Calls (part 2)

From collaboration to reciprocity

We are called

• to collaborate in reciprocity with all the people with whom we share life and mission.

Collaboration lived in reciprocity is for us a conviction, a challenge and a choice.

We discover, live and announce God's love, which is at the heart of our charism. This impels us to work together and with others in partnership, to foster life and to contribute to the building of an alternative society. The globalized world challenges us constantly and calls us anew to recognize our responsibility for and interdependence with all of creation.

A way of being, a way of doing

Collaboration occurs at the level of our being and our doing, and it implies reciprocity. Collaboration is recognition of the dignity of persons and of peoples, it implies welcoming and sharing what each one is and offers. It requires attitudes of trust and mutual support, vulnerability and openness. It recognizes the need to learn from others and requires flexibility and imagination in discovering new possibilities together.

Collaboration implies team building, delegating and assuming our co- responsibility for the common good, working on common projects and developing together new processes in our service of education.

Strategies

1. To widen our vision of religious life and open our communities so that we can share our life and our mission with lay people and other religious congregations.
2. To form ourselves and others so that collaboration is carried out in reciprocal relationships characterized by:
   1. self-knowledge and acceptance of self and others,
   2. work on common projects,
   3. reflection, interchange and celebration.
3. To intensify our active participation as women in the Church and in civil society.
4. To create a communication network among those working with Associates, partners in mission and similar groups.
5. To encourage solidarity and exchanges among different ministries and projects, making use of networks that already exist.
6. To strive for a better interaction among our school networks, projects for the excluded and popular education networks.

    

7. To join forces, make proposals and take action with alumnae/i, parents, friends, in common projects for the benefit of persons and groups who are the victims of marginalization or injustice.

From meeting to dialogue of cultures

We are called:

• to respond to God present in the heart of the world
• to expand our understanding of what it means to belong to a multicultural community
• to learn to live interculturality among ourselves, with others and in all that we do.

We, as an international community made up of diverse cultures: social, economic, linguistic, generational, ethnic and national, recognize that we have not always acknowledged and appreciated the richness of this diversity, either in our world or in our communities.

We are ready to take a step forward as we realize with greater conviction that we must expand our understanding of what it means to belong to a multicultural community, for this is a reality that confronts us in the Society and in the world today.

Called to be "women of communion, compassion and reconciliation", it is not enough to appreciate our multiculturality. We are impelled to enter into the reality of the other, to allow our boundaries to be expanded in truly reciprocal and hospitable relationships.

To participate in the process of transformation, we must learn to live interculturality among ourselves, with others and in all that we do. The process of interculturality will allow us to open ourselves to the Spirit present in each culture and to engage in a dialogue that will enable us, together, to celebrate the banquet of God, where each one has a place, sons and daughters of God.

Today globalization dominates our world vision. We believe that living interculturality could help us participate in a process of transformation which breaks through some of the negative dynamics of globalization that create particular burdens for poor, marginalized and excluded people.

Since Vatican Council II, we have been learning as a congregation to value our own local cultures and to live out our mission in response to the needs of these realities. Recent Chapter documents have called us to greater sensitivity to the movements of migrant people, to the need for inculturation of the gospel in our respective realities and to make our internationality "Good News for the poor".

Today we hear a further call to justice and conversion. We commit ourselves to recognize, value and open ourselves to the diversity of cultures in our world and particularly among ourselves. We are challenged to live in an attitude of reconciliation. At the heart of all of our relationships we are called to be transformed and to transform.

In our desire to know deeply the richness of our diversity, to accept our differences, and strive towards reconciliation, we need to address the relationship between interculturality and language. To be called to live interculturality is to sensitize ourselves to the significance of language in the life of each person and each culture. Language is more than words. It is a complex of signs, of which words are only one kind, that shape our identities.

A person for whom there is no space to speak is not merely silenced, but is disempowered, is in some sense effaced. We are called to work to collaborate in creating this space. Cultures that overvalue words are called to learn from cultures which balance speech and non-verbal communication in different ways. We are challenged to make this a reality within the Society as well as within the world in which we work.

Interculturality must be rooted in our daily lives. It begins "at home", by accepting oneself and others, by becoming more open, more loving and more caring in one's own community. We wish to move towards greater interculturality in our communities and provinces, and in the way we live our mission.

Strategies

1. To work individually, in communities and in our provinces so as to know and appreciate better our own cultures, and to become more aware of the many cultures to which each one belongs.
2. To analyze our cultures, opening ourselves to the challenge of the gospel.
3. To be open to new insights about our values and prejudices, including those that are entrenched in the language we use.
4. To initiate or collaborate in processes at community, provincial and inter-provincial level to help us open up our histories to reconciliation
5. To welcome and celebrate the diverse cultures in our communities, workplaces, provinces and countries.
6. To be with and support persons from other cultures who come to live and work with us and help them to enter into the new reality without losing their own identity.
7. To collaborate with groups and organizations that work with refugees and migrants.
8. To open ourselves to faiths and traditions that we encounter and to educate ourselves to live in dialogue with them.
9. To give priority to the study of languages and commit ourselves to learn the languages of the country and culture where we are sent.

Spirituality

We are convinced: that our lives, given in love, are the strongest expression of our spirituality.

The spiritual journey that bound Religious of the Sacred Heart together across the world during this bicentennial year has engaged us in a single movement of sharing, deepening and communicating our experience of the Heart of Christ among ourselves and with others. During the days of this Chapter the journey continued. The Spirit moved among us and made us recognize that our spirituality is an urgent answer to today's world. We became deeply convinced that only by contemplating Christ's presence and action in the world we find the strength and generosity to claim these calls and to live them with integrity. Thus will we respond to the needs of our world today: the thirst for God, the hunger for justice, the desire for equality, the longing for meaning and the ache to belong, the very needs we ourselves experience.

We have also found that the calls of this Chapter have challenged us profoundly to rethink and re-express our spirituality in the years ahead. We ask ourselves:

• What will participation in God's work of transformation demand of us?
• How will we be challenged and changed by our collaboration with others?
• How will the richness of our many cultures and spiritual traditions enlarge our experience of God and the ways of God's actions in ourselves and our world?
• How will a deeper commitment to justice, peace and the integrity of creation transform our hearts?
• How will we explore and dialogue about the different theologies among us?
• And what new language will be adequate to capture and communicate these new intuitions?

We are convinced as a Chapter that our lives, given in love, are the strongest expression of our spirituality. Living these Chapter calls day by day will yield a new language, whether in words, art or symbol, to express our spirituality of the Open Heart of Christ in the Church and for the world.

The journey continues.