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IV
- ITINERANCY AND MISSION
28. Itinerancy is a necessary partner to mission. This
ontological link is rooted in our own history and especially
in the life of St Dominic. He discovered his mission
‘on the road,’ and sent his brothers –
even novices – to a life ‘on the road.’
Recent chapters of the Order have reminded us of this
history and have called us ‘to take to the road
again.’ Quezon City, in 1977, was perhaps the
first to show an awareness that the priorities had shifted,
and saw as the first priority, ‘catechesis in
diverse cultures and places.’ Aware that this
new and different situation called for a new approach,
the chapter declared, as second priority, ‘the
training and preparation required for preaching in this
new world.’
Subsequent
chapters have elaborated on just what these new priorities
mean. Walberberg, in 1980, addressed ‘the adaptation
of our apostolic activities according to the needs of
today,’ and offered some ‘specific notes’
Dominican mission and preaching should have: ‘prophetic,
made credible by poverty, compassionate, and founded
on a deep and scientific study of theology.’ Avila,
in 1986, in the country of Dominic himself, that unique
‘man of the frontier,’ affirmed as the ‘specific
mission’ of the Order, ‘evangelization on
the frontiers.’ And it enumerated those frontiers
where we are to be and live out our mission. Oakland,
in 1989, challenged the Order: ‘Do we hear the
call coming from the world of today?’ Are we not,
rather, in need of a profound conversion from ‘comfort
and security [which] produce a mentality opposed to
any change.’ We must recapture ‘Dominic’s
spirit of itinerancy and mobility… and rediscover
that poverty which frees us for the Spirit and makes
us open to the cries of those in misery.
Mexico
City (1992) lists the actual situations and challenges
to the apostolic life in the Order and boldly declares:
‘Our willingness [to meet these challenges] is
born of a confidence that somewhere in the Dominican
heart are the requirements to meet this urgent calling.
The seeds of our tradition are ready to burst forth
again into flower if only there are courageous and generous
hearts to house them.’ The chapter also cites
some ‘strengths from our tradition,’ each
one involving a certain kind of bodily or mental itinerancy:
mobility, a readiness to move without excessive material,
cultural or intellectual baggage; respect and concern
for others, a readiness to meet people where they are;
openness, a readiness to listen and learn; and community,
for we never act alone. Caleruega (1995) called us to
be ‘faithful to itinerancy.’
The
last two chapters focus on the nature of itinerancy
as a ‘going beyond.’ The mission of the
Order, says Bologna (1998), ‘calls the Order to
go courageously beyond those frontiers that separate
poor from rich, women from men, [and from] diverse Christian
faith communities and other religions.’ The chapter
situates this mission on ‘the lines of brokenness’
of humanity and sees the Order placing itself ‘at
the service of the ‘Other,’ ready to listen
and to be transformed.
In
his Relatio de Statu Ordinis at the Providence chapter,
the Master of the Order spoke of a ‘future that
we have chosen… as part of an itinerancy of heart
and mind and mission’ and the chapter speaks about
the concern of all in the province for the mission of
a vicariate: ‘The province should foster a spirit
of itinerancy to ensure that brethren are easily available
for such service.’
The
following reflection is in aid of fostering just such
a spirit of itinerancy ‘of heart and mind and
mission.’
TAKING
TO THE ROAD AGAIN
29.
According to the biblical witness, it is always on a
journey that surprising things happen. Abraham rushes
out of his tent to greet strangers and they promise
him a future different from the one he and Sarah had
imagined (Gen 18.1-15). Moses, on the run, experiences
God in a burning bush and discovers both a people and
a task. God says, ‘Go, now, I am sending you…’
and promises: ‘I will be with you’ –
so long as you continue to journey… (Exod 3.1-21).
Jacob, ‘on his way,’ wrestles with the angel
at the ford of the Jabbok, in a story of conversion
and vulnerability. Jacob, like many of us, has some
very disagreeable traits. He is a ‘trickster’
and fears those he has harmed. His father-in-law is
pursuing him behind and in front, Esau awaits him. And
then, the struggle, from which Jacob emerges, forgiven
and converted, with a new name, a new mission –
and a limp.
It
is while ‘on the road’ that Jesus summons
his disciples and it is ‘on the road’ that
he teaches them. (Pasolini’s film on the Gospel
of St Matthew has an unforgettable image of the Sermon
on the Mount: Jesus is running over the hills, the disciples
trying to catch up to hear the words of Jesus as he
turns his head back to teach them ‘on the run.’)
The feeding of the four thousand in Mark (8.1-10) was
eaten ‘on the run’ like fast-food. And it
is on the road that Jesus learned from those he met,
like the pagan women (Mt 15.21-28), whom he praises
and even offers to his disciples as a model of faith.
Finally, it is on the road to Emmaus that he reveals
himself to disheartened disciples (Lk 24.13-35).
The
mission he gives his disciples is just that, a sending,
a ‘taking to the road,’ without purse or
bag or sandals. He tells them, ‘Do not stop at
the homes of those you know’ (Lk 10.4). There
are several interesting things about this: Jesus invites
them to a life of itinerancy, to a life of urgency (‘keep
moving’) and to a life of dependency on the goodness
of others, strangers, whom they ‘do not know.’
TAKING TO ONESELF
30.
To be itinerant is to make oneself vulnerable and dependent.
But itinerancy is the only proper response for a Dominican
in a world that produces the homeless, the hurting,
and the stranger. To take to the road again –
as our general chapters remind us again and again –
is to live on those ‘lines of brokenness’
of humanity, to share the fate of those who have been
made itinerant. It means sharing their fate of being
made homeless because of the stands we take against
prevailing opinion.
The
scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann, writes of ‘the
monopoly of imagination,’ a phrase that suggests
that ‘some body or force in society has both the
sole voice in determining how things are experienced,
and the right and legitimacy to supply the lens through
which life is properly viewed or experienced. No one
is permitted to have an image outside this approved
set of imaginations or images.’ To stand against
such powerful monopolies is to align ourselves with
the Gospel-vision that Dominic made his own. (One writer
believed that Dominic sent his brothers to the cities,
not only because of the universities but because it
was there that the newly disenfranchised victims of
an emerging mercantile society were: Dominicans were
to be ‘brothers’ (friars) to them.) To take
such a stand is to be ourselves made marginal and vulnerable.
But it is only there that our preaching is credible.
It
is interesting, in our context, to realize that the
Greek word used in the New Testament for welcoming (lambano:
‘take, receive, possess’) is not about taking
aside those whose conduct is not in harmony with ours.
The verb indicates that we must ‘take [them] with
us’ and ‘introduce [them] warmly into our
fellowship.’ It is a word often used by St Paul
in his vision of strangers becoming community, rooted
in the experience of what God did in Jesus: ‘In
Christ, God was making friends with the world…
and entrusted to us the task of making friends’
(2 Cor 5.19). This is why he entreats the Romans to
‘practice hospitality’ (12.13). But to make
friends or welcome others, those others have to be looked
at as ‘like us’ in needs, experiences, and
expectations. ‘It was not sufficient,’ writes
Christine D Pohl, ‘that strangers be vulnerable,
hosts had to identify with their experiences of vulnerability
and suffering before they welcomed them.’
Perhaps
the ‘being out of place’ that is associated
with itinerancy really means being able to be in another’s
place. And it could well be that the more foundational
text for mission is not one of the traditional ‘Go
and baptize’ passages but, rather, a passage like
2 Cor 1.3-7, which defines mission as paraklesis, as
consoling and comforting. Paul writes, ‘Blessed
be… the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation,
who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may
be able to console those who are in any affliction with
the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled
by God…’ What is interesting about this
passage is the appeal to a mutual experience. Even what
we suffer is for others’ consolation. Can there
be any other motive for mission than in going out, like
Jesus, ‘stretching and touching’ (Mk 1.41),
seeking out the vulnerable, on the road, in a healing
and comforting relationship.
TAKING THE RISK
31.
Claude Geffré has written that ‘the challenge
of religious pluralism invites us to return to the heart
of the Christian paradox as the religion of the Incarnation
and the religion of the kenosis of God.’ It is
for this reason that he can speak of Christianity as
‘a religion of otherness.’ There is something
adventurous about a theological journey on the frontiers,
which challenges us to become truly Dominican, ‘taking
to the road again,’ responding to new realities
where they are, on the frontier, being ‘useful’
to those others who define our mission and determine
where we are to be.
Early
in the Bible, it is written that ‘anyone who wished
to consult the Lord would go to the meeting tent, outside
the camp’ (Exod 33.7). ‘Outside the camp’
among all those ‘others’ relegated to a
place outside the camp, is where we meet God. Itinerancy
demands going outside the institution, outside culturally
conditioned perceptions and beliefs, because it is ‘outside
the camp’ that we meet a God who cannot be controlled.
It is ‘outside the camp’ that we meet the
Other who is different and discover who we are and what
we are to do.
In
February 2001, a group of Dominican men and women, almost
all of them living in Asia, met in Bangkok, ‘outside
the camp,’ and shared their experience of listening
and learning. ‘We realized,’ they said,
‘that dialogue with those of other religious traditions
is the main challenge at the beginning of this new millenium
for our Dominican preaching. It is here in Asia, a privileged
place for the encounter with different cultures, different
religions and different people that we are challenged
to conversion: to a new way of listening, seeing, touching,
learning and understanding.
‘Dialogue
opens a door on an unfamiliar world, whose exact contours
we do not yet know – but the journey there will
lead us home because we believe it is where we belong.
‘The
Order was called into being by Dominic’s attentiveness
to the needs of people in the changing world of the
13th century. We, like Dominic – and like the
Buddhist monk and the Hindu sanyyasi – are called
to take to the road again, to reclaim our mendicant
heritage, to realize that we are all beggars before
the truth, which only waits to surprise us.
‘We
pray to be able to trust in that Spirit who maps our
journey for us, for we, as Church and as Order, have
ourselves been given to the Spirit. It is the Spirit,
present in every culture and every religion –
long before Christianity arrived – that makes
dialogue both possible and necessary.
‘We
pray for the trust of our father, Dominic, who even
though he could not foresee the outcome, knew that he
was doing what God wanted.’
How
significant it is for us Dominicans, entrusted with
a universal mission of preaching, to remember that Jesus
began his mission in ‘Galilee of the Nations,’
Galilee of the foreigners, half-Gentile in population,
half-pagan in cult, a land populated by people considered
suspect by the institution in Jerusalem: ‘Can
anything good come from Nazareth?’ (Jn 1.46).
Yet after the Resurrection, Jesus tells his disciples,
‘I will go ahead of you to Galilee’ (Mt
26.32). Even more intriguing is Jesus’ message
to the women: ‘Go and tell my brothers to set
out for Galilee; there they will see me’ (Mt 28.10).
It
is outside the camp, in all the Galilees that surround
us, that we discover what mission is: to be in mission
is to live outside the camp. And to discover, with others,
what God is really about. But this knowledge comes at
a price. The image of going outside the camp or outside
the tent in order to meet God is found again at the
end of the Bible, in the Letter to the Hebrews: ‘Jesus
suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with
his blood. Let us go to him, then, outside the camp
and bear the abuse he suffered’ (13.12-13). We
have been blessed by the example of Dominican martyrs
in Algeria, Pakistan and many other places, who put
themselves on ‘the lines of brokenness, outside
the camp.’ They ‘bore the abuse he suffered’;
they ‘sanctify’ us by their blood. We, like
them, are called to ‘go to him, outside the camp’
and endure what Jesus endured.
Even
his relatives thought Jesus was ‘out of his mind’
(Mk3.21), so far from the norm, so eccentric was his
behavior. If we Dominicans are to adopt the vita apostolica
in today’s world, perhaps we need to be a bit
more abnormal, a bit more eccentric, unbalanced and
off-center. What are we doing now that can make others
believe we are ‘out of our minds’? The Report
of the Commission de Missione Ordinis asked: ‘Were
we living what we preach, were our lives a true service
of the Gospel, throwing us onto the roads beyond frontiers,
then we might be seen as ‘out of our minds,’
and a touch of Gospel-madness would joyfully dwell in
us.’
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