“We
have produced our own narrative of diminishment.”
Sister Tere Maya, CCVI, addressed our
Congregational Assembly this past June and among the riches of her presentation
was the sentence repeated in this post’s title.
Several years ago, our Congregation was
engaged in a strategic plan process which engaged the membership in very rich,
participative committee work. One committee within that process was the
Viability Committee. At our very first meeting, a Sister with the appropriate
professional background had graphs and charts of Congregational
demographics. You know what I’m talking
about, the same kind of charts we see from CARA that show smaller and smaller
numbers and a higher and higher median age across Religious Institutes in the
U.S.
After a short presentation, committee member
Sister Maria Carolina expressed her discontent with the material. “I don’t want to see just these figures. They
don’t show us where our Congregational vitality is or where the potential is for
deeper life among us.” I warmed to that response
and that perspective immediately!
Sister Maria Carolina’s response gives
voice to concern about a fallacy too easily succumbed to when we look at
numerical data. Jay Wellons, M.D., in
his medical memoir1 illustrates this well in a story he tells of his
mentor, Dr. Miller, a pediatric general surgeon and professor. This doctor had
removed thousands of coins from children’s stomachs or air passageways throughout
his pediatric practice. Miller kept each coin and catalogued them. He tabulated
his data and determined which coin was most commonly involved. They were coins from the Denver mint. “Beware those Denver coins”, he would tell his
students, then continuing his lecture, making the point that statistics can easily be misused
to find a “meaningless answer.”
Miller is not alone. LCWR, in its work
on the emerging future of religious life has, in the persons of Sister Ann
Munley IHM and Sister Carol Zinn SSJ, given similar responses when presenting
those CARA graphs to LCWR members. Both of these women encourage participants to
look beyond the figures, not stopping at the numbers. What other ideas, issues, questions do those
figures raise, these Sisters ask us.
In my own reflections, I ask, “What is
the challenge of smaller numbers and a higher median age? How is it viewed? As a threat or an
opportunity? And however we see the data, to what actions, to what new mindset do they call us ?
I don’t have a clear answer to those
questions, but I am so eager to engage with others about them. It’s hard
because, I believe, it is so difficult to make the mental turn away from the
prevailing social and cultural constructs. It is hard to unlearn that bigger is
better, and that young is good and old is bad.
That’s what our western culture tells us, what it has instilled in each
of us since our toddler years.
But a countercultural perspective is
precisely the prophetic witness that we women religious are called to live and
witness in this time. It will be realized through prayer, long and frequent
communal conversations, deep listening, sharing our dreams and daring to
act. For me as a Sister of Divine
Providence, it is also daring to trust God’s Abundant Providence with abandon!
We live into the future by how we live
the present. Through God’s Providence, “We
are the ones; we are enough.”
1Wellons, J. M.D. All that Moves Us: A
Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and
Resilience. New York: Random House, 2022
