The theme for Assembly 2010, which took place in Chicago in June, was Formed and Transformed in Mercy. Leading the opening ritual Rosaline O’Connor highlighted the goals of our assembly:

• to deepen our understanding of Mercy
• to strengthen the sense of aliveness among us
• to find our life at a deeper level; to be in touch to the God within
• to clarify the next phase of our journey
• to affirm, to challenge and to build on the interconnectedness that we hold in our lives

and she linked them with lines from A Message from the Hopi Elders which speak about this being ‘the Hour’ and ‘this could be a good time’. She asked us to reflect on what would make our time together a good time for each of us.

A very impressive ‘River of Mercy’ flowed through the center of the room and like Lydia and her companions in Acts 16 we came there to pray. Indeed we returned to the river many times during our days together. We recalled John O’Donohue talking of a river:

‘From source to sea, it is one unbroken song of flow – ever changing, yet always one’. He goes on to talk of the silence, grace and elegance of the river and then he says; ‘If we could but find a rhythm of being which could balance a contemplative grace, a poetry of motion and an accompanying stillness and silence, our pilgrimage through this world would flow in beauty through the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment. It would continue to hold a clear flow-line between the memory and depth of the earth and the eternal fluency of the ocean, and never loose the passion of flowing towards the ever new promise of the future’.

Rosaline mentioned that in the past year or so we as a Congregation have walked through some of “the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment”. She invited us to pray that in our Assembly Days we may find the rhythm of being, the balance, the flow, the presence, the stillness, the God within.

On the first day and a half of the Assembly, Marie Chin rsm, former Leader of American Sisters of Mercy spoke on the vows. Her words were prophetic and inspiring and they invited us to look at the vows in a new way. She described Poverty as a habit of the heart that calls for true accountability – the willingness to care for the well being of the whole.  Marie views Celibacy as inviting us to create a Sabbath heart which leads us to delve deep into God’s passion for life. She spoke of Obedience as highlighting the need to listen deeply to the heartbeat of the world which is relationship and interdependence.

She encouraged us to listen with the heart to the silence, the imposed quiet and stillness of winter, remembering that as David Whyte put it:

‘What is precious inside us
does not care
to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence. 
What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need’.

Marie views the vows as elegant dynamic, healing choices, forming a pattern of wholeness. She reminded us that God is constantly breaking through the encrustations of our old, taken for granted stories and inviting us to tell new stories that reveal Gods’ own reality and desire for creation.

Following Marie Chin’s input, Donna Fyffe, our Assembly Facilitator, led us in reflections, discussions and prayer on our Mercy life and on retirement and ageing as part of that life. She spoke of ageing as a time of grace and transformation and as an inevitable reality. Donna suggested that we need to:

• challenge our ways of looking at the inescapable reality of growing older.
• be aware that persons are more than their achievements.
• consider age as a ‘terrible beauty’, a holy threshold upon the boundary of the soul – an opening into God.

She raised our awareness of our Mercy spirituality and our relationship with God. She encouraged us to believe that our deep knowledge of God empowers us to be bearers of hope, to be bearers of a new story. We reflected on the new story that is coming to birth in our lives and in our universe at this time. We also considered the part we might play in this new story.

Thanking Miriam Kerrisk at the closing session Rosaline said, ‘Over the past year you followed with interest every step we took on our journey toward Assembly. Your presence with us these days has been very special for us. Your capacity to be with us, to hear, to reflect on what you hear and to reframe it in the context of the bigger picture of the Congregation is a real gift to us. Your encouragement and your affirmation continually invite us to be our best selves.’

Rosaline went on to say, ‘as we draw Assembly 2010 to a close I am reminded of a verse from Rainer Maria Rilke called ‘The Hour is Striking’

‘The hour is striking 
so close above us,so clear and sharp,
that all our senses ring with it.
we feel it now: there’s a power in us
to grasp and give shape to our world’

The hour was indeed striking close above us, the hour when we left Chicago asking ourselves the question we have at the end of our Chapter statement: ‘How will this change my life?

 

Mary Divilly rsm
US Province