Welcome to this Continental meeting! We come, as members of the General leadership team and teams responsible for leadership in the Province/Network in America, to reflect together on a way forward for leadership in the light of our last General Chapter and our reality as an Institute.
Opening of Continental Meeting Canada, 23-September – 03 October 2010 Here we share with you some paragraphs taken from the Margaret's opening address to the participants:
Welcome to this Continental meeting! We come, as members of the Can we truly hear our Founder encourage us again to “adopt new forms and new means” for the new reality of today? We are increasingly convinced that the consecrated life, present and future, is not an old dress that we have to try to patch patching with a piece of new cloth, but new wine that requires new wineskins (Mk 2.18 -22). Leaders have the responsibility of enabling membership to discern and to seek together these “new wineskins”.
From where can life be engendered, so that we may bring forth a renewed missionary commitment , and a maternal, compassionate love? Where can we find the secret of a love that leads us to revitalize our Consecrated Life and open ourselves to all generations, creating new ways of relating on inter-personal, social, political and cosmic levels? Many would say that the new religious life that is slowly emerging needs a spiritual leadership that is directed by the Gospel. A leadership that includes and values the gifts and rich experiences of the different generations within institutes; a leadership that administers the changes through listening, sharing, discernment co-responsibility and openness to the will of God who journeys with the human story; a prophetic leadership, capable of seeing in another way the present reality, expressing a vision of the future that is creative and bearer of hope. A leadership centred in Christ that incarnates with audacity the prophecy that is born of a love that is passion for God and for humanity. We have before us a prophetic role that nobody could have imagined forty years ago. It often takes the appearance of a dark path: no-one has yet passed that way, no-one can show us the way. But the Holy Spirit, the Great Connector, He, She, will guide us and we know we can trust her.
Somehow, we are still and always at the beginning, en route to another intensity. It is your responsibility, as leaders, to be bearers of this vision, to give to your communities the power and freedom to live in hope. Margaret Muldoon
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