A READING FROM THE BOOK OF PROVERBS (2.1-11)
My child, if you accept my words and treasure up my commandments within you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; if you indeed cry out for insight, and raise your voice for understanding; if you seek it like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures - than you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; he stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk blamelessly, and guarding the paths of justice and preserving the way of his faithful ones. Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity: every good path; for wisdom will come into your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul; prudence will watch over you; and understanding will guard you.
(The Word of the Lord)
With this appeal to and praise of wisdom we North American SCJ's assemble. We appeal to a Word of God, we speak of God before we begin. We come together as a prayer that we may know the heart of God, that this week we may live in God's proximity. We ask for wisdom - the gift from the Lord. The gift of wisdom, as we just read, is a gift of the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is a unique gift that comes from the divine treasury. It is the fear of awe that the most Holy One is our friend. It is before this awesome Friend that we assemble.
When St. Augustine wrote his Confessions - or as Gary Wills has lately translated the title, The Testimony - that is, the testimony to God in his life, one of his main pre-occupations was the experience of time. In the Eleventh Book of The Testimony, he meditates on time. He recalls the Book of Genesis and the story of creation and how the Eternal One made us to live in time. The more he delves into time, the more incredulous he becomes. Finally, with a cry in his heart he blurts out, "What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided no one asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled." He asks what it is that God created in the beginning. Augustine is baffled because how can time exist if the past is no longer, the future is not yet, and the present is so fleeting? (T+N,I:7) What then is time if we cannot locate it anywhere? Augustine ultimately suggests that time exists nowhere except in our soul. Within us right now, within our present, we know time - we know it as a flow between past and future, between memory and expectation.
Augustine's meditation on time was not without a reason. He tried to understand how his conversion had taken place and how it was that the conversion experience had so changed his life. He realized that his memory of the past had changed. He could now see traces of God in the stealing of a pear in his youth, in the child he begot and which he named "God's Little Gift". Because of his conversion experience he could now testify to a new past - his whole space of experience had shifted. How could that be? Because he had gotten a radically new view of the future. His relationship with God had given him new hope. It had allowed him to commit his life as the bishop of Hippo. It gave him a new appreciation of the scriptures and opened up truths there that he had never thought before. It helped him to see that the disastrous collapse and destruction of Rome which was happening as he was teaching and writing was not the end of the world and it permitted him almost single-handedly to launch the West into the Middle Ages. For Augustine time within his soul had changed.
We have gathered this week to ponder and be baffled by time - our time. Our topic is our SCJ identity and mission in North America in a time of momentous change, as momentous, I dare say, as the collapse of antiquity in the fifth century. We need to make our testimony at the end of the 20th. How can we do this in our days together? To testify to our identity is to do what Augustine did. He saw that his identity was shaped by time: the memory of his past, the expectations for his future molded by his new commitments and the opportunity in his present to make a new start of things.
Our identities too are an amalgam of stories: stories of where we have been, stories of our hope and our commitments for tomorrow, and stories of what we can do today: our past, our future, our present. First, our identity are stories of our past: because our memories recall a common heritage; a shared testimony in the faith experience of Dehon. We have all known, as the English Canadian vision statement declares - the love of God in Christ Jesus. Our memories also recall that we three regions in North America have had moments in common, moments when our stories intersected with each other. We want to retell these stories this week. This past is also stories of our failures, of our sin, stories of our biases and prejudices that keep our past and our memories frozen. Secondly, our identity are stories of our future, because it asks us to what we have committed ourselves? What is the promise we have made that we are trying to live out? And how can these commitments and promises help us to shape a more common identity and mission in North America? Where would Dehon take us into the new century? What Christian vision might guide our hope and our faith? And, finally, our identity involves stories of our present: What are we really able to do together? What has the US province to do with the Anglophone and Francophone Canadians in shaping an identity and mission in North America? What are the down-to-earth initiatives that we can take together? Perhaps, they are nothing major, as yet. Perhaps, this is a time for renewal of acquaintance, for the creation of a new fellowship, - or a bit more. How much more? That will be determined as we listen to one another.
Three days to allow ourselves to be baffled by our experience of time, our past, our future, and our present moment of grace. The first day and a half we will invoke our present memories of the past; we will tell our origins and how we see ourselves; we will explore a bit the shifting world in which we live; we will examine the obstacles to our hope that have come from the injuries and disappointments of our past. On the second day we will look forward to our hopes, to our faith in God's doings in our midst, to dream ahead of ourselves of the great vision of a world enthralled with God's reign, to what we seek as a community together into the next century. On the third day we hope to come to some actions that we as North American SCJs might be able to undertake together across boundaries to express our identity and our mission.
We began with an invocation of Wisdom - for Lady Wisdom. We invoke her now upon this assembly. May wisdom come into our hearts, may her knowledge be pleasant to our soul, may prudence be our watch and may understanding guard us and guide us. (Prov.2.10-11) Amen.