I am delighted to contribute this piece for mercy@live. As most of you know, I spent ten years as the Director of the Mercy office at the United Nations before assuming my new role as Director of the Partnership for Global Justice, a coalition of 125 congregations worldwide.
When I reflected on this article – about what I might want to say and you might want to hear – I thought that most of you know about the UN and what it tries to do, and how we as members are free to visit and learn about UN agencies. We at the Partnership believe that education is key, and so we provide workshops, seminars and outreach. We design individual programmes to meet members’ needs by educating, advocating, animating and agitating, bearing in mind that words and statements do not feed hungry people!
And so, reflecting on the bigger picture, one of the greatest lessons I have learned while participating and engaging in this world centre for negotiating, is the importance of working and relating from the perspective of a values base. I belong to the values caucus, a group of international advocates who work from the ethos of asking:
- How can we stand in solidarity with those suffering on the underside of history?
- How do we support people, most of whom live in a world of obscene disparity?
- How do we learn to cope in an age when disruption is around every corner, by way of globally-connected economic systems, inevitable super storms, and technology’s endless reinvention?
- How can we find meaning and health amidst the chaos?
- As we approach the 2015 watershed, how can we be about “bread and ballots”, as Nelson Mandela so famously put it?
What I have learned during my tenure at the UN is that failure is intrinsic, healthy, normal and necessary to most complex systems. More than ever, the world needs ways of sensing emerging disruptions that encourage cooperation, rather than division. The world needs thinkers who view thinking as a creative process.
Sr. Deirdre speaking at the International Day for the Eradication of Proverty
Some 10 years ago, we would probably have marvelled that a butterfly could flap its wings on one side of the planet and cause a hurricane on the other side. Now, we live in awareness that every butterfly is connected to every hurricane and that the ecological system, the economic system, the geopolitical system, the climate system, the food security system are all connected to each other in ways that cause very complex and highly unpredictable nonlinear outcomes. Knowing all of this invites us to a place where we try to find equilibrium in a planet that is out of balance; and that means protecting people, especially the vulnerable, from the shocks and disruptions that are the hallmark of the 21st century.
The financial crisis of 2008 was a wake-up call for all of us. At every level, we need transparency, participation and accountability. Over the course of the past several years, there has been a shift in language and behaviours. I note the emergence of a new kind of dialogue here at the UN, in which there is more talk about risk adaptation and implementation of all the statements and words written, and less about keeping the solemn promises that have been made! I see and hear it at discussions where government folk, corporate leaders and social innovators have begun to talk about the same thing – not using the same language, but with the same kind of drift.
Group at an International Conference in the UN
And I have also noted a shift within myself. I specifically remember the moment. It happened in March 2007. I was in Cambodia, where I had helped to raise funding to build a small school in a rural area outside Phnom Penh. We visited with some of the villagers after the school opening. The dwelling houses were very simple – thatched roof, dirt floor. The woman who welcomed us was the local leader in her village. She was someone who did not have access to a lot of resources or education, but she was a deeply resilient woman who valued the school and the potential it might offer to a new generation of youngsters. Gratitude radiated from within her for the preciousness of life and the beauty of creation. I will never forget the gift she shared with me – the view of a mountain outside her pane-less window. Suddenly I knew this gifting had bound us together by a web of mutuality and shared destiny. And yet, I do not think it was by accident that she found me. There was too much synchronicity in the events that led to that moment. My Mercy soul was ignited with a freshness and freedom to respond and do what I could to break open the Gospel wherever I found myself, challenging structures that exclude and claiming the future we desire by acting for it now. I knew too what I had read for many years: that the vantage point of marginal people is a place of encounter with God.
One of the best ways I can follow through is with young people. This is both a gift and a responsibility. Many high school and college groups follow our Global Citizenship programme. In the youth of today there is a bias towards action. This is particularly evident in the Girls’ Education focus, Educating Girls To Educate Girls, a project that has touched many lives through the schools we have built and the scholarships we have provided. One of the most gratifying stories I heard recently has come out of this programme. Mary had just finished a Masters degree in Engineering at University College, Dublin. She had also entered and won a number of beauty competitions. But something within was calling: “I attended Thornhill College in Derry and we were involved with a Mercy Action project through Sister Deirdre. What she told us never left me. I knew I had to do something with this degree, so now I am off to India to work with the HOPE Foundation. For me this is payback time.”
Sr. Deirdre Mullan
In his poem “Ithaka”, Constantinos Cavafy advises seafarers to make their journey a long one and to be old when they arrive at the island, for it is the island that gives us the reason for the journey; without it, we would never set out. Jesus’ invitation to the rich young man to “follow me” has been very much misunderstood. If we think that Jesus was simply repeating Isaiah’s dictum: “If you divest yourself of wealth and give it to the afflicted, all will somehow be perfect and just, it is the second part – to follow him – that produces within each of us radical possibilities and consequences. To follow him is to find that something for which it is worth laying down our lives – on a daily basis. And it is not just money that we have to hand over; it is ourselves, our safety, our security and comfortable compliance, and our complicity.
Yes, the world is in a mess, but we each can do our little part to make it better in the place we find ourselves today. Our task is to do something, to count for something, one person at a time.
Sr. Deirdre’s Publications
Deirdre Mullan RSM, PhD
Northern Province, Sisters of Mercy
Executive Director, Partnership for Global Justice
United Nations,
New York
To find out more about the Partnership go to: www.partnershipforglobaljustice.com/
Northern Province
