rapture of action” has been made common in our Notre Dame vocabulary. She makes the following comment on the extraordinary nature of this precious heritage: “Foundresses in general rarely give a specific indication of spiritual approach, and to find so clear a directive in the writings of someone as open and unassuming as St. Julie is unusual indeed” It is fitting to reclaim this ‘precious heritage’ at the beginning of our third century.
As indicated in the quotation above, Sr. Mary Linscott approaches the “rapture of action” as the phrase which captures our unique spirituality, a spirituality which requires a deep unity in our relationship with God as well as our ministry. The pithy statement she uses to embrace this idea is an invisible union with a visible work.

Mary’s work is readily available to us. There is a chapter dedicated to “The Rapture of Action” in THE FOURTH ESSENTIAL but I think her most mature thinking about it is in the book written sixteen years later, SAINT JULIE AND THE JOY OF HOPE. I would like to read two rather lengthy quotations which I think summarize her thinking on the topic.
But the summary of what she (Julie) was spiritually is probably contained in one of her instructions where, in putting before the Sisters the ideal of a Sister of Notre Dame, she unconsciously described herself. This is where she says that beyond the level of virtue and goodness that we strive for by correspondence to God’s grace through our own efforts, there is a level where God himself works in us. Here we can only let him act, live in us and work through us. We are, so to speak, carried by him, though not passively. Julie does not hesitate to call this a mystical grace which is a free gift of God but which every Sister can and should aspire to if she is to be faithful to her vocation. For God takes us out of ourselves and into himself, not by the ecstasies and raptures experienced by some of the saints, but by our equally out-going from self, or suspension of self in God, which takes place in the very kenosis of the apostolate and in the allowing Christ to take over in us so that his love and power are at work through the services we are rendering. There is an important distinction. The work goes on as usual (in fact the example that Julie gives is a class-roomful of noisy children, than which nothing would seem less conducive to contemplation). But the work is in God and God in it in such a way that we lose ourselves, or are taken out of ourselves, not by the work, but by God. Julie calls this the rapture of action and says that it is the living of St. Paul’s word, I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me (Gal 2:20). In this rapture of action the finding of God in all things and, still more, finding of all things in God, is the heart of St. Julie’s spirituality and her own best self-description.

And finally a description of what it looked like in everyday life:

The rapture of action is not necessarily a blaze of light. God’s love was not diminished nor his arm foreshortened because Julie, like ourselves, did not live in a desert, or go on lengthy pilgrimages, or think in terms of the great fourteenth or seventeenth century mystics. He could give her solitude in the center of Paris, a journey to him in the recesses of her own heart, and union with him in the poverty and concreteness of his everyday will through someone like M. de Sambucy. He could draw her by the asceticism of personal relationships, school time-tables, misunderstandings. He could teach her poverty by the frustration and limitations of her circumstances. She could suffer from waiting, from seeing what needed to be done and being unable to do anything about it. She could feel like a square peg in a round hole. She had to practise her obedience to him through unlikely intermediaries: a careless doctor, an inept coachman, an ailing bishop, Napoleon. However God came, he was always welcome. The self-emptying of joy or of sorrow or even the times without event were always the Lord’s working in her to deepen the relation of her religious consecration. This was rapture of action in its down to earth, everyday expression. There was no holiness and no apostolate for Julie outside of it.

We need to appreciate that Julie was working with a relatively new idea of religious life for women, one that was similar to monasticism in its absorption in the God-quest but accomplished through a different lifestyle. She looked to St. Frances de Sales who “saw that the challenge to confront Protestantism was to lead a devout life outside the protective shelter of the monastery or the hermitage. This called for a new path to holiness, one that combined contemplation and action.” Julie was focussed on developing among her sisters this new path to holiness. “Rapture of action” was the phrase she used to designate this new path, one that would express a deep union with God through the integration of prayer and ministry.
Julie understood this new direction as an extraordinary accomplishment beyond the normal call of a Christian. She saw this new form of religious life as “above and beyond” so she used language of exception. We undoubtedly have difficulty with the implication that this new form was a superior way of living since we have made many efforts since Vatican II to correct the theologically inadequate description of religious life as a higher state. Religious Life is indeed a distinct state that is neither clerical nor lay but it is neither superior nor inferior. However, we must understand the statement in the context of her time and not dismiss it out of hand.
I think there were two driving forces that persuaded Julie to use the language of exception, the notion of “above and beyond” the normal call of a Christian. There was not only the prevailing idea of Religious life as a higher state but also Julie’s realization that this path of holiness combining contemplation and action was something new, something different so she used the language of “above and beyond.” For example, she says “It is not only living a good civilian and Christian life. God must necessarily raise us to something higher than a merely natural life.” One is not capable of doing this on one’s own unless “God draws them out of a merely natural state.” The theology of that day did foster the idea of living a “supernatural state” but I think her emphasis is also due to her efforts to establish a new path of holiness, something different which required more effort in the sense that it was an untrodden path.
Julie uses two words, rapture and ecstasy (un ravissement et une exstase) to describe the condition of the person. We know that she had a least three deep religious experiences that emblazoned themselves in her being and hence, in our tradition. I suspect there were others which were unrecorded. However, we do know that these experiences lifted her “out of herself.” We have an account of her vision on Feb. 2, 1806 at the singing of the Nunc dimittis. Mère Saint Joseph describes it in her MEMOIRS. “Her gaze was lifted to the crucifix, she stopped singing, and her eyes became fixed on the image of our Lord, who seemed to draw her to himself for sometime she remained motionless. She would have remained so longer, but just then Madame de Franssu came in. Someone blew out the candle and made a good deal of noise, and an impulsive young sister threw her arms around out mother, who quietly came to herself and went to her room.” I do not believe this is what Julie intends for us by the use of “rapture and ecstasy.” Like the description of Julie’s intense religious experience, rapture and ecstasy conjure up notions of out of body experiences and we don’t identify with it or perhaps think it is even appropriate to imagine it for ourselves. We are not being invited to a paranormal experience.
The primary meaning of ecstasy is infused union with God. The qualifications of it in the different versions such as “this sort of rapture” and “a kind of ecstasy” is to tell us that the special case of suspension of the bodily senses is not a necessary part of “rapture of action.” This qualification is repeated in the opening statement of the Ashdown Park version in which Julie says, “My dear sisters, a Sister of Notre Dame is called to be, in some ways, a mystic.” Julie would disagree with the title of Jack Kornfield’s book, AFTER THE ECSTASY, THE LAUNDRY. Her title would be ECSTASY IN THE LAUNDRY.
Julie uses the terms to connote the union itself. I hardly think she could possibly mean an out of body experience when she specifically states that the condition we can attain “is a long- continued rapture and perpetual ecstasy of action and operation.” What she is describing is a union with God that lifts us out of ourselves – a self-emptying, a kenosis that requires a total absorption of the God-quest, a focus of white-heat intensity.
I believe that Sandra Schneiders explains it well in contemporary terms when she says the following: “All Religious Life is organized around the single-minded God-quest, the affective concentration of the whole of one’s life on the ‘one thing necessary,’ which is union with God.” The consequent existential solitude of celibacy if “attended to, and dwelt in as the heart of one’s vocation, finds its positive meaning in contemplative prayer. If it does not find its meaning there it will lead, sooner or later, to a bitter and empty isolation, to the boredom and mediocrity of the ‘professional’ minister, or to abandonment of the life itself in search of affective fulfillment.”
Sandra continues to speak of this contemplation which Julie would call rapture of action. “This desire for God alone as the direct and immediate object of one’s love is an essentially contemplative project. Here we touch the mystical core of Religious Life. By mysticism, or the mystical dimension of Religious Life, I do not mean paranormal experiences or unusual states of consciousness, but what Bernard McGinn calls the direct consciousness of the presence of God in its preparation, reality, and effect.” “Contemplation is probably a better word than mysticism, at least one less liable to historical misunderstanding, to describe the constant seeking of union with God that is the purpose of Religious solitude.”
Another way to view “rapture of action” is that all of creation “lives and moves and has its being in God” so we already have the gift of union with God. The “rapture” is to live with an awareness of it. I fully agree with Mary Linscott that this awareness is not obvious in a dramatic kind of way and not reserved for the few. “On the contrary, they are essential to an apostolic way of life and therefore necessary to each Sister of Notre Dame.” St. Julie tells us at the end of the statement that “Grace works a real transformation in our soul, for when we have attained this mystical life, each one of us can say with St. Paul: “I live, now, not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20). I think we attain this when we live with an awareness of who we are as created beings, attentive that our origin is God and our destiny is God and we live in God. The words are so simple but the realization is profound. James Walsh, SJ, a well-known spiritual director and writer in Britain thought that the “rapture of action” was an expression of wonder – a gasp – similar to the Magnificat. When we stop and realize who we are, what other response is there than a gasp. Abraham Heschel describes a prophet as someone who hears everything “an octave higher.” In some ways, that is what it means to live the rapture of action. We hear all the overtones of God in daily life.
The caution that we must make is that the “gasp”, the “overtones” are not necessarily dependent on feelings. Sometimes in moments of great stress or wonder, prayer surges up within us spontaneously and is often associated with strong feelings. At other times, our prayer is a matter of conviction. It may often be times of waiting and listening or even of darkness but Saint Julie urges us never to give up. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that true devotion consists in having a relish for prayer, “she said.
About ten months after their meeting in Amiens, Françoise needed to return to Gezaincourt to take care of the matters of her estate. Julie wrote her first letter rejoicing in the fact that Françoise could have the joy of seeing the beauty of the countryside of her childhood. This early letter has the seed of “rapture.”
Oh, how often I thought of you during your journey! How much all the works of the Lord must have caused you to raise your mind to him! If I had any desire, it would be to see these objects so worthy of our respect and admiration. You will often be able to read in this great book of nature. What grandeur there is to be discovered in it! But only those souls can find it who have the happiness of seeing God everywhere. (Letter 1, Amiens, July 15, 1795.)
“Seeing God everywhere” is the clue to rapture. It is the finding of God in all things, and still more, the finding of all things in God. That is what makes us gasp! But the realization is not an end in itself. Julie ends her instruction in Theme Six with the words: “Furthermore, no ecstasy is recognised as genuine unless it results in this rapture of action and operation.” The awareness of God propelled her into action. We readily see in the twelve years of her active life from 1804 to 1816 an abundance of activity expressed in journeys, instructions, letters, foundations and the re-settlement to Namur.
In summary, our understanding of “rapture of action” is a code word to describe our spirituality. A path which requires an intensity of effort in order to integrate the totality of our life in God.
III. A Contemporary understanding in the context of the Twenty-First Century
I would like to make a modest proposal for another interpretation of “rapture of action” in light of what we currently know about ourselves. This is based on information that was not available to Julie and Françoise. But first a word about theology. The scope of theology is universal. God who is the creator of all is expressed in the three major areas of God, humanity and the world. Early Christian and medieval theologians took this view for granted. If we are going to make reasoned inquiries into the understanding of God who created everything, then it is only reasonable that we embrace everything created in our efforts to know God. We can speak metaphorically by saying that the fingerprints of the “Ground of All Being” are found in all that has being.
Theology broke with the tradition of including the world after the Reformation. Neither Catholic nor Protestant theology kept pace with science so the consequent focus was on God and the human person and leaving the world aside. The reason for this is often attributed to Galileo. Catholic theologians were schooled in a geocentric universe and consequently were uninterested in questions stemming from a heliocentric and then evolutionary world. Vatican II marked a turning point but we have yet to grapple with nature in a full way. In her presidential address to the Catholic Theology Society of America, Elizabeth Johnson made the following statement: “As theologians of the 21st century, we need to complete our recent anthropological turns by turning to the entire interconnected community of life and the network of life systems in which the human race is embedded, all of which have their own intrinsic value before God. In a word, we need to complete our intelligence to the heavens and the earth.” We must return to cosmology in order to restore the fullness of vision that theology embraces God, humanity and nature.
David Tracy also calls for reclaiming the third pillar of the metaphysical trinity of God, humanity and the world. “If theology is to remain a discipline establishing mutually critical correlations in theory and praxis between interpretations of the situation and interpretations of the tradition, then cosmology must once again be accorded a central place in all theological reflection. Otherwise, we would not be faithful to either the demands of the new intellectual situation in both science and theology nor the crises in praxis which impinge on us all. Nor could we claim, under the rubric of a theology of history, that we have adequately interpreted the full resources and demands of the Christian tradition itself; redemption and creation; history and nature; God, self and world. Thus the challenge to all theology: a challenge to recognizes the new status quaestionis which our contemporary situation poses; a challenge to allow, indeed demand that cosmological concerns reenter all contemporary theology”
The early thinking of the cosmos was that it was static. It was understood that the universe was made in a reasonable way with laws, invented by a single law-giver, waiting to be discovered. Medieval theology understood the universe as geocentric, static and perfectly ordered made by a God “out there and up there.”
We are the recipients of a New Story of the Universe and in order to have theological integrity, we must allow it to enter into our thinking about God. New world views are often greeted with reluctance because it is difficult to change basic commitments that we have made to world views. But a refusal to participate will truncate the possibility of expanding our tradition. We have a rich and solid heritage in Notre Dame with many uncharted depths.
David Tracy encourages us to this undertaking by reminding us that hope is at the heart of the Christian view of both nature and history. The always-already-not-yet reality of Jesus Christ is a primary theological clue for our new cosmological and historical situation. We must focus on that central category of hope and begin a new construal of God, humanity and nature.
The New Story is a paradigm which moves away from a static cosmos into a universe of Cosmogenesis. The cosmogenic world view is the idea that the universe is a single, unfolding self-organizing event, more like a living being than a static machine, something radically interconnected and creative. The entire story of the universe as we presently know it started fifteen billion years ago (some say between ten and twenty). Most scientists agree that it began with a startling moment of Singularity which we call the Big Bang. All the energy that would ever exist in time erupted in a primordial explosion. The energy of the most distant unseen galaxy and your energy to come into this room came from that starling moment of Singularity. It is not correct to think of it as a moment in time or a specific place because within its matrix the conditions arise that enables temporal events to occur in space. We who exist in time and space cannot imagine the source of the energy which, according to Brian Swimme, scientists call the quantum vacuum because it is nonvisible and nonvisualizable. Nonvisible does not mean invisible to the human eye but rather cannot be seen at all because it is neither a material thing nor an energy constellation. Scientists depict it with mathematical language.
What completely numbs our minds is the notion that a vacuum is not “nothingness.” It is a fecund emptiness from which particles foam into existence. Brian Swimme calls it the “All-Nourishing Abyss.” He uses this title to point to the mystery at the base of being. The universe’s generative potentiality is indicated with the phrase ‘all-nourishing’ but the universe’s power of infinite absorption is indicated with ‘abyss’.
Creation was not completed in seven days but began as a process which continues as we sit here. The present highly organized and complex state arose from a long and complicated sequence of transitions and processes. So the Big Bang was not ‘The Creation’ because the universe has, in a sense, never ceased to be creative. Creation is an ongoing process. The universe is an unfinished creative project and because it is unfinished, it has a future.
Ten billion years ago, the galaxies were seeded and emerged for the next four billion years. Our solar system came into existence five billion years ago. Biological evolution on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago. A short while ago in cosmic time, humans appeared. The arrival of humans brought a great surprise to the universe because a new faculty of understanding made its appearance. The story of the human is the Universe’s story of self-awareness. We are the only ones capable of knowing and reflecting on this unfolding Story of the Universe. Two vital points for our continuing pursuit of theology is that the universe is still in the process of creation and therefore has a future and we, the human family are the self-awareness of the universe.
How does the Universe Story make a difference to our conception of God? How does it differ from the God who is described as the Unmoved Mover and immutable God eternally existent and unaffected by other existence? We posit this God as “up there.” Although the incarnation is God among us, we interpret that as God “up there who came down here.” This fits well with Newtonian physics which understands the world as a wound clock ticking away according to laws outside of the temporality of the world.
David Toolan suggests that we need to redress the imbalance of a God who is disengaged from the world to one who is not only related to the world but also affected by the events. He proposes that a more integrated understanding of God is to conceive of perfection as the process philosophers do, “as being unsurpassably related to all events, as well as unsurpassably receptive to all events.”
God is relocated from “up above” to One who comes out of the realm of the future, “up ahead.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin insisted that God draws the world from up ahead toward the future, toward the Omega Point. Karl Rahner spoke of God as the “Absolute Future,” Moltmann understood the word God in the Bible to be primarily “Future,” Pannenberg and Peters refer to God as “Power of the Future.” The radical change that this brings about is an orientation away from causality and toward the future.
The spirituality that has come from the classical theology is one of ascent and descent. It embraces the tension of the transcendent God (ascent) and the immanence of God (descent). Different spiritualities embrace differing emphases but they are all faced with the necessity of balancing the tension imposed by the verticality of the God “out there” as well as the incarnate God “down here.” In recognition of the Universe Story, process theology changes the location of God to within the universe so perhaps a spirituality that embraces this directionless existence of God would be a spirituality of participation in the universe. God is in the horizon of our life rather than in heaven. We are not spectators. There is no “out there” there. We have issued from the All-Nurturing Abyss, foamed forth with space, time, matter and energy. The space continues to expand and sends us further and further away from our nearest galactic neighbors. We are connected to the entire universe in a great web of relationship. Cosmic destiny and human destiny are inextricably linked. This is the context of our spirituality.
In this world God is a persuasive God, a God of influence. As John Haught states, “A world given lease to become more and more autonomous, even to help create itself and eventually attain the status of human consciousness and freedom, has much more integrity and value than any conceivable world determined in every respect by an external ‘divine designer.’ If by persuading rather than coercion something greater than a puppetlike universe is permitted to come into being then we can say that persuasive power is more influential than brute force.” That is to say, God’s action and power in relation to the world takes the form of persuasive love rather than coercive force. God lures us from up ahead, attracting us into the future. God moves the world by the magnetic power of beauty and love. God is the “poet of the world.” God waits and awaits. “’Waiting” is never disinterested passivity, but the highest form of interest in the other. Waiting means expecting, expecting means inviting, inviting means attracting alluring and enticing. By doing this, the waiting and awaiting keeps an open space for the other, gives the other time, and creates possibilities of life for the other.”
What difference is the purpose of our lives in his evolving universe? I answer with the words of John Haught:
The purpose of our own lives, when situated in the context of cosmic evolution, is to carry forward in whatever way we can the universe’s general creative aim toward deeper and wider beauty. An “aesthetic” understanding of the evolving universe not only makes us ecologically more sensitive than we may have been before, but it also provides a robust life for ethical life in general.
In a post-Darwinian world our vocation, our mission in life, must be in some way to participate in the universe’s own ageless labor of intensifying the reign of beauty. The evolving universe, as it turns out, is not indifferent to value, for it has always had an adventurous inclination to expand the dominion of beauty – to combine order with novelty, unity with multiplicity and harmony with contrast. And we may now integrate our own life-trajectories into the wider universe’s habitual straining to actualize ever more intense versions of beauty.
Once we have become aware, with the help of evolutionary science, that our own lives and labors can add something new to the ongoing cosmic creation of beauty, our lives and deeds can gain a meaning only vaguely apprehended by the pre-Darwinian picture of a static universe. A lively awareness of the general cosmic aim toward beauty gives us a rich context in which to cultivate the life of virtue. The virtues we idealize are still the traditional ones – humility, compassion, justice, gratitude, hope, and so on – the same ones that our great religious traditions have always taught. But now, in the context of evolution, we can see more clearly than ever that the good life is one that contributes meaningfully not only to the spiritual growth of the individual person, but also the ongoing creation of a whole universe.

In conclusion, I propose that “the rapture of action” for the twenty-first century is all that we know with the additional understanding that all the beauty of our lives, the beauty that expresses itself as the Goodness of God participates in the ongoing creation of the whole universe. Our context is the whole universe in which the All-Nourishing Abyss waits for us, invites us, expects us and entices us into the future. This is the rapture that impels us to action, to the emptying of our lives. The appropriate response to the depth and magnitude of our lives is a gasp – a perpetual ecstasy, a long-continued rapture of action and operation. Julie used the expression “wider fields” to invite us to a more contemplative prayer. I believe we can translate that invitation today as a request to contextualize our prayer in the whole universe.
Many Sisters of Notre Dame have been engaged in the implications of the new cosmology but as a Congregation we are beginners. So I conclude with a poem by Denise Levertov:
BEGINNERS
‘From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea.’
But we have only begun
to love the earth
We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
- so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
- we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot drag,
in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet
there is too much broken that must be mended.
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.

We are two hundred years old, which is hardly a blink in cosmic time. The “Rapture of Action” is still in the bud. Let us continue to participate in its unfolding creation.

Acquaintance moment.
At 19.00 we took dinner together in the meeting hall. Here the participants got chance to acquaint with one another.

ON 9TH JULY 2004 - 2ND DAY OF SYMPOSIUM:

The talk at plenary session:
At the second plenary session Sr. Marie Chin, RSM talked about "Recasting the Fire".

“Recasting the Fire”

RAPTURE OF ACTION: PASSION FOR THE VOWED LIFE
Notre Dame Symposium -July 9, 2004
by Marie Chin RSMI feel like I’m walking on water in addressing you this morning. I come to you feeling very humbled and inadequate to the task before me so, like Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn in one of Elie Wiesel’s stories, I’m simply going to begin with a story and from there talk to you from my heart about reframing our religious vows in the context of our contemporary world.
Once upon a time I had a revelation. I came face to face with a mad woman and I saw the back side of God. There she was, shuffling along. Her hair jutted in wild gray wisps under the frayed brim of a shapeless hat that once was black, but now took its colour from several layers of dirt. Her clothing, an assortment of fashions, hung incongruously upon her, reinforced and held together in several places with safety pins and bits of string. On her left foot she wore a black sneaker and on her right a white one, both of them held together and anchored in place with heavy twine wrapped several times around the insteps. Her dirty stockings sagged loosely over the top of her shoe. In one hand she carried a bulging shopping bag; with the other, she clutched a bundle of yellowed newspapers close to her bosom. On she shuffled, her face turned skyward, singing, bawling in a strident voice that now and then had the trace of sweetness:
Abide with me, fast falls the evening tide…
I noticed, too, that most of the passersby were too engrossed in their own pursuits even to notice the mad woman. A few people were startled out of their self-absorption; they glanced at her furtively and quickly averted their eyes. Some snorted and tossed their head in disgust. There were a few teenagers leaning casually against a building. When they saw her, they burst into raucous laughter. And there were those, myself included, whose faces were veiled with pity, who lowered their eyes and shook their heads in puzzled sadness – “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Like a detached observer I took in all of this. Meanwhile, the woman was almost lost in the crowd but I could catch the last fading notes: When other helpers fail and comforts flee; Help of the helpless, O, abide with me
There was something in this mad woman that laid a claim on me. As I ponder this experience, I have an intuition that the story of this mad woman is as much my story as it is the story of all humankind. We spiritual beings on a human journey constantly dance on the edge of madness. Ronald Rolheiser gives this madness shape and definition when he says in his book,
The Holy Longing:
We are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and which would have us believe that we can have a great love, perpetuate our own seed, and contemplate the divine.

Rolheiser develops the wonderful insight that there is a deep-down hunger, a longing, a desire in all humankind that comes from beyond and makes us fundamentally restless, always searching, reaching out for someone, something, someplace. All great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion grapple with naming and analyzing this desire. It is called greed, eros, longing for God, thirst for justice and peace, dignity and equality. “Whatever the expression,” he says,
everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing – an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else.

Rolheiser characterizes this fire as a madness in all of us, an insatiable longing, especially that unnamed and infinite longing that eclipses all others -- the longing for God-- which echoes in the caverns of our lives in all kinds of forms, patterns, modulations, disguises.
To my way of thinking, it is this inexpressible desire, this infinite longing for God that has drawn and continues to draw all of us who have committed our lives to this life form (Sandra Schneider) we call religious life. Every day this holy longing rises up to God, and every day it meets the inexplicable faithfulness of God. As I continue my own halting and at times painful struggle to be a woman of faith and a woman committed to the Church, for better or for worse, I have this growing conviction that the God Quest is indeed what my life as a woman religious is all about and when the longing of my heart meets the longing of God, a holy conflagration happens. The fire that Jesus came to cast on the earth is ignited to link the possibilities of hope with the”aching pain,” the fears and despairs in our world.
I suggest to you that as vowed women religious we forge our spiritual path with the elegant choices we make for “the madness” within our soul to find fullness of expression in terms of the gospel imperative. These elegant choices are our lived vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience which hold together the longing and desires of the collective soul of our congregation and constitute the strength of our life together.
As I see it, religious vows are not for ourselves alone. They are for a life circumscribed by the shared quest with others who have the same desire to fan the flame of longing for God and to be a “searing presence of God’s spirit in the world.” (Joan Chittister), announcing God’s true character, attitude, relationship, and action with respect to life. This shared quest is the common fire which gives our life the characteristics of “radicality” and “prophecy.”
Concomitant with being prophetic is also the matter of disturbing complacency. For religious life to have social relevance, it must be a life lived in the present world in such a way that it becomes a loving critique of the world in which we live: a renunciation, that is, a departure from the prevailing mindset of contemporary US culture, and I dare say, of world culture, a resistance to the dominant and prescribed values of consumerism, excessive individualism, and a lust for violence and, at one and the same time, a re-announcement of the gospel imperative which offers a lucid alternative consciousness to the unredeemed cultural norms of what Brueggeman calls “the empire.”
Let me state that I think that religious life is a dynamic historic reality, one that constitutes itself by responding to new challenges in a spiritual process that introduces change, sometimes self-correction, and, at the same time, assures continuity and fidelity to the past. I believe that apostolic religious life will continue to be a life of total self-giving to God in terms of the vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, lived in community. These vows have the potential to offer an alternative response to the pervasive emptiness, fragmentation, and general violence in our world and in our hearts, but it entails a profound transformation of consciousness on our part that cannot be realized by mere social impulse. It requires a “habit of the heart” that is deeply contemplative. So, what I would now like to do is to use three descriptions of contemplation as a framework for articulating some of my thoughts about living the vows today. You have asked me to focus on the United States but what I have to say applies as much to the world at large.
Poverty: Witnessing to Abundance instead of consumerism
Contemplation“unveils the illusions that masquerade as reality and reveals the reality behind the masks.”

In one of his reflections, Parker Palmer gives a fascinating explanation of what happened when Jesus and his disciples fed five thousand people. For him this was a moment of contemplation. The miracle, he says, was not the feeding of the multitude. The miracle was that Jesus did not act alone. He acted in concert with others and evoked the abundance of community. He and the disciples came together and they put together what each had at hand --- more than enough to feed a multitude. In a moment that was communal contemplation, Jesus, the disciples, and the entire crowd unmasked the illusion of scarcity and created the reality of abundance.

There really is a paradoxical relationship between the experience of abundance and that of scarcity. I remember well my experience in Jamaica in the 70’s when the government, in an effort to stabilize the economy and narrow the gap of the “haves” and the “have nots,” began a policy of democratic socialism and banned much of the imported goods that they termed “luxury items.” There was a general uproar. Were the basic goods of life in short supply? It depended, I think, on our assumptions. It depended on what we assumed to be basic goods. If cereal in the morning was vital or if you absolutely had to have tuna fish for lunch or a mackintosh apple (what Jamaicans call “American apples), then scarcity became a problem. In a mindless kind of way, the Jamaica society could not see any possibility beyond its dependence on foreign markets. More than ever we began to assume a mentality of scarcity. A preoccupation with acquiring and hoarding entered our souls and became an unconscious way of being. We lived in the constant fear that money would run out, that we wouldn’t have enough to eat, and we talked of nothing else but the hardships we were enduring. The remarkable thing was that as we acted out our fears, the assumptions we were making about scarcity did in fact become a reality. As we acquired more than we needed, as we hoarded our supplies, especially those that came from abroad, there didn’t seem to be enough to go around. Prices soared and so did the imbalance between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Who groaned and complained bitterly and constantly. Who quickly lost hope? It was not those persons whom we call poor, those for whom scarcity is never an assumption but truly a hard fact of life. “Structurally adjusted” for more than half of their lives, they tightened their already tight belts and kept hoping in a provident, prodigal God. As hoping people they chose to assume abundance and live in such a way as to create it and share it. When a family of six or more couldn’t buy a whole chicken, they would buy what they could afford and chop it into smaller pieces so more could eat with less.

And so I began to understand fleetingly what Parker Palmer means when he says that scarcity and abundance are not merely economical or political issues. They are deeply spiritual conditions connected with assumptions and choice. He believes that if we are to effectively balance the scales of justice and if we take seriously our responsibility as stewards of creation, then we must examine the assumptions that inform our choices. It is not enough for us to explain our global imbalance solely in terms of greed and power. There is a connection between our inner life and our ability to respond to the situation of our world. If I have the attitude that this is mine by right, if my inner experience is that of scarcity and grabbing for all I can get because there is not enough to go around, then surely I will not be able to freely share the goods of the earth. Equitable distribution of resources and opportunities will be a problem. That we move from having and grabbing possessions to trampling others is perfectly consistent. If on the other hand my inner experience is that of living in a world that has been simply and graciously given to me, that truth and resources are ample and available, then I will be able to live in ways which allow others to live as well. I will be able to recognize the intrinsic preciousness of all life, human and non-human. I will be able to reach out in partnership to all creation with confidence that our prodigal God holds us all together in his great heart/her spacious womb. But how uncritically we assume the closed, narrow mindedness of scarcity. How easily we take it for granted that our well-being lies not in what we share with others so much as in what we possess and in the differences that exist between us. How easily we fall into the trap of believing that our well-being lies in possessing more and more and building bigger and better “barns” to protect these possessions, whether they be material, emotion, spiritual. Small wonder then that the spirit of God has to come in wind, fire, and chaos. God’s spirit has to disrupt our neat, pinched, narrow lives in order to integrate and “restore all things in heaven and earth.” (Eph 1:10)

For us to give a credible alternative to our world, plagued as it is with its passion to possess, we need to understand these assumptions at the heart of all our relationships. We need to examine and discern what is good and healthy for our souls and for our world. We need to wear a “habit of heart” that sees riches in a different light so as to discover a life of plenty that transcends the economics of scarcity and the politics of differences that divide and keep us apart from nature and one another. The needs of our time call us to the discipline and divestment of poverty that is a habit of heart constantly balancing our needs with those who are poor; our energies, limitations, and gifts, with those with whom we share life, our fears of risking and losing, with God’s promise of abundance.

Celibacy: Witnessing to Solidarity and Compassion instead of excessive individualism

Let the land lie fallow and practise Sabbath.
Let me return to Rolheiser’s description of the incredibly powerful energy of eros within us. He tells us that
Sometimes it hits us as pain—dissatisfaction, frustration, and aching. At other times its grip is not felt as painful at all, but as a deep energy, as something beautiful, as an inexorable pull, more important than anything else inside us toward love, beauty, creativity, and a future beyond our limited present. Desire can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope…

To my way of thinking, what Rolheiser describes here is an integral part of human sexuality that we need to harness and make explicit in our vowed life today - sexuality as a tremendous resource for contemplation and action when it is understood and experienced as an expansive, open, relational energy /, relational power.
The problem here is that we have learnt very well, in subtle and not so subtle ways, that we are solitary beings, who must pursue our own good in competition and fear of one another. A thousand times a day we are driven to position ourselves in our assigned niche of being separate, self-contained, hierarchical beings and to establish power relationships that are unilateral to see whose will it is that will prevail. Power as a force over and against the “other” is the norm for all relationships. Small wonder that we have perverted (turned completely around from itself) our eros/sexuality into the excessive individualism that gives primacy on every level of our being to “going it alone,” maximizing autonomy, our own self-interest and individual rights, and the need to express ourselves independently of the larger community and which Robert Bellah describes as a cancer eating away at the fabric of contemporary American culture
I cannot help thinking how much we, as vowed religious, need to free ourselves from this cultural myth, unlearn the experiences we have had of the perversion of power as relationships of domination, control, cruelty, compliance and competition, and redefine sexuality in its non-perverted, most radical dimension as an empowering drive toward right, mutual relationships that are loving, just, co-creative. To make the “elegant choice” for celibacy is to recognize and make real the incredible power of sexuality as the yearning, the hunger, the drive, saying YES to the breaking down of the walls that separate person from person, creature from creature, creature from creator; and to the making of reciprocal connections between and among us in which we find our common good – the common-wealth of God. (Carter Heyward)
“Setting our heart on God’s kin’dom” is not about going it alone and winning prizes. According to Martin Buber, “success is not one of God’s names.” It is more an invitation to disengage ourselves sufficiently from our producing, controlling, result-seeking selves to create a sabbath heart, a whole, spacious, full, and open heart in which our individual and collective ego steps out of the internal structures that keep us fearful, squeezed and tight and makes room for God to lead us deeper into God’s passion for life, humanity and all creation in a new and different way. The person who allows God’s passion to fire her own passion, is, according to Carter Heyward,
the one who not only remains human but who takes pleasure in being human – a person whose laughter is plenty and whose tears flow freely, because in this world not to laugh and not to cry is to be cut off from realizing either the beauty of [our world] and its resources, or the shame and horror that marks our common home.

God pulls us beyond the boundaries of our own skin into the realization that we are in a common world, that our strength lies in bonding together to live lives of hope as resistance to what ails our world. We are thrust into solidarity with the whole creation, “groaning in labor pains until now and not only the creation, but we, ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit, groaning inwardly, while we wait for … the redemption of our bodies.”
Obedience: Tending the Whole and Holy instead of running the treadmill of violence
Contemplation is really a gracious act of waking up, taking notice of, and paying attention to our daily human experience.

****
The real focus of American violence is not in esoteric groups but in the very culture itself, its mass media, its extreme individualism and competitiveness, its inflated myths of virility and toughness, and its overwhelming preoccupation with the power of nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, and psychological overkill. If we live in what is essentially a culture of overkill, how can we be surprised at finding violence in it?

My reflection on these two insights bring me to an observation that Jesus makes: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” It occurs to me that Jesus may well be reminding us that while we must be single-minded about our search for God and God’s desire for us and the world, we must also be mindful of how we go about this quest.
When God’s spirit can move freely to disturb, heal, create, transform our personal and collective soul, paradoxically we become less anxious, less willful, less demanding, less violent, certainly more gentle and present to the hunger and desire that makes itself known and which is usually the first sign of God’s presence. Awakened, our soul begins to feel, connects, even breaks. It can no longer deny or run away from pain, be it personal, communal, societal, or ecological. There is an important connection between a community’s contemplative presence to its collective soul and making healing choices for itself and for the world.
What is becoming increasingly clear to me is that our daily human experience, where God encounters us and talks to us as individuals and as a community, is a vital place of God’s self-revelation. Contemplation calls us to look at what is actually happening in our experience; we linger with what we are observing, what we are noticing. We pay careful attention to the different movements, the different moods that we experience, trying to identify the patterns of our behaviour, our responses, our resistances, how and to what we have been co-opted to accept as values. But paying attention in a contemplative mode goes one step farther. It is important to be able to relate every felt experience, whether it be the acute feeling of loneliness, betrayal, inadequacy, grief, joy, or consolation, to the larger context of having had the experience of being loved by God. To contemplatively pay attention is to listen to the truth-bells of the stories we tell, to enter into the depth of our lives where we are known by God, loved by God and so begin to know, accept, and love the reality that is being revealed.
Bernard Lonergan has called the central Christian experience “God’s love flooding our hearts,” and he describes how such an experience re-orients one’s inner life at its root. The light of God’s love breaks through and we begin to see differently, with eyes that perceive the divine and sacred dimension in the most ordinary details of daily living. We become acutely aware of life in its God-held-wholeness. We become acutely aware of our fundamental connection and interdependence with all of life and being a part of a unified whole, healed and healing.
All of this happens to us as individuals but what we don’t often bring to mind is the fact that this can also be a part of our communal experience. “God comes walking out of lived-in things …and knocks down every wall inside our house” and, when we are contemplatively paying attention, we notice that with God, “the world arises” and God’s “dawn gleams on every crack and crevice of our lives.” There is a power in community to bring newness that we do not often claim, for example, what happens when people come together in a faith community to make meaning of their experience. Or, take for instance when a life story is deeply heard, and listener and teller are transformed. This is true whether it is an individual’s life story or the life story of a community. The teller feels validated and more integrated. The listeners see themselves as part of the story unfolding; they become a part of the story and inexplicably they no longer feel alone. Such is the power of communal meaning-making to offset the isolationism, ostracism, and insignificance that we so often feel in our day-to-day living. Here again, it is important that we contemplatively listen to the primal energies powering our being and doing and discover the truth-bells of the collective stories we tell and hear.
I call experiences like these “contemplative” in that they awaken and enliven a depth-level of being that is not usually engaged. We are more able to stay centred on the present, focusing ourselves in all purity and with full attention on the now-moment. The result is deeper interior freedom, a deeper capacity to let mystery unfold. The spontaneous outflow of goodness-filled-being is so powerful that it creates space in which life finds a home and all kinds of unexpected things can happen. God opens up life to take on a radial symmetry, a reaching beyond ourselves to lay claim to our essential connection and interdependence with one another. Thus, we can begin to re-read and re-interpret mission and ministry not from our customary vantage point but from that of the “other”; for example, in terms of the evangelization that has already begun in poor, vulnerable and marginalized people who are re-reading the gospel from the stance of their lived experience and, with alternative imagination, are reclaiming the sub-version of the Gospel.
I have this sense that we can never be truly present to the living God and remain the same, personally or communally. According to Beatrice Bruteau:
Spiritual practices on the contemplative path involve a certain amount of discipline and overturning of old habits, a willingness to shift viewpoints and accept different attitudes, the courage to think for oneself, to ask deep probing questions and perhaps try unauthorized opinions, the perseverance to continue when success is not yet visible, and the heart to undertake one’s contribution toward creatively “dancing the world.”

Transformation and God’s reign will come when faith communities have the courage and stillness of heart to keep vigil and submerge themselves collectively in the pain of the world ---there to find God’s passion and to be filled with the power of God, the power that is humanity’s by nothing more than faith in the power of our common bonding, on common ground. (Heyward)
One final thought…
As I explained at the beginning, this presentation is really an attempt to reframe, and “put a new spin” on metaphors that abide in the story of our contemporary culture. In my attempt to do so, an image kept coming to me of space that was neither a structure, nor a system of practices but space, in which God’s Spirit beckons us to uncover, discover, or recover how God’s Spirit is searching to hallow our souls into our own essential vocation. So I began thinking that religious life is that sacred space in which the vows weave their own patterns, sometimes distinct one from the other, sometimes winding intricately with each other like a web of interrelatedness but always calling us to our unique companionship with God.
I had just become aware of this flow of thought when I came across some notes from Robert Raines’ musings:
Recently I came by the book Eccentric Spaces by Robert Harbison. The subject is the human imagination and the mysterious, evocative interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, streets, maps…even novels, paintings symphonies…Eccentric spaces…. Christmas is the eccentric space of God emerging on the earth: spaces of a manger, an empty tomb, journey to Emmaus and to your town and mine…

Vowed religious life is, indeed, an eccentric space in which we honour the “madness” within our soul – eccentric, meaning original, individuating, distinctive, unique, but also peculiar, odd. By virtue of the elegant choices we make for poverty, chastity, and obedience in a world of consumerism, excessive individualism, and violence, perforce we will always be the odd one out, “odd women who come together in odd communities/congregations, always at odds, always at risk, always in the presence of an empire with its insistent version of reality, always telling the boys and girls that we are different, different because we have been in the demanding presence of the Holy One.” (Brueggeman)
I thank you for taking this excursion with me into the eccentric space of religious life, forged and recast in the fire of God’s love for all creation. So passionate is this love that God crosses over from divinity to be present to us, rupturing all impossibilities as well as religious and cultural fixities and pleads with us to invest in God’s future with outrageous, ecstatic hope. This, I believe is the new story, the new metaphor that we must tell with our lives today.Reflection:She views religious life is not a solitary quest. It is essentially a shared quest with others who desire with all their heart to fan the fire of their longing for God and God’s kin’dom here and now. "What do you think would happen if we understood religious vows as metaphors of this shared quest?” In this talk, she invited us to explore this question in her presentation.
In this presentation Sr. Mary Chin described some thoughts about living vows of poverty, celibacy and Obedience

Poverty: witnessing to abundance and NOT consumerism. Contemplation unveils the mission that masquerade as reality and reveals the reality behind the maskers.
Abundance of our life depends on our assumption. We often have ‘accusity attitude’ that influence our reality. Accusity – consumerism is not a practical issue. It is always related with our inner life and the events outside our life. When we have inner experience of our personal life, we are also able to share this life with others.
God’s Spirit robbed our needs. Passion of God is a kind of process. We can examine it through our limitations.
Celibacy: Witnessing to solidarity and compassion NOT excessive Individualism.
Let the land lie fallow and practice Sabbath.
At this moment we need explicitly to express our vows.
Sexuality is a way to breakdown the relationship to one another to come to a kind of co-operation. In that way we can take part, find, live and experience in a wider world in our ministries. Here we have to let God’s love call and touch fully our passion.

Obedience: Tending the whole and holy NOT running the treadmill of violence. Contemplation is a gracious act of waking up taking notice of and praying attention to our daily human experience.
Community means we create a goal together. Every person has right to contribute something and to have space to have mutual sharing about own experiences. In that way we realise that none is alone.

One final thought.
Space with God searching how God go into our own essential, our own being. Religious life is a specific and sacred space. Vow life is a kind wave of interval. Vow of religious life is an eccentric space in which we honour the madness within our soul.
Questions on table conversation:
- What energize you in living vows?
- Do you have any new sight?
- Do you have any shift of consciousness?

Breakout Session:In breakout session we chose topic about: Vowed Poverty in an Ecological Age part 1 and 2 – presented by Sr. Paula Gonzalez, SC.
This talk invited our awareness and our attitude to deal with the whole creation that God has created. Through living vows in concrete way, the role of religious life is asked to be more alert in caring for the wholeness of God’s creation.
Living vowed poverty as "liberating frugality" would address dramatically our current global crisis – and could revitalize religious life. The Earth Charter proclaims, "Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions and ways of living." Reverent, ecologically responsible living could be the prophetic witness to which religious are called today!
The future of humanity is in the hand of how we can give and provide the new generation a better life and hope. Looking at back God wish about the His whole creation, we as human being is the most reason of creation but NOT the most important.
The question is:
What might be an appropriate role for vowed religious in the co-creation of a sustainable future? How can we taste our universe? God needs people!
- Fundamental changes are needed in ours namely values of witnessing, institutions and the way of living.
- Common standard for all people: respect and care for community life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, democracy, develop of the culture non-violence and peace)
- A change of mind and heart: a new sense of global inter-dependence and universal responsibility, imaginative initiative towards a sustainable way of life, appreciation of culture diversity, expansion of the collaborative / search for the truth and wisdom.
- The vows expand fundamental values. Here we can differentiate between:
Keeping vows means: Living vows means:
At a distance engagement
Moral Social
Holiness Earthy / spirituality
- We entered a new age where all of us will have to sign a new contact with our environment and enter into a new lager community.
What can we do?
- Revision human role in the primary sacred community.
The sacred community is the way in which the divine is present revealing itself to us (quoted from Thomas

Berry).
- Realise that each one can make a different
- Commit to action toward one area earth healing.

The purpose of religious life is not survival but it is prophecy and the meaning of vows is more clearly that:
Poverty Charity Obedience
Sharing Caring Daring
Giving up Giving for giving in
Share with be with talk with
The vow of poverty is a liberating frugality. We try to set free ourselves from domain by a foreign power. Frugal is to be careful in using our resources. It needs a kind of shifting in consciousness and awareness. Here we all are called for caring our world that God has made in His good wishes.

Free journ - breakIn the evening after breakout session the participants had free time. The committee provided some activities that could be chosen such as swimming, walking around the city, etc. The participants also could get dinner in Hotel by paying a ticket for $15.

10 JULY 2004 - THE 3RD DAY SYMPOSIUM.
The talk at the plenary session.
At the Plenary Session Sr. Nancy Schreck, OSF talked about ´Living Community in the U.S. Today: There’s an Elephant in the Living Room! ´

In this presentation Sr. Nancy invited the participants to explore the love-hate relationship many people have with the idea of community life. The complexities, challenges and prophetic nature of living community in the U.S. today became the part of her presentation. The format includes a presentation followed by significant time for table conversation.
Community is difficult to live. We got tear, fear guilty, frustration, afraid, alones, or deepest desire to live.

The challenges: adjudge mental issue. To solve the issue make us defensive.
Living in community on the other way people need to be curious. We are expected from one another to share views and to expand to take action.

What does community mean?
- Does it mean to have a kind of conversation
- Does it mean to explore your reality of your own community?
These seem not the answers that show us the way of community life.
The universe is the example of our true community. We are unit connection even small species they have a relationship too.
The reality pushes up to think about community. We break the boundary down to broad our understanding about community. Think about your internationality community! Think also about the relationship and contacts you have. The question: Is that your community life?

What is meant to live together?
How many do people now worship Internet? There is a program that named ‘Call by Joy web’. These things sometimes make us confused. Through Internet people could find more or less 4 - 10 million community life style creations. They all talk about community. When looking at this modern electronics communication, what is really meant to live in a community life?

What does community need?
A community needs a clear purpose that people want to reach and to explore one another. Some people said that my ministry is my community! The other said living in apartment people don’t know one another! Perhaps there are many other statements that can make people confused about what we called ‘community’.
Religious life never expresses the huge community. Most we need in religious life community is possibility to build the same aim and purpose to every people.
In this paradox we mirror our larger society where isolating suburb and declining organisation participation both protect.

The things are under the table!
Idealistic is the community with the peace atmosphere. We want the things go on smoothly with joy and happiness.
On the table: acceptable and reasonable things.

Under the table we find some attitudes:
Angry, jealous, denied, hate
Questions, shy to talk, etc.
Process???
What do we really struggle with this picture?
How do we deal with this reality?Why do we want to live community?Community is replacement of fairly! No! We don’t live community as social project or celebration. Community in a religious life is a response the call of Jesus to away of life that is based by the Gospel. Religious life is communitarian not because it is religious life, but basically because of Christian. Perhaps community likes friendship and happiness. It is something most likely to happen not straight in and for it self. Community is meant to express the Reign of God. The most important is to explore our own particular community.
Here we think creatively about living community. We learned from what we have done before. In the community we have to have a clear purpose. When we do not have a clear purpose, we feel exhausted and lose the valuable of life. We need to form to one another. For example how we organised our way.

The questions for discussion regard to community life:
1. What are the ’under the table issue’ we need to talk about in the light of community?
2. Where are you with ‘living together’ under the same roof as a definition of community?
3. What have we learned in the last 20 – 30 years that give wisdom in community now?
Questions came from the floor:
1. How do we welcome the new comers at community to sustain our community?
What is important to us?
The book of ‘We are able to be more in community life’ by Ellain Mc Taggart.
2. Do we change the understanding of roof?
3. How do we share deepest conversation the way we do, the work we do etc.?
All these things are not only for ourselves but it also for others.
4. Do you see community life is a common vision? Think also about the international community where people create a new world.
5. Thinking about ‘under the table’, what do we do? How do we want to stand!

´Being together´
Related with ‘culture’ participants from Brasilia said ‘table’ is a place for being together. It is not an obligation. The persons come on table because of sharing to one another their presence and their love. It is an exciting place to meet to one another.
The modern electronic can be used as an effective communication, but it is not a real personal communication when we talked about community life.

At Breakout session on 10th July 2004:Communication in Community Living – The Art of Dialogue by Kathleen Gallivan, SNDA Call to Action of the 2002 Chapter is to "develop a renewed vision of community life and create new forms of community." The talk invited us to explore the challenge and invitation to open honest communication as a foundational value for our renewed community life. This topic is also taken based on the talks before. The relationship between God and the whole creation included our own life. Those are expressed in our whole life.

Questions:
1. Which the core skills do you think assumption for effective communication in community?
The research showed that 70% awaking of communication. The skill need of community is a dialog with empathy skill.
Empathy: the recognition of the self in:
1. The other as an indispensable tool of observation, without which vast areas of human life

remain in Intelligible. Here we try to give as close as we can to share experience to one

another.
2. The accepting confirming and understanding human echo, evoked by them self is a

psychological nutriment (also spirituality nutriment) without which human live as we

know it would not be sustained.
3. Emphatic listening to other:
Subjective - objective
Affective – cognitive
Connected – separate
Internal – external
Understanding – explaining
Doubting – believing
Real listening takes a lot of works and time.


The second Breakout session on 10th July, at 15.30
Externalising our Post-Vatican II Reality for the Sake of Newer Members
By Deborah Cerullo, SSND.
This talk described about the renewal of Vatican II that brought many changes to religious life, deconstructing a world where the externals had become ends in themselves. The external manifestations of the lifestyle were discarded and never replaced. This presentation explored what parts of our new reality may need more externalised expression in order to provide to post-Vatican II generations the identity markers needed to convey the message embodied by the commitment to religious life.

Question:
How do the new members stimulate to believe about religious life nowadays?
One of her suggestion is to have a theological reflection. Theological reflection is a process of group gathers to discuss an issue within the framework of lived experiment.
- It begins with the lived experienced at those doing the reflection.
- Correlative this experience with the sources and text of the religious tradition and
- Draw out practical implication for living.
Questions:
1. How do or do not these ideas resonate with your experience?
2. What issue may need more dialog or common expression within your own situation?
ON 11TH JULY 2004 – PANEL SESSIONPanel session.
This session was lead by Margaret Claydon SND, Jacinta Martinez SND, Kristin Matthes, SND and Gwynette Proctor, SND
Table Conversation/Process: Fran Repka, RSM, and Facilitator
During this session the floor got chance to ask question, gave comments or suggestions related with the topics that has been talked at plenary sessions, breakout sessions and discussion groups. There some red lines can be concluded about the topics that has been talked during these three days symposium among others:
1. The mission has to do together as community of Sister of SND. It cannot to do by only

oneself or by a certain person.
2. Passion to God comes from the madness. It is a totally calling through a commitment of

living our religious life.
3. Try to create a welcoming community of SND that different from the others. In this case

we dare to confront to one another and we realise we have to go for a long way.
4. Give space for having a conversation for new young generation in congregation.
5. Try to discover the things under the table especially in building a community life.
6. How do we together make our own community with the curiosity attitude than judgement?

Curiosity community where we can smelt and taste the sisterhood relationship in the

community.
7. Can we find our worlds from our own dark world and try to go to the light one?
8. In connection with our earth, how do we take action in order to care for our damaged

earth? How do we deal with our modern technology?

Time for reflection:
At the end of the panel session the sisters were invited to take time together for some reflections by guiding some questions as follows:
1. What is world of image you have now?
2. As you reviewed the entire weekend ‘Rapture of Action’ symposium what image world

come to mind?
3. What distinctive aspect of community might be core to the SND charisma?

Eucharistic Celebration
Gospel Reflections by Teresita Weind, SND.
Sr. Theresita Weind, SND gave reflection based on the Gospel reading taken from
Lucas 10: 25 – 37. She emphasised about the true sisterhood and brotherhood in connection with realising the spirit of the founder to the whole world. The Sisters SND are indeed demanded to realise it concretely and dare to breakdown the boundaries that covered the Goodness of God. From the Gospel, we noticed how the Samaritan gave us a great example and challenge to our religious life about what we call ´sisterhood and brotherhood´. It is a closing reflection and review towards our mission in responding the needs of our world and in this time.

C . CLOSING
Impressions we got after attending this symposium:
*The symposium: There is a clear theme and purpose that was rooted, inspired by the

spirit of Mother Julie Billiart. The spirit of Julie Billiart has become a fire to rapture of

action of each SND sister in context of living vows nowadays and according the signs of

time.
* The role of the general council that has been expressed through presentation of Sr. Camila Burn has taken an important part that directed, kept alive, gathered, inspired and invited the sisters to review and return to the sources and charisma of Mother Julie as well as realised it through living religious life in concrete way.
*The spirit of Mother Julie Billiart has been embodied in whole way of life of the sisters. We could feel, smelt, tasted through their vision, language, the way of communication, the symbols, the liturgy etc.
*The SND sisters have many experts both in spiritual fields and science. We found that most of presentations have been lead by their own sisters.
The hopes for the future:
*We hope that international meetings of our congregation such GCO, Chapter has a clear and specific theme and purpose based on the inspiration of spirit and charisma of Spiritual Mother (Julie Billiart).
*The role of the general council and Generalate House becomes a centre and source of inspiration in deepening of spirituality in whole of congregation. Because in renewing the religious life, it has to return to the sources and original charisma of the founder of congregation. (See PC).

Once again we very thank you to all general council members who stimulated, trusted and supported us to experience this great event. We found it as a fruitful meeting in which we were invited every time to review and reflect the way of living as the Sisters of Our Lady, who are rooted with the same spirit and charisma of Mother Julie Billiart. We are also invited to realise and keep alive her spirit and her charisma to push our rapture of action, especially in living our vows in context of religious life and according to the signs of time.

Amersfoort, August 2004
Arranged by
Sr. Christa Suminah
Sr. Mariani Made