Plenary 2022

Programme

Commitment: "I commit myself to live vulnerable synodality through service as a leader, animating it within the community together with the people of God."

You have chosen a theme that is completely contrary to the prevailing paradigm of our world. Embracing our vulnerability, speaks to me of the essence of humanity and the very heart of transformation. Embracing our vulnerability requires that we embrace the fullness of our being: life’s beauty and austerity, the full cycle of surrender, gestation, and birth, and all manner of anguish and love.

A spirituality of listening is born from this source: the perspective of a God who listens, and listens to all, and listens especially to the “voiceless,” to the most  vulnerable, to those who have been left without words, and does so by awakening in them the faculty to speak, because His listening is always liberating. For this reason “being listened to”, being well heard, is always a healing experience. 

God is both faithful and creative, always true to Godself and a keeper of covenants, and yet bigger than any box we may make for God. How do we journey in an emergent cosmos with a trustworthy yet radically free God who has chosen to involve God’s creatures in the creative process and who has given us free will so that we can choose against, as well as for, life and wholeness? That is the challenge of synodality, of journeying together.

I approach this reflection by considering two aspects of vulnerability as experienced by missionaries. The first is what I call vulnerability from above, which I define as the decision to empty oneself of the power and honour which one legitimately possesses; it contradicts our innate desire to hold on to power, to dominate and to be triumphant. The second, which I name, vulnerability from below, is an invitation to embrace our human condition in its woundedness, fragility, limitations, sinfulness, and imperfections.

The truth is that, from the very beginning, even before the pandemic started, I felt small and vulnerable and had practically spent the first year of this service wondering why I said Yes at the Chapter, upon being elected. However, during the Spiritual exercises that I experienced during the Pandemic, the “choice” was to “say yes” to the service that I now carry out, from the perspective of vulnerability, convinced that this is the type of leadership that religious life needs today.