Readings: Isaiah 7: 1-9; Matthew 11: 20-24

Introduction

Worried, Louis XVI asks La Fayette: "Is it a revolt?"

"No, your majesty, it is a revolution!"

"That's the question!": Is this General Chapter a revolt or a revolution?

By "revolt", I mean an event that depends on the mood of the moment, a great gathering which remains indecisive, immature, an aborted hope.

By "revolution", I mean an act which transforms reality, a true conversion! Besides, in Greek "anastasis", "resurrection" and "revolution" are the same word!
 

Brothers, "citizens!", I invite you, then, to pass from revolt to revolution! In this General Chapter, I invite you to move from exhortative texts to effective change of reality. We will not go to the next General Chapter, it is too expensive, to long, and it is just air--if we don't arrive, here, at real decisions.
 

The subjects we will debate here today are "The Dominican Family" and "Affective Maturity". They can be linked because emotional maturity is appraised in its relation to what is different, to women and laity. Concerning the Dominican Family, we are all agreed: one more text would be mental pollution.
 

We know that the brethren do not have a monopoly on the Dominican charism and that the Order only works well where the Dominican family works along in synergy. It is thus in all new communities, increasingly. An end to speeches! Let us get down to action!
 

Let there be no more distinctions between nobility, clergy and third estate: brothers, sisters, lay people! On the 4^th August, let us abolish privilege! There is only one Order, the Order of Preachers and, as our brother Alberto said, it is together that we must work, as in the beginning at Prouilhe.
 

I have proposals, I will make them in the assembly, so as not to abuse the power of being the only one allowed to speak.
 

"Daring, and again daring, always daring·" and the Order of preachers will at last measure up to its true vocation!
 

HOMILY

We have heard: Jesus did not read William of Occham. He is no nominalist, even less a neo-liberal. He does not address isolated individuals. He considers towns, public organisations, states.

He asks cities, political institutions, countries to be radically converted.

How? Br. Antoine Lion said it: an end to racism and to the extreme Right in Europe, to violence in Chiapas, to tribal quarrels, to "ethnic cleansing", to economic exclusion of whole peoples.

Conversion cannot remain individual, it has be incarnated politically in the social body.

It concerns us today precisely as Provincials, as General Chapter, as institutionalised Order.

I talked about it in my introduction. I would like now to develop the second point in the Gospel, that of failure. In his preaching, Jesus met with rejection.

St. Dominic prayed for sinners, he passed his nights in prayer of intercession. Jesus himself lived with rejection. His human and spiritual experiences is even more radical.

If I am a Christian, if Jesus is my master, it is very specially in his sovereign way of living with failure.

Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. He is aware of the immensity of waste. He sees the lakeside towns, Bethsaida, Corazin and Capernaum becoming submerged in a logic of death. Because he is the source of our freedom, he has no miraculous solution in the face of our refusal. No guard-rail, no spiritual police, no "Holy Inquisition".

The rich young man had a "vocation", Jesus lets him go away. He does not hold on to him. The towns have heard his preaching, they are free to be converted or not. He does not insist. There is a moment when the preacher is silent.

Our society only knows success, it is suspicious of, rejects, forgets all the losers. Jesus, he teaches us to live with maturity in adversity, without doubting, without putting our methods in questions, without pretending that everything depends on us. We must renounce culpability and megalomania. Other people's conversion depends before all else on themselves. The word we have spoken no longer belongs to us.

I therefore question you, not about the extent of your success--the sects, too, are successful--but about the quality of your failures. "Rejoice when the whole world speaks ill of you: your names are written in the Book of Life."
 

© 1998 Order of Preachers  General Chapter, 1998  Internet site by Scott Steinkerchner OP  email: steinkerchner@op.org