Last week I sat in on part of Module 3 of the Mercy Leadership Program and Dublin Pilgrimage (MLPDP). The Pilgrims had returned from Dublin and had regrouped to consolidate their learning, reminisce and resolve how the experience might shape their own mercy leadership journey going forward. There was friendship and a great camaraderie in the room and a genuine appreciation for what they had experienced.
Sr Annette Schneider facilitated the afternoon and, drawing upon Caroline Thompson’s ‘Be as shining lamps’ (2022), helped us to unpack our own spirituality and posed the challenge to be ‘intentional in what we attend to in our lives’. Twelve months earlier I had been in the room as a returning pilgrim – I found myself reflecting upon what had changed in my life and the world since that time and my own ‘intentionality’.
I realised that I find ‘hope’ increasingly elusive. Horrific and sustained conflict, aggressive global politicking, climate crisis and human tragedy all serve to undermine a value core to my faith journey and our mercy commitment. What snaps me out of what might otherwise be a surrendering spiral, is the affirmation that the Christian world view was and is disruptive and indeed counter cultural! Moreover, our ministries exist because of a societal and practical critique built upon compassion, justice and hope. Indeed, MMC articulates the value of Hope as ‘We see within our current situation possibilities and promise, which nurture and shape our future.’ Notwithstanding the challenges of our times, we are called upon to foster hope.
Walter Brueggemann, an American biblical scholar and theologian who passed away recently, urged Christians to think beyond what is and to imagine what could be. In his work The Prophetic Imagination he posited challenging definitions of both compassion and hope:
“Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.” “Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.”
MMC sits in this prophetic tradition, it shapes who we stand with, how we use our power and privilege and commits us to the longer struggle for peace, justice and reconciliation with our Creator. Or as Maria McGuiness RSM is quoted in Be as shining lamps: “Are the socially radical and politically subversive visions of our foundress still operative today? Are we reading the Signs of the Times in the provocatively disturbing and challenging ways that our foundress did?”
The MLPDP had equipped participants to ask those very questions. I heard their ‘intentionality’ to act and to constructively pose them. As we welcome the pilgrims back into our board rooms and ministry executive groups, our role is to create the space, heart and energy to engage with them in the questioning, so that we may together ‘see within our current situation [the] possibilities and promise, which [will] nurture and shape our future.’[1]
Paul Linossier
[1] Mercy Ministry Companions, definition of Hope according to the MMC Values.