Edmund Rice Networking
Reflections on ERN - part 2
The name ‘ERN’ has evolved and is still evolving. ‘Network’ has changed to ‘networking’ as our experience and understanding of this reality changes. Surely a network is dead without the networking that brings it life? This is the age of networking - global, social, business, etc. It is being promoted through articles and advertisements, expressed through clever e-networks, and buoyed-up by the relentless new modes and models of technology and thinking. From road-side bill-boards on rural highways to exclusive in-flight duty-free offers, one can find new and faster ways of networking to and from places and locations thought inaccessible, isolated, inappropriate, or impossible a few months ago. Networking has long been around, but today it is bigger and quicker than ever before.
I feel that ERN is similarly connecting people. One difference between the international network we had before and today’s networking is that previously there were many visible common elements (a network of communities of brothers under religious vows, schools for boys, etc.), but today I see much more diversity among the people, ministries, and forms of commitment in the ERN (ER Camps, prayer groups, justice & peace groups, etc.). Previously we had external, physical things in common (habits, horaria, schools, etc.) but now the external things are more varied and it is the internal, non-physical things (like Edmund’s values and story) that we share in common, though in varying degrees.
In all of this I am not completely sure, yet I feel that is how I should be. Maybe to be sure is not the way to be anymore, for to have the complete picture is to limit God’s greatness and mystery. Previously an Act of Chapter or a clause in the Constitutions could qualify a ministry or control a community exercise. I doubt if the growing ERN could or should be nailed down in words like that. I suspect there is a need to keep gathering and describing our global experiences in openness, resonant with Micah’s call for justice, tenderness, and humbleness.
Edmund Rice Networking is a life-force that inhabits old and new. It animates entities of different shapes and sizes, and holds them in a variety of organic connections. It is growing by a seemingly chaotic, inner force that is giving birth to new expressions of Edmund Rice and ‘letting die’ expressions that are no longer relevant. This dynamic reality is happening even as you read this. It has seemingly come about because of Edmund Rice’s Brothers, but often unaided by or even in spite of them. Is ER Networking part of God’s doing that we are asked to see in Isaiah 43:19: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”
The Brothers have taken cognisance of ERN from General Chapters to local initiatives, but it seems this is not uniform - and I wonder if it should or could be? In some places (where the traditional vocations to the Brothers have stopped) ERN is more developed and varied, while in others (where new brothers are coming forward) it is just dawning. Perhaps the direction to take is the call to Internationality and to build more open global connections and channels of sharing and learning - while not necessarily copying or transporting from one part of the globe to another. For no one has the answer. ER Networking is a shared expression of Edmund’s spirit in a network of relationships, a unique global phenomenon, an expanding consciousness, a mystery that holds us and which we hold, a networking in which we share and which shares us.
Edmund Rice’s Brothers are not the exclusive keepers of the flame any more. They do not meet out the oil of anointing. (They may still hold the purse-strings for now but our history shows that Edmund’s spirit has not relied on money.) No, there is an Edmund Rice life-force that is expressing itself and flying free across our petty barriers and distinctions.
Networking seems to boil down to connectedness or relationship that pervades all creation. A network is as vulnerable as its weakest link, connection, or relationship. For me, Christianity is about connectedness and relationship. It is just that today the connectedness and relationships stretch across the cosmos with more aspects than we had ever imagined before. This includes building connections with people and things that were previously deemed as damned.
If I accept that God is bigger than I can think of or imagine, and if I open myself to this God, only then will I be able to accept the ERN fully.
Senan D’Souza cfc
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January 2010
See RECENT RICE EXPRESS for Part 1: ‘ERN AND THE BIGGER GOD’.
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