As we celebrate the Easter Triduum in this Jubilee Year of Mercy, we share excerpts from a letter written by our former Superior General Helen McLaughlin rscj in Easter 1992:
If we are called by our vocation to make known ‘the revelation of God’s love, whose source and symbol is for us the Heart of Christ’ (Const. §3), then compassion, Hesed, that characteristic of God’s Heart must live in us and permeate our whole educational mission.
Compassion is certainly not absent from our world; it exists. We all know people who bear witness to Christ’s compassion, to God’s compassion, and practise it in a radical, even heroic way.
Compassion exists, but sometimes seems blocked, dormant; and then there are grave consequences: greed, the thirst to have and possess, individualism, and so on, and these produce oppression, poverty and injustice.
In this situation I sense a challenge for us. We often hear about seeking and offering alternatives. Could not compassion be the alternative, the ever fresh, ever surprising possibility that we RSCJ have to offer our world?
We have what I could call ‘the power of compassion’, and that power has a transforming force. It is a grace that does not impel us to control, as political and economic power can do, but to be concerned, like Christ, with the suffering of humanity, in order like him, to heal and set free.
The power of our compassion – a compassion that is never completely pure but is intermingled with weakness – will help us to struggle against all that brings suffering to so many of our sisters and brothers.
Our Spirituality |Celebrating the Seasons
