It’s a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning in El Paso—currently, only 42 degrees Fahrenheit, but the intense light of a clear desert sky promises a warmer day than yesterday’s overcast gloom and cold, with a constant 38 degrees at all hours. Already I can open wide the back door of the house (the Columban Mission Center at Magoffin Avenue) and let sunlight into the kitchen, and open all the honeycombed window shades designed to block out all unwanted heat in the hotter months.
We’re all just back since a few days ago from Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Columban missioners and associates from all over the U.S. met and talked and sang and prayed together for five days straight. At one point, chatting with another priest who had worked many years abroad, I remembered a wonderful insight that first burst into my world in my early years in Chile: it doesn’t matter whether you actually get anything done in a meeting, since just the fact that people are together and expressing themselves and relating to others is already a huge achievement. In the case of the very poor, in fact, it is positively liberating to be counted and have a senses of one’s own dignity and power to effect change, just by overcoming shyness and the heavy weight of being discounted by society—being “nobodied”, as a poet once wrote—and experiencing one’s personhood.
This puts a positive light on any gathering, and although the issues that were important to some of us never made it through to the end, as proposals for the General Assembly of delegates of the Columban family throughout the world—scheduled for August 26th through September 23rd, 2012—we could be happy that we raised the flags of Ecological Justice, or Columban Spirituality, or Financial Transparency for a while, and went down in glorious flames to the two most important aspects for the U.S. Region: a Strategic Plan for our mission, with targets and strategies and deadlines and measurable goals, and, secondly, a special call to include three relatively young delegates at the 2012 General Assembly.
These three “New Members” at the General Assembly, not elected by their respective Regions to attend but appointed by the Superior General, would attend and participate in recognition of their age group and their ethnicity (ordained graduates from the newer formation programs in Fiji—including priests from Tonga— Philippines, Korea, Peru and Chile). The value of this measure would be to ensure a fairer participation by the men who will be affected by the decisions of this assembly in the future. Most of the delegates to the 2012 General Assembly, realistically speaking, won’t be around any more in another ten or 20 years, so even though the older Columbans may outnumber the younger Columbans heavily, their voice and vote must be tempered, it was felt, by a greater presence of the relatively younger, and less European/North American, members.
The week in Scottsdale was rich in other ways, too. Fr. Gary Riebe-Estrella of the Divine Word Missionaries spoke engagingly and at length about interculturality, a word that will produce a Spell-Check red squiggly underline in Word-formatted texts. “Differences, not divisions, are natural to us,” he pointed out, at one point. How to turn differences into something valuable, instead of into divisions, is a major challenge of living with people from cultures distinct from one’s own. Fr. Riebe-Estrella gave us not only the theory and theology for valuing a variety of cultures—roughly categorized into either individualist or organic cultures—but also practical clues and structures to better acknowledge the contributions of distinct, inherited manners of thinking and acting in a single community.
Our own Columban priest and Irish academic, Fr. Sean Dwan, picked up smoothly from where Fr. Riebe-Estrella left off, and encouraged us with questions that we could bring home with us after this assembly adjourned.
Specially-invitedd young adults also accompanied us and spoke in an innovative “fish-bowl”- structured meeting on how they perceived and appreciated Columban mission. Most of us found the dynamic energizing and positive. “If nothing else comes out of this Regional Assembly,” one priest said openly, “this experience made the trip all worthwhile.”
The Franciscan retreat house that hosted us brought us into close contact with the beautiful desert setting and biosphere, including hundreds of rabbits, thousands of small, white crystals strewn throughout the natural setting and many varieties of cactus. I used the swimming pool during some of our breaks on the warmer days, feeling very invigorated and relaxed afterwards. Mosaics, statues and dozens of pieces of artwork also left us contemplative and moved over the week, and the food was abundant and flavorful. Chocolate-chip cookies appeared for every afternoon break!
Part retreat, part vacation, part thoughtful lectures, part family reunion, but mostly work, I delighted in my first U.S. Regional Assembly. Now back in my country for nearly three years, it was a milestone in my process of reinsertion and reverse “culture shock” after a long time in Chile. I am grateful and happy for the experience, and now return to my job and life in El Paso with new energies and a feeling of integration into the Columban mission in the U.S., which in the end is the mission of Christ.
