Brazil, M. Silva
Our 1982 Constitutions say that “by our charism, we are consecrated to glorifying the heart of Jesus: we answer His call to discover and reveal His love... and through our love and service to radiate the very love of His Heart” (Para. 4). While with my mother this Christmas, I was once again profoundly touched by an awareness and appreciation of the deep and abiding love my parents have for each other, an awareness that has been growing in me especially over these past five-plus years of watching my mother cope with my father’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease. The unconditional love that I see so palpably expressed in my parents’ relationship with each other teaches me much about the love of God. There are two insights that I want to reflect on today because they are significant in how I understand myself living my spirituality as an expression of the charism of the Society of the Sacred Heart.
First is the connection that I see between the depth and quality of my parents’ love for each other and their life-long commitment to each other. This is important because it shapes my understanding of the commitment I have made to vowed religious life in the Society of the Sacred Heart. My parents certainly are flawed, and their marriage has not been all sweetness and bliss. As an adolescent and young adult I was only too painfully aware of this – of what I saw as the “dysfunction” in their relationship. Yet in recent years I have come to recognize that at the very heart of my parents’ love for each other is precisely their commitment to each other, with their flaws and through the tensions, disappointments and sufferings (as well as joys) in their relationship. This recognition has helped me to understand better the connection between the commitment I have made to vowed religious life in the Society and my ongoing discovery of God’s love.
I experience my day-to-day commitment to religious life most concretely in community – that is, in my relationships with other RSCJ, whether in my living community, area, province, or internationally. One of the more common experiences of newer members in religious life, I think, is disillusionment with the reality of community life. Certainly, that has been a part of my experience. Yet increasingly, I am realizing that it is precisely in my commitment to community, with all of its dysfunction – and yes, also joys – that I discover the love of God. In negotiating daily life together, learning to accept my sisters as they are not as I wish they were, seeing my own flaws, and experiencing my sisters’ acceptance of me with those flaws, I am living in the loving Heart of God.
This leads me to a second insight about my parents’ relationship with each other: that their love for each other is the source of the love that extends beyond them to their children and to all those whom they love. I know that I am not saying anything new here – but my own experiential recognition of this truth has given me a new, felt appreciation for the way in which the love of God that I discover in my relationships with others is the source of the love of God’s Heart which I “radiated” through my service, for example, of teaching theology at The College of New Rochelle.
It is in my ministry at the College of New Rochelle that I can most easily identify concrete examples of living the call to reveal God’s love – when I see the light go on in a student’s eyes because something I’ve said has helped her to make sense of her own faith questions; or when a student seeks me out because she trusts that I will listen to her concerns without judging her; or when, during class, I can feel the energy generated by the lively discussion we are having. Of course, those are only occasional highlights in the normal, humdrum course of things, but these are the moments when I recognize the potential contained in each interaction I have.
This leads me to a final reflection about the day-to-day living of my spirituality. So far, I have said nothing about prayer because, quite honestly, prayer – by which I mean the time when I intentionally quiet myself in order to be aware of God’s presence – is not normally when I have a felt awareness of God’s presence. Yet at the same time, time for prayer is essential to my lived spirituality because it is what allows me to recognize the presence of God in and around me. The image I have is of floating on an ocean. Unless I get out of the water every now and again – to sit next to it on the shore, maybe – I can lose the sense of the water. But it is in getting back into the water that I experience its presence all around. This image illustrates, for me the meaning of being wholly contemplative and wholly active.
Remarks made at the Teleconference of the United States province January 21, 2007
Elisabeth Brinkmann rscj
Province of the United States
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