Ref.: 02/218

To the Society

Dear Sisters,

The 150th anniversary of Philippine‘s death gives us a special opportunity to thank God for the life of this great woman, Madeleine Sophie’s friend and our sister, whose “heart of oak“ was a heart on fire, and to spend some time looking at what her life has to offer us by way of inspiration and example. An anniversary is a time to share stories, especially with the next generations, so that the heritage is not lost but is held in our common memory. Some of us may not know her well. Some may have been put off by her personal austerity that might seem to be the practice of another age. Others might be tempted to romanticize Philippine and project onto her attitudes which, as a woman of her time, she could not have had. But having said that, I think her life has much to say to us today.

Let us take a moment to recall, with the help of our imagination, some of the key moments of her life: her happy childhood in Grenoble in the large household which included her Perier cousins... her adolescent vocation and “elopement“ to the Visitation monastery of Sainte Marie d’en Haut... the Revolution and the closing of the monastery... visiting prisoners and the sick, teaching religion to children... the family move to a country house in Grâne... the failed attempt to re-establish the monastic community...

And then she heard about Madeleine Sophie and a new little group of women whose vision of religious life stirred something in her own heart and gave her the hope that perhaps her dream of bringing God’s love beyond the sea might be realized. She begged to be sent. She did not miss an opportunity to beg...

Then the waiting... and waiting... trying to find God in the “now” while Sophie, sympathetic to and sharing her desire could not imagine how to accomplish it. And then... YES ! Two acts of faith embraced and supported each other. Such a risk to go so far, and such a risk to send this forty-nine year old and four “professes jeunes “. What formation did she have to enable her to attract and form others? She had the one thing necessary: a passionate love of Jesus, fired by the inextricable union - the single movement - of deep contemplation and ardent missionary zeal. That was enough. All the events of her life united her more and more deeply with God who had taken hold of her heart at the age of fifteen and would never let it go.

When Philippine left for America on March 2, 1818 the Constitutions were barely three years old and would not be approved by the Church for another eight years. From her subsequent life we know that she was an embodiment of them. How often she must have prayed over them. We can imagine her pausing especially over the lines:

The spirit of the Society is essentially based
upon prayer and the interior life, since we cannot
cannot glorify the adorable Heart of Jesus worthily, save inasmuch as we apply ourselves to study Its interior dispositions, in order to unite and conform ourselves to them. (330. I.)

Therefore with regard to poverty, if they consider it in the Heart of Jesus, they will have no difficulty in attaching themselves to it; remembering that so great was His esteem and love for that virtue, that he chose to be born, to live, and die, in the midst of poverty. They must cherish it as their mother... (339. X.)

Though all the souls confided to the care of the spouses of the Heart of Jesus have apparently the same claim to their affection, nevertheless there are some for whom they are allowed to have a special attraction, namely, the children of the poor who come to learn from them the knowledge of salvation of which the greater number would be deprived in the midst of their families... Their poverty, which makes them so closely resemble Jesus Christ, will give them additional claims to the tenderness and zeal of the spouses of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
(350. XXI.)

What a journey it was!... the peril of the storms... the stench of the hold. . . the stifling atmosphere of the cabins... seasickness... the Rebecca becalmed off Cuba (could Philippine have imagined the Society implanted there forty years later?)... passengers and crew alike in admiration of the little group’s fervor and interior spirit... Philippine realizing her responsibility for the other four who were risking as much as she... and then the arrival in New Orleans on May 29th, the feast of the Sacred Heart, and the symbolic gesture of kneeling to kiss the earth... the welcome by the Ursuline sisters, with no sign of any instructions from Bishop Dubourg... finally, the 40-day trip up the Mississippi River and... the next of many deceptions... not St. Louis but St. Charles!

There were the hardships: physical deprivations, illnesses, the difficulty learning English, the severity of chaplains, the lack of spiritual accompaniment. Philippine felt her own inadequacy as superior and frequently asked to be replaced, only to be told that she was to continue to bear the responsibility for the Society’s life in America. Eugenie Audé, much more physically attractive than Philippine enjoyed a success in Grand Coteau that Philippine never experienced. How did she feel? In 1827 she wrote to Sophie: “1 really ought to be replaced by a person who knows how to attract people and make converts. Under my guidance everything will stagnate...”

She must have remembered often Sophie’s admonition on the eve of the departure from Paris, that they guard union among themselves and inviolable attachment to the Society in France as the surest safeguards in their efforts to glorify God. Day after day she gave herself tirelessly with courage, patience, perseverance, determination, humility, indefatigable prayer. . . but we know that she had her limitations as well. Her sanctity was not ready made.

And the Indians? Her desire to live among them grew ever stronger, but again, how long she waited, never knowing if one day her dream would be realized. Finally, on the 9th of July 1841, at the age of seventy-one, in failing health, and after a grueling ten-day journey she arrived in Sugar Creek. Her introduction by Père Verhaegen to the Potawatomi must have amazed them: “Children, here is a woman who, for 35 years, has been pleading with God to come among you”. After all the longing, the waiting, she stayed little more than a year.
While I could dwell on many different aspects of her life, I have chosen instead to reflect on what she might have learned during that one year in Sugar Creek in the midst of the Potawatomi. It is not unreasonable to think that during that one year they taught her, and that for the next ten years until her death, in the quiet seclusion of St. Charles, where solitude was often her daily bread, she must have pondered it all in her heart. She wrote very little during that time and there is no sure way of knowing what went on in her during those ten years, but I think it is safe to say that what she learned was probably similar to what our sisters who have had experience with indigenous people have learned in more recent years, and so this letter is an opportunity to share, however briefly, some of those values.

As you know, in reflecting on my recent visits to Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, I had an intuition that indigenous people have something to teach us, and so in Information (#141, June 2002) I asked RSCJs who have had any kind of connection or experience with indigenous people, “be it family or friendship, direct service, collaboration or advocacy”: What can we as a Society learn from their values and their wisdom? My “hunch“ was that despite differences from one part of the world to another, from one tribe to another, from one century to another, indigenous people have many values in common and that many of those values, which have been lived for thousands of years, are what we today would call “evangelical” or “counter-cultural”; values that we, living in the world of the twenty-first century, need to reverence and incorporate into our lives.

I was overwhelmed with the responses to my request:
the number, the carefulness, the delight in being able to share something so significant in their lives. Responses came from all the continents, and in greater numbers from Latin America (ten countries) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and the Central Pacific). Besides personal reflections, people sent articles, books, art, poetry... I have the beginnings of a doctoral dissertation! So the challenge is to distill something that will be of help to all of us. The themes are amazingly interrelated and I have been left with an image of wholeness.

What came through over and over again in the responses is that indigenous people have what I would call a mystical connection with the land. There is a sense that the earth is sacred, that God dwells everywhere, that there is no sacred/secular separation, that contact with the land is a primary spiritual experience. The land is Earth Mother, Pachamama, source of nourishment and shelter for the people, a gift to be cared for and passed on to posterity as a sacred trust.

Intimately connected with this deep belonging and affinity to the earth is a sense of being one community. One person said, “To be a person is not to stand alone, but to be with one’s people, both the living and the dead-ancestors”. And another wrote: “No person may stand out from a group. It is always the group which is acknowledged”. There is a natural instinct to share everything, even, in one case, dividing an egg into sixteen parts - to the great shame of an RSCJ who had divided hers only in half... If human beings belong to the land, the land does not belong to some but is the dwelling place and nurturer of everyone. It is easy to see how indigenous people, having no sense of private ownership, have been exploited by governments and economic interests greedy for oil, wood, gold, diamonds, and other natural resources. The consequent struggle of indigenous people today for their land rights as well as for the preservation of their cultural identity, while necessary for their livelihood and survival, is a tragic commentary on the state of our world, and so foreign to their natural instincts! So too the trend toward more and more privatization is incomprehensible to those for whom “ownership” of the land and its resources is unthinkable. Despite this bleak reality, the Guaraní dream of a Tierra sin males, a land without evil, continues to instill hope into the struggle of indigenous peoples.

It is only recently, and only because we are suffering the consequences, that as a world community we have begun to realize how increasingly damaged our planet is becoming, how distorted our values are. Although many justice and peace groups have added “integrity of creation” to their title and to their agenda, we are still far from really understanding the perilous situation of our planet. We have some prophets among us who have probably often felt like voices crying in the wilderness. What do we as a Society and each one of us personally need to do to give this issue the attention it deserves? Some of our provinces are in countries that are exploiting the countries of other provinces. Can we see this issue as a challenge to the way we live poverty? The wisdom of indigenous people can guide us in our search.

Another striking attitude of many indigenous people is their contemplative listening: to the earth, to silence, to the word of the other. It is a kind of “praying always“, “a reciprocity with God.“ Some Australian aboriginal peoples call it “Dadirri“: an inner deep listening and quiet, a still awareness that recognizes the deep spring that is inside of us “We call on it and it calls to us...” For some this listening is linked to the sense of community as in moments of decision making. One indigenous people in Argentina never votes or anything. They take as much time as is needed to read consensus, and that implies deep listening. We know that the Potawatomi called Philippine ‘ “Quah-kah-ka-num-ad” “Woman-Who-Prays-Always”. She was unable to speak their language but she could observe them in silence. Have we ever thought that perhaps she learned something about prayer from them? And what should be our attitudes in face of a twenty first century indigenous reality that is far from simple? What can we learn from our sisters who are the Society in the mids of the complexity of the indigenous world? One response touched me particularly:

What I have learned from my almost 10 years of direct collaboration with indigenous Maya peoples is first of all to respect them fully as persons, not to be tempted by the inclination to be patronizing and condescending. Do not romanticize or idealize them, see them as fully human and fully limited by what being human can be. And to listen - to give time to really listen, to accept the silence until the words or other communication comes from them, and to accept, really accept, their way of being and their way of thinking and their way of living.

Accept their desire to be “modern” and to have what others have, accept their desire to be indigenous while also being part of larger society, accept their struggle to understand what is happening to them, and be with them, sometimes in silence, but always with love.

What did Philippine DO during that one year in Sugar Creek? In fact, she did very little. Lucille Mathevon wrote to Elizabeth Galitzin in November 1842: “All she can do now is pray and knit. That is all! We are doing everything we can for her who has done everything for the Society. It is only normal that we surround her with every possible care in her old age”.

Finally, another value that we can learn from indigenous people and from the life of Philippine herself is the value of our older years. In a world that idolizes youth culture and is terrified of growing old, indigenous people - and Philippine -- can teach us the inestimable value of BEING, not just DOING, of not only reverencing our elders but, when we enter into the last years of our lives, of reverencing ourselves. Several of you who are elderly have asked me to write a letter to the elderly of the Society, “about the values of this age...”

Although at nearly sixty-three I am closer to old age than I am to the years of my youth, I am lacking the experience of feeling old and all that accompanies old age. I can speak only of my admiration for the elderly RSCJs I have met in each province I have visited: women who have learned to let go of what they can no longer do so as to continue doing what they can do; women who are inspiring the younger generation with their wisdom and allowing them to shape a Society they themselves will never live to see; women who have experienced that “sickness is a gift of God as well as health“ (1815 Constitutions); women who are relishing this “most contemplative period of our life” (Constitutions # 116). In the name of all your younger sisters I thank you for the witness of your lives, and count on your living our mission to the end.

I think a fitting end to this letter is a poem written by Sharon Karam, rscj, and published at the time of Philippine’s canonization. Though Philippine had been gone from Sugar Creek for ten years they remembered her still, as some reverence her memory to this day.

May this celebration of Philippine’s legacy unite all of us, old and young, wherever we are giving our lives, in humble gratitude for all that she has been to the Society throughout its history. Mariado and I will be making the visit of the province of France in November and will have the joy of celebrating Philippine’s feast in Grâne with members of her family. You will all be remembered very specially.

With much love,

Clare Pratt, rscj
Superior General