Reflections on Charism
May they all be one
John 17:21
… we found ourselves turning instinctively to identify with the pains and burdens felt in our whole earth community
The Heart of Being Brother (Congregation Chapter 2002)
P. Mark O’Loughlin cfc
Winter 2007
During our recent final, and for me overwhelmingly sad, Province of Saint Patrick gathering at Amberley I found myself reflecting on our attempts to articulate just what is our Christian Brother charism. In the current letter from Michael Godfrey on behalf of our Congregation Leadership Team we are asked to respond to this question. Who am I as Christian Brother? Who are we as Christian Brothers? My first thought is that any articulation of just what charism is must not be static. I am aware that in beginning to type I need to choose whether I am thinking about the charism of Edmund of Callan, our Brother, or the charism of us Christian Brothers today. And I further wonder whether I should be thinking plural, about charisms. Edmund’s response to his world, one so different to ours, was far from either static or single-faceted. And neither are our varied responses as Brothers in our world of today. Gone are the times of cultural conformity and uniformity. These issues caution me as I ponder the question of our charism.
On the Wednesday of that week at Amberley we were immersed into a bigger story, that of the Edmund Rice Network. I recall being in a small group with Matt Clayton, and being given a glimpse into his passionate enthusiasm for his engagement with Edmund Rice Camps in Tasmania. What so obviously thrilled him was what he described as the “connectedness” into which he was immersed, what I would also describe as the “relationality”. My mind went back to my years in the Stranger Movement in the early 1980’s. As I look back on those days I know that the whole Movement was foundationally about welcoming the other, the stranger, into respectful and intimate relationship, into community. On occasions later when I met a person who had participated in a Stranger Weekend I would eventually ask what the experience was like. Without fail the response was “I felt free”. This always evoked in me the words of Pope Paul VI in his Evangelii Nuntiandi … “as the kernel and centre of his Good News, Christ proclaims salvation, this great gift of God which is liberation from everything that oppresses the person”. The Stranger Weekend was primarily about inviting persons to tell their story, and to listen respectfully to the stories of others. From which a profound sense of “connectedness”, of being embraced by a community, was experienced. And a personal sense of “freedom”, of “liberation”, was generated. Matt Clayton’s experience was not different to mine, and that of so many others associated with the Stranger Movement and Tim Bilston’s Edmund Rice Camps Movement and the Edmund Rice Network. Connectedness and relationality and community are the essential, even if unspoken, goals of these charismatic visions. Responses to a universal hunger for “connectedness” that has perhaps always been the deepest yearning of the human heart. Jesus of Nazareth was in touch with this hunger, and his prayer was “May they all be one”. If David Ranson is right, and I embrace this theology, that “the nature of God is Communion”, then the incarnation of community and communion must surely be at the heart of the human enterprise, and of our lives and mission as Brothers.
We articulated through the spirituality conference in the early 1980’s that the charism of Edmund Rice was “to reach out to the marginalized”, and today I find myself adding the question “To do what?”. My experience of our Brotherhood today is that our answer is “to create communion”, as the Edmund Rice Camps Movement and Edmund Rice Network attest. Our last Congregation Chapter in 2002 in fact articulated an answer. In the core output from that Chapter we are called to take literally the meaning of relating as brothers. What a profound transition from our former mission to do and to teach. Carl Jung, and his disciple Robert Johnson, would invite us to recognize and describe this shift in terms of Jung’s quaint numerical “threeness of doing” stage of our human journey into the more fully human “fourness of being”. I find it intriguing that our Chapter so clearly invited us into the “fourness of being”! What a challenging change to now seek “to be”, rather than “to do”. I would like to think that language around our charism today now has counterpoints, “to reach out to the marginalized, and to there be Brother, and to there invite the other into Communion”. And we must continue to ponder the question “Who are the marginalized?”. The 2002 Chapter invited us to widen our perception of the marginalized when it recognized the pains and burdens felt in our whole earth community. And we are surely maturing beyond our perception of “the other” as being exclusively the “human” and “male” and “Catholic” towards an outreach to the whole earth community.
The excited sense of community within the Edmund Rice Camps Movement and the Edmund Rice Network, so evident on that recent Wednesday afternoon at Amberley, tells me a lot about our Brotherhood and the precious gift we carry for creating Communion. As our own history and the state of global humanity tell us, community does not just happen. It is incarnated through gift and skill. The reputed family therapist Stanley Greenspan asserts in The Growth of the Mind and the Endangered Origins of Intelligence (Addison Wesley, 1997) that “half of all husbands and wives are unable to maintain stable families”. The basic skills that he sees as necessary are: an understand of one’s own needs; a capacity to appropriately assert those needs; an ability to recognize the needs of the other; and a generosity that allows one to forego some of one’s own needs being met in favour of meeting the needs of the other. “To give a little to get a little”! Cautionary and challenging and informative for our relationships and communities, but I think that the necessary skills flow when we meet the other with a profound attitude of attentive respect.
The father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, articulated more subtle challenges for relationships. In every interpersonal relationship he recognized what he called “transference” and “counter transference” and “projection”. In Freud’s thinking the “transference” is the unconscious conjuring up in the client (the other) of a needed person whom the counsellor would become, such as a father figure with whom some neurosis required resolution. Freud’s “counter transference” is the needed person whom the client becomes unconsciously for the counsellor. And “projection” is the unconscious process whereby a client would describe another, but in reality be talking about themself. Freud understood the “resolution of the transference” as being the pathway to resolving a neurosis, and saw the principal role of the therapist as one of insightful maintenance of the transference. He explicitly warned of the risks for the therapist in negotiating the complexities of these realities, such as clients seeming to fall in love with the therapist through the transference. Challenging concepts, but requiring insight if relationships are to be successfully negotiated. I have wondered what differences there are between a good therapeutic relationship and an authentic loving friendship. And how far away is an urge for a physical intimacy that can be so destructive of relationship. D.H. Lawrence was brutal in his assessment in Sons and Lovers … “Having loved her he hated her”! These realities are again cautionary and informative for our engagements in relationship and community, but I believe that we do negotiate potential pitfalls successfully when we meet the other with a profound attitude of attentive respect.
How awesome, then, that we Brothers dare to welcome others into community, and through a precious gift incarnate Communion. I recall living with a community of the then White Fathers in Dar Es Salaam during my first visit to Tanzania in the mid 1980’s. Near the end of my stay one of the priests confided to me that he envied my title Christian Brother. He had to live with the uncomfortableness of White and Father. And here was I, a Christian and a Brother, and he would have preferred to be known as both! And I reflect now that our life can in fact be profoundly “priestly” … to incarnate Communion, in contrast to “saying Mass”. I celebrate this charismatic gift in our Brotherhood, and pray that it may be treasured and nurtured for our ministry to our whole earth community and prevail against the seductions to become corporate moneyed management.
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