U.S. Veterans Day
and the 147th birthday of Janet Stuart!

Dear Friends, Colleagues and Associates of the Society,

I want to provide for you a first hand account of what happened at the Society's Open Assembly November 3-7, though I am so aware that we actually had four different simultaneous gatherings with a lot of commonalities and a lot of differences. So this is a report of the whole colored by my participation with the Chicago, Omaha, Detroit, and St. Louis/St. Charles Area RSCJ.

Think first of all of the logistical nightmare of five days in four locations and three time zones, especially when we were trying to coordinate two teleconferences a day and all of the prayer, dialogue and voting in between. On the opening evening, for example, the East and Midwest groups retired after the teleconference, but it was only dinnertime in the West so they had a session which the rest of us would have after breakfast the next morning. The Open Assembly Task Force were truly amazing in working out all the variables and, with the exception of just one technological glitch, all went as scheduled.

We met in various surroundings. The Albany and Atherton gatherings took place at Kenwood and Oakwood with visiting RSCJ farmed out to communities and motels; the Houston gathering was at Duchesne and RSCJ lived at the Cenacle. The St. Louis meeting took place at a hotel near the airport. The highest number of votes (and thus of participants) was 268 which is 61.3% of the Province. Everywhere the prayer was deep and rich, the conversations were excellent and inclusive and “the still small voice” was heard. Everyone listened; everyone was heard. People who had never been to a chapter or representative assembly found themselves at microphones or giving reports on line. Trust had been built over so many months of participation in the three D planning process (dream, design, decide); it was tangible as we spent our days moving through the agenda. The whole process, according to emails I am receiving, gave people a sense of membership and ownership.

The final schedule of the meeting included 12 proposals for our conversation and vote. Others had been voted up or down in a straw polling process but these up or down votes were all ratified while we were together. In the end, we approved three of twelve proposals we discussed, and an additional 26 more from the previous straw polls were ratified. 29 proposals to implement are a LOT of proposals, but some are already in process, e.g. about mission advancement, real estate consolidation, prayer in common open to others, salary studies. Other proposals will take much more time, e.g. the several government proposals were voted down but the values embedded in them proved to be very important. Clearly we will need a continuing planning task force to help the Team sort out all the possibilities and prioritize how we will address them and over what period of time. As we were reminded by Jean Bartunek with her “organizational” hat on, the Assembly marked only the half-way point in the process. Now it all has to play out in our lives and be worked into a long-range plan - begun in the new year but also a mandate for in-coming leadership to be named in the next few months.

We also discussed a few spontaneous issues, a letter to President Bush regarding his priorities for a second term, participation in the process of decisions about Elder Care, a suggestion to have regular assemblies and some intermediate form of participation for those who wished-whether continuing the Improvement Teams or something on the Canadian “round table” model, or mission groups or reflection groups. The vehicle was not clear, but the desire for continuing participation was very strong. We must find a way to continue the momentum that has been built, despite our numbers and distances from one another. For sure, the process made us all more technologically savvy.

Since it is Janet Stuart's birthday, I choose her words to sum up the experience of the assembly for most if not all of us. “A bird does not sing because it has the answers; it sings because it has a song.” That was the miracle. In an odd way, it didn't really matter what the proposals were or that they weren't very polished or that their weight was very different one from the other. It didn't even matter so much that we seemed to interpret the “rules” for voting differently from one site to another. Comments were made; values were addressed; we grew from being together. It was as if we had heard Janet Stuart's word before we began:
Sing in every way you can….God gave song to give heart and courage and joy in life; if not with the voice, sing with the spirit and the understanding; sing by words of courage and hope, praise and thankfulness. Call out to one another by high thoughts and spiritual ambitions; these are the songs of our country.
Our Province is in the midst of re-imagining our lives, our mission and ministries, our health care, our retirement, our way of utilizing our depleted resources and how best to launch a development effort. We did not “sing” because we had the answers. We sang because we had a song and hope to continue to have a song and teach it to others for decades and decades to come.

As I write today it is a rainy, raw, mid-November St. Louis day. Since everything, in most of the Team's life at least, has been geared to preparing for the Open Assembly, it is something of a surprise to me that the holy days and holidays are nearly upon us. Blissfully, we now settle into the quiet days of Advent longing and hope and expectation. During these days I will keep each of you, our dear friends and colleagues, in my heart and my prayer in thanksgiving for all of your support and your continuing friendship. I count on each of you to pray in thanksgiving and hope for our Province and for the new song being sung!

In the Heart of Christ,


Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ
Provincial