MISSIONARY ANIMATION
HELPING TO RESET THE BONES OF SOCIETY

The New Year opened in a climate of war and conflict. In Tanzania the Student community is waking up to the drum beat of the educational institutions with ever-increasing Tuition fees. Unemployment is taking its toll on the bread winners of the Poorest. Albinos are on the run afraid of being the victims of greedy and wealth-seeking crooneys who presumably believe in the Waganga’s demands of their body parts. High level corruption that is taking its tolls on restricting opportunity to a few, unemployment and delinquency among youth, increasing numbers of single mothers and young children collecting empty plastic bottles for a survival all add to the horrendous criminality that is pervasive in our quarters. What is my missionary identity in this new scenario? How lovely are my feet which bring the good news, “God is love’ and ‘our God reigns’?

We wonder if the gospel of consumerism while claiming to enhance the sum of human happiness, in fact does much to undermine it, especially for the most vulnerable among whom we count many of our youth. Our yearning to add more meaning to our apostolate invites us to see the world from the perspective of the poor and marginalised upwards. This is the prophetic mission of the Church in our neighbourhood. We are needed here and our missionary outreach finds its depth in these circumstances. We see the breakdown and fracture in the society and in the community. The commonly held beliefs, values and virtues seemed to be gradually corroding from the axis of our community. This is what I mean by helping to reset the bones of society and this definitely is a religious activity, argues Fr. Michael Holman the Provincial Superior of British Jesuits. (The Tablet, 6th Dec. 2008)

The Church today needs also Missionaries of another kind. We need to be stripped of all false securities we have created over the years, the baggage we have accumulated – culturally and socially – and be disposed to travel light, the Spirit will blow through the dead bones (Ez 37:1-14). Are we willing to face our diminution and apostolate depleted of meaning with honesty and integrity? Very aptly does Joan Chittier says, “the fact is that Religious Life is was never meant simply to be a labour force in the Church; it was meant to be a searing experience, a paradigm search, a mark of human soul and a catalyst to conscience in the society in which it emerged”.

How can we be Re-setters of the bones of the Society? Let us discuss further.
Ours is a time of paradigms-in-transition, with many of us locked in denial in the face of the demise of the old models. At so many levels of contemporary life previous ways of relating to reality and former functional models are proving to be irrelevant, and in many cases, useless. Clinging to the past, we hold on to old baggage, and this enslaves us, diminishing our freedom to embrace the new future. In this in-between time, the call to authentic discernment carries a heavier responsibility than at any other time. Since, our cultural and dare I say, even religious institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, when confronted with the challenge to change they tend to become so rigidly resistant that they frequently capitulate their own perdition (O’Murchu, D).

Given the complexity of this great challenge and the extreme difficulty in honouring the desire to change we need to deal with some of our cultural assumptions which are inherited – institutionally, culturally and through loyal allegiance to a system. These in turn, if we scrutinize, become standard beliefs or cultural paradigms. Examples like, ‘we have always done this way’, ‘no one has ever questioned this’, ‘the constitutions says so’ and so on, continue to condition our modus operandi. Our sincere desire to be more relevant and convincing in our apostolic engagements pins us down to seek new avenues. I name this a paradigm shift. This concept defies a great deal of human rationality and certainly transcends many of the unconventional ways of understanding reality today. The gospels are saturated with paradigm shifts. Jesus proclaims a new way of relating, an alternative to power and dominance.

Some of the qualities we need to adopt for a new missionary thrust in our communities and Province are already clearly enumerated in Vita Consecrata – the enterprising initiative, Creativity and Holiness (VC 37). And the future of this move is not for us to invent but one we can anticipate co-creatively.

 

Ferrington Poobalarrayen, sdb