Importance of These Meetings and the Coming Chapter

Sr. Barbara McMullen, Congregational Leader

Last summer you told us that you wanted time to get to know one another better and to build

relationships across the borders of our Congregation. We listened, and so we gather today across the Congregation to share from the heart, to listen deeply to one another so that as members we get to know each other across continents and oceans. We can benefit and flourish from the gift of our internationality and interculturality opportunities. We can share with one another how we think we are to carry on the spirit of our founders and their spirituality.

In thinking about the theme of our coming Chapter: Holy Adventure: The Path to Possibilities it is our great hope that this theme and our living into it will lead us into paths we may never have chosen to explore or imagined in our future. We don't know what some new calls to us as a Congregation might be—perhaps to go to uncharted lands—to serve the poor and marginalized, to engage those who are disenfranchised and learn from them. We know that religious life across the globe is changing, that there will be challenges and yet doesn't our charism of trust in and openness to the Providence of God call us to respond with courage and vision for new ways of thinking and being? We don't have all the answers and perhaps that place of unknowing just might be the place of greater wisdom. Each of you has a piece of truth, a certain gift of wisdom to share. You might see possibilities that others don't. In our sharing, using synodal listening, we value each one's dream, each one's adventure as a part of the whole.

To walk the holy adventure together is not to know every turn in the road. An adventure implies some mystery, some risk, some courage. It will ask each of us to be willing to enter into the Paschal Mystery where we see the end of one historical reality in order to embrace an emerging future where God beckons us. Many of you expressed that we need to be about mission—that our lives and actions need to be about serving others and finding ways to respond to the needs of the suffering and broken in our world. So think about what some paths to possibilities could be.

It is our hope that through all of our sharing and listening to one another, a process of transformation will take us to new paths, to a rebirth of who we are as Sisters of Divine Providence and new responses to the signs of our times.