The Prayer was centred on “New Wine”, a time to connect to myself, to become aware of what is happening in me. Under difficult situations God makes a new wine, opens new paths of freedom, so that we may walk together in the way of truth and justice.
The Co-Facilitators noted with appreciation and affirmed the evident shift that was happening in the here and now. They brought it to the awareness of the Capitulants that along the process the working groups / teams had become communities! Transformation was already happening. Each of the Capitulants was responsible for this shift.
We are becoming aware that along the process the working groups have become communities. The work of the day will be centred on Mission and XXX.
I take time to see first in me and then in the group/community what is happening in the processes we experience in our life. Even in the small details, a lot of transformation is happening. The fact that we are learning from the here and now of our vulnerability and progressing in an intercultural milieu, formed with people from three continents, means that we are learning a new narrative for the community and for our Capitular Acts. Passing from working groups to communities, as well as taking time to acknowledge our reality and our vulnerability, these are already new narratives.
The work of the morning was centred on Mission with the presentation of the first text written by 2 groups and then combining the work of both groups.
After that an exercise was done to live in the concrete the change of narrative. Each capitulant looked at what was happening inside herself, shared it openly in an atmosphere of trust, as the groups have become communities and the capitulants a bigger community. The process was a real experience of healing the past, and living in the concrete the new narrative of transformation. In this “we learnt that every time we are tempted to react in the same old way, we must ask if we want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” We experienced that “you and I are both essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices”. (Quotes from Deepak Chopra). These shifts in consciousness that the capitulants are realizing are creating a new narrative.
Each person in the community/chapter is like a rough stone broken and fragmented (each with our trauma/reality that is now being transformed), stacked together in the inukshuk, in which each stone supports the others to form a human figure, traditionally used by the Inuit people as a landmark or a commemorative sign (the inukshuk picture).
This will be the new creation that will empower each one and the congregation.
Those who do not learn from the unpleasant facts of their lives, force the cosmic consciousness to replay them as many times as necessary, in order to learn what the drama of what happened teaches. What you deny subdues you. What you accept transforms you. (Carl Jung)
The capitulants spoke about the new narrative: In order to free the future how are we going to listen differently to bring forth a new creation?
In the afternoon the capitulants worked on deepening our charism in “collaboration” with others.
In his word at the end of the day Fr. Dave said: You are trying to marry your experience with that of the Gospel. You are doing that all together and I can only rejoice! The Spirit of God is at work within you, empowering you. We are being enabled to empower others. What you are experiencing here is not only for you; you are receiving power in order to empower others. What you have lived today makes me think of the parable of the woman making bread. I see the woman kneading a great quantity of dough, in which the Spirit of God is like the yeast that she is mixing in the heavy dough. The dough is the heaviness and you with the Holy Spirit are making it light. If you allow that Spirit to come in you, then you would be like that woman who kneads and bakes a huge loaf of bread, not only for the family but for the whole village.
