Prophetic Voices

As baptised persons, each one of us is called to be prophet, king and priest. How do we realise being prophets in the Dominican Order, in the Church, in the world today in this year 2004 ? Do we actually want to be prophets ? Or are all conferences and meetings with the theme “Prophetic something” more an expression of us expecting others to turn up as prophets and lead us out of some sort of lethargy ? A cry for help or a cry for someone else to take on the burden of being Christian and prophet and why not also, Dominican and prophet ? Someone else, but not me. We know what it takes to be a prophet, so do we want it? 

We must in honesty ask ourselves why we are talking so much about prophets, prophesying and so on today. What sort of prophetic word are we thirsting for ? Is it a prophetic word we really want, or are we rather craving for consolation ? Sometimes when I hear religious people talking about modern prophets it is more an expression for nostalgia, that is, how religious life looked like in the late sixties or during the seventies. I guess that a younger generation in religious life doesn’t consider those events as prophetic, at the best they see them as a healthy protest, a tidying up of religious life.

So what is a prophetic voice ? Let me make two quotations. First, one from the letter to the Order on itinerancy from 2003 by the present Master of the Dominicans, Brother Carlos Aspiroz Costa. 

33. However, we have been called to be preachers, to be prophets. To be a prophet does not mean to know or to foretell the future, having it clear, and offering security. God calls the prophets to read history in the light of his Word; to read the Word feeling the pulse of what is happening.

To be able to read history, the signs of our time, is to be realistic, to dare to see the world and our fellow human beings as they are and not as we might want them to be. A prophet would be a good sociologist, and why not also a good pragmatic politician ? It is a person who lives in the here and now and is neither prone to nostalgia nor to a dreaming of a future that he knows nothing about and that probably never will materialise anyway. A very down to earth person who wouldn’t care much about his identity, he simply is what he is. Perhaps that is what Brother Timothy Radcliffe says in his speech The Identity of Religious Today to the U.S. Conference of Major Superiors for Men (CMSM) in 1996.

When we religious discuss our identity, you can be pretty sure that before long the word "prophetic" will occur. And this is understandable. Our vows are in such a direct contradiction with the values of our society that it makes sense to talk of them as prophetic of the Kingdom. I am delighted when other people use that term of us, but I am reluctant for religious to claim it for ourselves. It could carry a hint of arrogance: "We are the prophets." Often we are not. And I suspect that true prophets would hesitate to claim that title for themselves. Like Amos, they tend to reject the claim and say "I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet." I prefer to think that we are those who leave behind the usual signs of identity.

So, a real prophet would not claim that title or role. This person’s life-project is just to become the vocation he or she is called to. This person would cease to be prophetic the moment he or she starts thinking of himself or herself in that way. Being prophetic is not to matter to oneself. So we can all be a prophetic voice if we forget about ourselves and walk the way God calls us to without nostalgia and useless dreaming.

When the prioresses general met in Caleruega recently, the theme was  RETURN TO CALERUEGA, GATHER AT THE WELL, AND PROPHESY! Fine, but did they think of the fact that a prophet is never accepted in his home-town, still less among his relations! If we all like what they said when they came back from Caleruega, they can hardly have been prophesying! But then, what did they do ? Aren’t we all too often preaching words that are pleasing us, rather than challenging us ? Aren’t we all too often happy with what we already are or have obtained ? Do we actually want to move on as the biblical prophets always did ? And how aware are we of the last beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount ? Blessed are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for  you reward will be great in heaven; this is how they persecuted the prophets before you.

I guess that a bit of caution is called for!

If a prophet is someone who definitely can read the signs of the time and also someone who rather would not be a prophet, or at least he is not concerned of that identity, his only aim being to do justice and walk humbly in the face of God, what would we be hearing from him or her today ? One thing he will not be talking so much about is the example of people in our own past history, the Dominican brothers and sisters in our tradition. That is, he will not talk about them if that would give us an excuse not to walk our own way of sanctification. He will talk about them if their life-style can encourage our own walking. But on the whole, God’s living Word and the Sacraments are normally sufficient to make us faithful to our vocation. The conditions for the saints in the past and for us are exactly the same. So what would a prophetic voice today focus our eyes on ? And what challenge would that voice be for the Church and the Dominican Order today ?

Let us first ask ourselves when we feel most disturbed, and by whom we feel most disturbed in our everyday ordinary life today. I myself, at least, am disturbed when someone, it could be my sisters, the personnel for which I am responsible, a “lost soul” from anywhere, is either calling me on the phone or knocking at my door when I am preparing lectures, writing statements or articles or making the accounts or simply doing anything that demands my attention. This irritating knocking at the door also tends to happen when I am overloaded with work, especially when it comes to my own personal projects. It is as if God would send this other person to create trouble, at least for me. The result of this being that I am excusing my irritation because of stress!

Yes, God is sending this other person to me in order to change my time-table, in order to break up my projects and to call my attention to that this is God’s Creation. I am pretty sure I am not alone with this experience at a personal level. God is desperately trying to make me look at Him through this fellow human being calling on my attention and He will continue to kill my time to make me turn away from “my” projects to the vocation He has in mind for me.

Now, this is also happening on a more political, global level, with all the “others”, who legally or illegally, are crossing our borders and calling on our attention. This “other” disturbing me, or these “others” disturbing our nations are the persons who for a variety of reasons have left their homes, their families, their countries and ended up at our doorstep. He or she is in some way the living continuity of the biblical prototype who is digging up his roots in Ur and setting out on a journey to a promised land. He or she may have left misery, escaped persecution or just be searching for a better life. He or she is calling on my attention. He or she is actually challenging our political view on universalism. What concrete consequences does this fundamental Christian concept of universalism have for us today ?

As Christians we are on a personal level called to a brotherhood, or to avoid the gender association, to a biblical friendship, that John is talking about in his Gospel, and this friendship is transcending our cultures and ethnic belongings. On an ecclesiological level, as well as on a political level, we are called to universalism where excluding state-borders also should be transcended.

Where is the prophetic voice hurting us, hurting our lethargy, challenging our status quo in the Church as well as in the Order and in our political societies today ? Isn’t it this “other” coming from somewhere else disturbing our time and our selfish projects ? One thing is clear, this prophetic voice of the other being a disturber is definitely someone who is not very well treated to say the least, most often he or she will be persecuted by our state-authorities, so he or she will fulfill one of the criteria being a prophet! 

But we are also there to make a witness on the welcoming side! Some of the pre-conditions for our Christian behaviour are already very prophetic in themselves. I think that we all can agree on the following facts: 

§       in the Kingdom of God there are no borders. It is built upon the Creation as such and is there to fulfill the eschatological family.

§       in the Kingdom of God we all have the same dignity, we are all created in the image of God.

§       in the Kingdom of God different ethnic groups constitute a richness, not a problem

§       in the Kingdom of God all cultures are evangelized and we are continuously being called to transcend our own particular cultures in favor of the Gospel.

How do we politically handle this call to receive the Kingdom of God and how do we as Christians realize being the light for the world ? Remember that we are not called to become the light for the world, but as baptized persons, we already are the light for the world. But we may prefer being under the tub … it is sometimes more comfortable that way.

It is not my task here to deepen the politics of migration issues. I would just like to recall the result of the recent elections for the European parliament. There are certainly many ways of interpreting the more than troubling results, but one thing seems to be clear: the citizens of Europe do not seem ready to take away their national borders between themselves, and they do not seem ready to look for a common European good and equality between all its members, and probably even less for a global common good and equality between all human beings. This should be more than troubling for the Christian community, more than the debate on whether we should mention God or not in the Constitution.

But we also have to evaluate our own behaviour as Christians and Dominicans. How often are we as individuals or communities disturbed with joy by the other or others ? Are we actually active witnesses for a borderless, transcultural or multicultural reality within our Order ? Well, yes and no. Many sisters, brothers and lay Dominicans are working with refugees, with trafficked persons and so on. That is fine and should be encouraged. But to what extent do we share our homes and lives with these persons ? How do we welcome persons from other cultures in our midst? How do we work together with them ? How do we build a new society together with them?

We have a lot of work to do here, with our parishes, communities and ourselves, and the work to do spells out “conversion”. Conversion because we have to step down from our positions of power, conversion because we have to acknowledge our poverty in meeting the other person face to face when he is disturbing my time and my projects. We have to ask the question who or what is holding the hegemony in the Order ? At least in my own congregation we have been talking a lot of collaboration between the different provinces. Now, because of the hegemony of the French culture in my congregation there has not been much of collaboration, rather a welcoming, albeit a very warm welcoming, from the French province’s side towards the sisters of the less fortunate provinces. A couple of months ago, we asserted that we were living some sort of a chaos, at least an uncertainty, because there was no evident hegemony anymore. This was the favorable moment to talk about collaboration, and we concluded that we hardly had had any real collaborative projects where the partners were working on an equal level. There will be a new hegemony, but we can be much more aware of it and spell it out, when we start a new collaboration, and this in order to transcend a particular culture.

I want to give a very concrete example of what I mean by such a conversion. I give it, not because it is perfect, but because it is what I know best – my own situation in my own vice-province in Sweden.

When I entered religious life in 1980, the dominican vice-province of my congregation in Sweden had been trying hard to become “Swedish” and was still laboring for this goal. A number of the first French sisters was still there, but everything that smelt “foreign”, particularly “French”, had to be purified in some way or the other. Nevertheless, much of our studies was done in France … Without realizing it, we were becoming an isolated island of “Swedish” Catholicism, not much in touch with what was happening in the suburbs of the big cities and still less in some industrial cities in other parts of the country. We were not in touch with our own church, which was and still is very much in touch with the suburbs and our industrial cities, and not even with our country.

The number of Catholics in Sweden since I entered religious life has more or less doubled with the great influx of refugees, and ordinary immigrants coming to work in industry. But we hardly realized this within our vice-province, we were still expecting Swedish-born vocations and developing a Swedish mentality, far from what was going on in the rest of society. One of the first challenges came from our prioress general addressing myself as a young vice-provincial with the following surprising question: “So what are you doing to become more inculturated in Sweden ?” I reacted quite angrily by saying that the large majority of us Dominican Sisters in Sweden were Swedish, so why did we have to be inculturated ? Others might have to work on their inculturation in Sweden, but not we. Things developed very quickly after that and I am still very grateful for the question Sister Rosario put to me.

When we opened a new community in a suburb north of Stockholm and got the mission to form a new parish there a new Sweden entered our life. Of a group of roughly 400 Catholics there were about fifty nationalities and different cultures and languages present. Today we have closed that community and the parish-in-being is taking care of itself having created its own traditions and way of life. They are not Swedish, not Spanish, not Polish, not Syrians, but Catholics, sharing their faith in a common country by the means of a common new language. They are gradually creating new traditions among themselves, they are building up a new culture of their own, which eventually also has to be evangelized.

It has been a rather tough story to become Swedish and also to transcend this and becoming catholic in the real sense of that word. Sometimes God acts through accidents and hardships to make us see new realities and deepen our faith. So also in our case. We have always had one or two sisters in formation, but at the end of the nineties some active sisters fell ill and we were diminishing in number and if we didn’t do everything we could we would as well have to close the vice-province. Sister Rosarios’ question about inculturation coupled with our own questions why we didn’t recruit among the immigrants and our bishops’ concern for the future of apostolic religious life in Sweden as a whole led to a decision to see if we could welcome Dominican sisters from cultures and countries that were represented among the immigrant Catholics in our different parishes. We would ask these sisters to share our community life and mission.

So off we went to talk with the sisters in Iraq and Vietnam where we knew that they had many vocations. At this point we were aware that we needed transformation of our own Dominican life in Sweden, that we needed new inspiration, a radicalization of our life, a conversion and that this could only come from Dominican experiences in other cultures. We were not looking for too young sisters, certainly not for candidates to religious life, which we sometimes were offered, but for some sisters who would actually share their experiences and teach us how to be Dominicans in a context which we didn’t know so much about in our own country! 

And when we were in real trouble with three sisters hospitalized and a lot of other problems, they all of a sudden came, two sisters from Iraq, one from Vietnam and then we had candidates from Sweden but some originally coming from Korea and Armenia. Today we reflect the face of the Catholic church in Sweden, today we are inculturated, at least when it comes to the representation of nationalities in our vice-province.

I don’t know if we are living a multicultural situation within our community today, I don’t know if we are welcoming towards everybody who turns up at our door, but what I do know is that we are living a very concrete transformation. Since a year ago we have founded a new community in Gothenburg, five hundred kilometers away from our “birthplace” in Sweden, Stockholm, in a region where none of us knew anybody! Of the nine sisters in our new community only two had been in Gothenburg before moving there! Only three of us are Swedish. As much as possible we are trying to build up this new project on an equal footing.

And what do we have in common ? The Church and the Dominican family, Jesus Christ and Dominic! These are the only two references we all share! We are bound together by our vows and that has kept us going and developing a new project, a new mission, a new community. In this adventure our vice-province is no longer welcoming sisters from other cultures, instead we are all together building a new reality, a new culture if you want, where we hope to be answering the call from God to leave our father and mother and set out on a journey to a promised land. This is also true for the few of us born in Sweden. We have in fact a new promised land in front of our eyes, but it is far from the context, traditions and culture where I was brought up as well in ordinary life as in religious life. 

What will the next steps be ? What can we learn from this experience ? Well, I don’t know for sure. I am eager that the next generation will take over, they are exploring so many new ways I know nothing about. But I am convinced of some challenges that we face but where we seem to be very slow to act, probably because it will disturb our comfort and security. To put this challenge in a positive way: the beauty of the Church is its catholicity, its universalism, the beauty of our Order is the same paired with its mobility, its call for itinerancy. 

But then I must ask a question to us Dominicans: why do we uphold the borders between us ? Are we prepared to go on mission where the Church is calling us building communities of sisters of different languages, cultures and social backgrounds coming from different congregations where no one is welcoming us but Jesus Christ ? Are we prepared to take the risk to let our faith carry us across borders be they national, political, cultural or of a religious structure ?  Are we prepared to become the disturbing other, as well as welcoming him or her? 

Dominic wanted to go to the Cumans. Our European cultures may be the Cumans today for the Dominicans from South-East Asia and the Middle East … We have been so accustomed to give to others, to go on mission from Europe, to share our values and traditions … The transformation for us might lie in receiving a new evangelization from the off-spring from our own mission, from churches that are more vital and have other experiences than we have today. The transformation might lie in welcoming the other who wants my time and my eyes looking into his or hers, turning away from my time-table and my little projects. God is constantly calling us to a more universal view, be it on a personal level or on the level of our congregations and the Order, on the level of the Church and also on the political level of our nations. The prophetic voice for this calling is simply the other.

"I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet."  When I am willing to leave behind the signs of my identity, my pagan identity, that is my nationality, my cultural traditions, my father and mother, in order to follow Jesus Christ, then there is a prophetic voice. But it will not be accepted as such, especially not in my hometown, in the midst of my relations. And it will die as soon as I think of it myself as a prophetic voice. When the transformation has started we have to give it over to the next generation, to the next inculturation

Sr Madeleine Fredell OP

Dominican Family Day

Stone 2004-06-19