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Thursday, April 29, 2010
 

Dear friends, Sister Gemma’s text on the Good Shepherd today reflects my own thinking and I am so grateful to her to write it so crystal clear! I profoundly believe that another “Church is possible”, but it does and can grow only from grassroots’ level.
Claire-Marie

'If you want to be a good shepherd, you have to learn to think like a sheep'

Sister Gemma Simmonds gave the following reflections on Good
Shepherd Sunday, from Our Lady and the English Martyrs Catholic church in Cambridge, on BBC Radio 4 Sunday Worship at 8.10.

The texts are Ezekiel 34: 1-16, Revelation 7:9, 14-17, John 10:27-30.

1st reflection

The prophet Ezekiel pulls no punches when he denounces the shepherds of Israel. Speaking in God's name he contrasts the theory of how the religious and political leaders were meant to 'shepherd the flock' and the harsh reality of their practice.

In recent months we have been experiencing a desperate crisis of leadership within the church, with the media leading a litany of denunciations. Firstly they denounce the small but deadly minority of shepherds who violate their calling through cruel and abusive behaviour. No prophetic words can suffice to condemn this, and no apologies, however sincerely meant, can be enough on their own to heal the wounds inflicted on the innocent. Through the words of Ezekiel, God promises a day of reckoning for such betrayals, and the day of reckoning has begun to fall on us all.

Secondly the media denounce the collusion of those shepherds who covered up the dark deeds of abuse under a cloak of silence and religious obedience. In a period when the Catholic church was undergoing a similar crisis of leadership, St Catherine of Siena wrote to the Roman Curia of her day, 'Be silent no longer. Cry out with a hundred thousand voices. I see that the world is destroyed through silence'.

Ezekiel contrasts the way in which the shepherds of Israel have used their ministry as a means to exercise abusive power over the flock, and the gentle and loving way in which God promises to shepherd the people: seeking the lost, healing the wounded, strengthening the broken, nourishing the starving.

If we are to understand vocation to ministry in the church correctly, we can only do so by taking on the mind of Christ. He did not rely on his equality with God, but made himself as humble as a slave, and submitted even to death for our sake. The pattern of Christ is not one of lily-livered weakness. No one can say that in taking on the religious and political authorities of his day, cleansing the Temple, casting out demons, dealing with the doubts and hesitations of his disciples, that Jesus was not strong. But his strength did not come from relying on the mystique of power or religious charisma. It came from his intimacy with the Father, and from his love of truth. At his trial before Pilate, when he must have been most afraid, he bore witness to the truth.

The current crisis within the church does not demand that all those called to ministry should be saints. We will be, as all of us have always been, a mixture of saints and sinners. What it does demand is that we disconnect priestly and religious ministry from the false assumption of power. We are called to have the courage to speak the truth. This means opening our ears to those who have been abused, opening our eyes to where we ourselves have colluded or been complacent about the way in which the church is organized. It also means opening our mouths and proclaiming the truth of the holiness of the church and its members, despite all failings and criticisms. Neither the abusers nor the structures of collusion have the victory here. The crucified and risen Christ has the victory, if we are willing to walk his way. He is the good shepherd, who calls each one of us to be a shepherd in our own turn. Our vocation is to be Good Friday and Easter Sunday shepherds, building a humbler, simpler and more humane church whose structures of governance mirror the loving humility of the suffering servant Jesus.

2nd Reflection

I once read a book in which a shepherd remarked, 'If you want to be a good shepherd, you have to learn to think like a sheep'. This is one of the best descriptions of the Incarnation that I know. Jesus says of his flock, 'I know them'. He knows us because he has been one of us, he knows human life from the inside. He claims an ownership over us that is not a proclamation of power but a promise of kinship - this is why he claims that we will never be lost, and no one can steal us from him, because he is one of our own, one like us. This kinship lies at the heart of his invitation to service.

We live in a culture of entitlement, which has 'I know my rights' as it motto. In contrast to that is the message of those who follow Christ, which asks, 'how can I serve?' This is not just a message for priests and nuns, a spiritual elite, but for the huge number of people from every nation, race, tribe and language, called by their baptism to a universal vocation to holiness. I have worked as a school teacher, a university and prison chaplain, a spiritual director, and among the street children of Brazil. In each of these ministries I learned far more than I ever taught. In the Christian tradition we often speak of evangelization as something we do for others. We 'bring' the Gospel to those who haven't received it. But we forget that ministry is a two-way traffic, and the Good News of Jesus was preached to me by those I served: schoolchildren, colleagues, students, prisoners and, most powerfully, the poor. It was they who taught me the meaning of vocation.

Mary Ward, who founded the Congregation of Jesus 400 years ago, died with her vocation to active ministry for women denied by the very church she loved and longed to serve. Her last words were, 'Cherish God's vocation in you. Let it be constant, efficacious and loving'. If we want to be good shepherds, we need to learn to think and feel like those whom we shepherd. It's a question of entering into and embracing our humanity more deeply, even when that doesn't look particularly holy. It is there that we will find kinship with Christ who shared our humanity so that we might share divine life with him.

To listen to the programme on BBCiplayer see: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s1p7b/Sunday_Worship_25_04_2010/

Dr Gemma Simmonds CJ lectures at Heythrop College, London University


Tuesday, April 27, 2010
 

I am so very grateful to John Dear for this excellent text on leadership! I translated shortened parts of it into french for Katutura. Mandela's appreciation of John Dear is enlightening and I will reflect further on it. (the images, I found)

Mandela's Way
By John Dear SJ Created Apr 20, 2010 Here's a scene I'll never forget -- sitting in the Edenton County Jail with my comrade-in-dissent Philip Berrigan, both of us on ice until the trial for our Plowshares disarmament action, looking up at TV suspended in our cell. Unfolding on the screen was the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, the new president of South Africa. Peter Jennings caught up with Mandela later and posed the question: "Did you ever think, during your 27 years in prison, that one day you would be president?" Mandela's face flickered with a look of incredulity and he answered, "Why, every single day my fellow prisoners called me that." Phil and I threw each other a shocked glance. Imagine such faith, vision, hope, determination and leadership! And single-mindedness.

Locked up for years on Robbens Island, toiling in heat hammering rocks in a quarry, Mandela and his friends nonetheless spent every spare minute studying and preparing for a new South Africa. Few could imagine such a thing. But he and his friends not only imagined, but confined as though they were by stone walls and stonier guards -- and a forbidding sea -- they toiled to make it happen.
I once spent a week on retreat at a Trappist monastery with several of Mandela's prison comrades, and I asked them how it happened. They spoke of Robben Island as "The University." There, they said, they studied and debated every aspect of government, justice and politics. Mandela assigned one to draft a new constitution, an untried topic for this poor soul. But he set himself to work as best he could, collecting the world's constitutions and gleaning from them the most just and humane provisos. And when the day came, the new constitution was unveiled -- one that not only abolished apartheid but ended the death penalty and unilaterally dismantled South Africa's nuclear weapons. So far, Mandela has far outmatched Obama. Now and then Obama's rhetoric lifts spirits in passing, but his actions conform to wearisome American ways. Like his predecessors, he wages endless war -- conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan interminably drag on. And notwithstanding his recent rhetoric to the contrary, he has funneled yet more national treasure into state-of-the-art nuclear weapons facilities. More, his first duty seems to be to the superrich -- multinational corporations have been handed huge sums from the American treasury. An economic apartheid against the world's poor.

Nor, by and large, do I sense Mandela's visionary leadership among the hierarchy of the church. They should be helping us usher in God's universal reign of love and peace. They should demonstrate that same sacrificial spirit and soaring vision.
So what to do when leaders don the trapping of leadership but, out of blindness or corruption, don't lead? We need to become true leaders ourselves. It is we who must take a stand, undergo transformation, help one another change. It is we who must pursue the Gospel vision -- even if we harbor clamoring doubts that such a vision is beyond our grasp. And how do we do it?

For answers we can look again to Mandela. His friend Richard Stengel, who helped Mandela with his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, distilled Mandela's leadership style and listed its traits in a new book Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage (Crown). Here are Mandela's lessons:


1. Know that courage isn't the absence of fear. For Mandela, courage is a choice, an everyday activity, shown in large ways and small. Learn how not to let fear rule your life. Mandela says we have to act as if we are not afraid. Pretend to be brave, Mandela believes, and you become brave.


2. Be measured. Stay calm in all situations because calmness diffuses tension and inspires people to act justly. Mandela's "measured response" was a large reason why South Africa did not explode into civil war. Think, analyze, then act, he would say.


3. Lead from the front. "Leaders should lead," says Mandela. "And they should be seen leading." That is to say, be conspicuous. Serve, act, speak openly. Thus keep the movement for justice and peace going.


4. Conversely, lead from the back. Mandela believes in building a team, sharing everything with one another, and pushing others ahead. We keep the pack moving, he says, by steadying it from behind. It's the way to empower others to take a place in the movement. Ubuntu, he says: Empower one another!


5. Look the part -- a matter of carriage and bearing. Walk with dignity, wear clothes that command respect. Self respect was a key ingredient in his fight against racism. And his deportment inspired others to reclaim their dignity. In public, Mandela always smiled, a gesture to show he had moved on from bitterness and anger. A gesture that displayed hope.


6. Have a core principle; everything else is tactics. Mandela's principle was equal rights for all, regardless of race, class or gender. Not keeping to a core principle diffuses energy. Keeping to it gilds the nuts and bolts of tactics and plans with true focus.

7. See the good in others. Mandela, like Gandhi did, tends to see everyone as virtuous until proven otherwise. He begins with the assumption that one is dealing with him in good faith. His many years in prison taught him how apartheid had destroyed otherwise decent people. Apartheid aside, he concluded, people's equilibrium tended toward virtue.

8. Know your enemy. To convert a resolute political opponent, one must understand him and discover his weaknesses. Mandela studiously regarded his enemies, and learned to understand them. He learned their Afrikaans language and appreciated their interests and their sports (a theme of the recent movie "Invictus"). By this he found common ground with his jailers and opponents. And though sometimes grudgingly, they came to see him as a human being.


9. In the same vein, keep your rivals close. Many in Mandela's own movement opposed him. Young movement radicals, especially -- they embraced different tactics and ideals. Yet Mandela kept in touch so as to be in a position to build relationships and try to reconcile. Likely his strategy prevented the factions from falling into all-out war.


10. Know when to say no. Time will arise when one must draw a line and refuse to concede. Otherwise one compromises his core principle.


11. Don't be naïve; know the game will be long. In prison, Mandela learned to think in terms of "the long run." His perspective was from a historical perch. His goals didn't primarily lie in changing his own surroundings but in nudging history itself. In upgrading social standards. In diverting society down a more humane road. The long-haul view gave him patience, steadied him during set-backs, heightened the wisdom of his decisions.


12. Understand that love makes the difference. Mandela encourages revolutionaries to be loving people, have loving relationships, to have lifelong loving companions. Be loving!


13. Understand, too, that to quit can also be to lead. Mandela's willingness to step down after one presidential term sent a message around the globe: power is not the goal. The goal is a more just, democratic society.


14. Know that it's always both. Which is to say, be comfortable with contradictions. In perceiving reality, shades of gray didn't bother Mandela that much. He accepted his limitations in understanding. And his knowing that he could never lay claim to absolute right made him compassionate to those who opposed him.


15. Finally, tend a garden. In prison, Mandela found himself wanting a garden, and after appeals to the authorities, his wish was granted. The garden afforded him some contemplative space where he could touch the earth and cultivate not only beautiful plants but inner peace. Everyone should garden, he says.


These lessons distilled from Mandela's life help me in my own modest efforts for justice and peace. They push me to see beyond myself and my accustomed ways of thinking, to keep the big picture in mind and stay the course.
My own summary of Mandela's life would be different. I would focus on Mandela's willingness to suffer, go to prison and die for the cause of justice, and the quiet faith and spirituality that undergirded his sacrifice. I would emphasize his sterling forgiveness, his ability to let go of resentment, and his eagerness to reconcile, even as he still insists social, racial and economic justice and peace. I take Nelson Mandela seriously, and give thanks for his life and witness.

And I offer his principles here as we each ponder how to respond to the global crises we face. May we, like Mandela, do our part for a new world of justice and peace, and go the distance.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/mandelas-way