“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