Reflection On The Year Of Consecrated Life
Sons and Daughters of the Rainbow: Co-Creators with Our Creator God
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By Elizabeth M. Davis, RSM
In proclaiming the Year of Consecrated Life (the Year of Religious Life), Pope Francis cried, “Wake up the world! Be witnesses of a different way of doing things, of acting, of living!” Steve Werner, composing the hymn for the Year, challenges us to wake up the world with “abiding words of faith, uplifting words of hope, prophetic words of love and unending words of joy.” The sense of waking up the world with a word is deeply embedded in our call to holiness as Christians. In the first story of creation in Genesis 1, “God said . . . And it was so.” John’s Gospel begins (Jn 1:1, 14), “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
More and more, we are coming to realize that we are called to be co-creators with our Creator God, transforming our torn and fractured world one moment at a time. Our Jewish sisters and brothers have given us the powerful Hebrew phrase, tikkun olam, “repairing and healing the world.” In Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1997), Leonardo Boff writes:
Human beings must feel that they are sons and daughters of the rainbow, those who translate this divine covenant with all the beings existing and living, with new relationships of kindness, compassion, cosmic solidarity, and deep reverence for the mystery that each one bears and reveals. Only then will there be integral liberation, of the human being and of Earth, and rather than the cry of the poor and the cry of the Earth there will be common celebration of the redeemed and the freed, human beings in our own house, on our good, great, and bountiful Mother Earth.
In To Weavers Everywhere, Marchiene Rienstra poetically expresses this invitation to be co-creators:
And God invites us
Not only to keep offering her the
Shreds and rags of our suffering
And our work
But even more -
To take our place beside Her
At the Jubilee Loom,
And weave with her
The tapestry of the New Creation.
We women and men religious are profoundly privileged, not in being the only ones called to be co-creators because that is certainly not so, but in being among the very few who know that we are called to be co-creators. Through our personal and communal contemplation, through our access to wise teachers and mentors and time for study, and through opportunities to share wisdom in our communities, we have grown in our awareness that God wants us to be co-creators, trusts us to do so and strengthens to do so.
In the Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis challenged each one of us, not matter what our position in the Church or our level of instruction in the faith, to be missionary disciples (EG #119-121). In a letter written to the Canadian church in 2003, the Christian Ecological Imperative, our Bishops give us a contemporary blueprint to help us in our response to this challenge in faith. They invite us to live contemplatively, ascetically and prophetically – (i) contemplatively: each one of us is personally called to deepen our capacity to understand and appreciate the world around us as an act of faith and love through meditation, prayer, participation in liturgy, study and reflection; (ii) ascetically: we adjust our lifestyle choices and daily actions in awareness of and sensitivity to the realities of the world around us; and (ii) prophetically: we work with each other through community action to make our world more inclusive, more socially and ecologically just, and more rooted in right relationships.
On the way from Jerusalem to Emmaus, Mary and Cleopas found joy and hope when they were in the midst of despair. They found that joy and hope in walking with a stranger, sharing Scripture with him, inviting him into their home and breaking bread with him. Each one of us has that very same experience every single day. Yet how rarely do we exclaim in joy-filled delight as Mary and Cleopas did, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Lk 24:32)
This Year of Religious Life is a blessed moment for us to renew our faith journey with energized steps, to re-read with new eyes our Scriptures and our newspapers, to welcome once again strangers to our tables, and to re-ignite our burning hearts.
Because we choose to celebrate this Year of Consecrated Life with “abiding words of faith, uplifting words of hope, prophetic words of love and unending words of joy,” will Earth be repaired and healed? Will our global village become healthier? Will our communities become more daring places of welcome? Will our Church become more radically inclusive? Will our hearts burn more brightly within us? Will we wake up the world? Let us dare to say “Yes!” Let us dare to live “Yes!”
