Christian Life Community (CLC) Southern England region reflecting on the World Assembly
I usually only find myself in Mayfair when I am attending a Christian Life Community (CLC) event at the Jesuit Centre in Mount Street. I am always bemused with the queues outside certain shops. I can only assume they have some significance for the consumer. The place smells of money. Yet almost 200 years a church found itself here ministering to the needs of those who lived here. I don’t know whether Mayfair has always been a wealthy area but I do know that whatever the wealth of an individual or area they will have spiritual needs.
We had gathered as members of CLC in the south of England to hear from Pat Callaghan and Jackie Gill who had been our delegates to the CLC World Assembly in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The World Assembly (WA) meets every five years and its role is to discern what the Lord requires from us as a community.
It became clear as Pat and Jackie shared that this was not a typical World Assembly. I had heard about WAs previously and this one wasn’t sounding like the previous.
The venue was Colegio Máximo de San José which is an Ignatian centre located 50 minutes by car from Buenos Aires. I had imagined the event occurring in the centre of Buenos Aires. What we imagine compared with the actual experience can be very different. As a contemplative community, we use our imaginations in reading a gospel story to nourish our prayer with the Trinity. Perhaps there was a lesson for me here in that often I desire to imagine the best rather than the actual experience. The Grace for the assembly was as follows,
“We desire greater depth and integration in the living out of our CLC charism in the world today”
The WA process of which Jackie and Pat spoke echoed the process of our community meetings albeit ours last a couple of hours whereas the WA lasted 10 days. The pattern of CLC for our local communities is replicated regionally, nationally and internationally, at least that is our hope. But whether we meet as local communities or as the World Assembly we bring ourselves. There were a lot of challenges for Pat and Jackie who were also accompanied by Alan Harrison SJ. They spoke of 15 hours working days and the occasional loss of electricity.
The gift of CLC is the gift given to Ignatius in the form of the spiritual exercises which aid us in deepening our relationship with God through contemplative prayer. The challenge is to go as deep as we can individually and communally. I guess the communal part is more difficult for us as individuals. Pat and Jackie’s presentation seemed to be another example of how our struggles come alive as we interact one with another. Yet is it through that process we together become more.
Documents were provided to those in attendance though it is only in reading them and re-reading them that you begin to understand the intensity of the ten days. It is almost as if our delegates have to get to the pearl of the experience in order that we might fully appreciate what is required of us as both as individuals and as local communities in England and Wales.
I was reminded that the World Executive communicates regularly through its webpage and attempts to summarise what we need to know in what they term Projects, see link below.
I found my own pearl for the day in an extract from Pope Francis’s letter to the assembly,
“At the center of your Ignatian spirituality is this desire to be contemplatives in action. Contemplation and action, the two dimensions together: because we can only enter the heart of God through the wounds of Christ, and we know that Christ is wounded in the hungry, the uneducated, the discarded, the old, the sick, the imprisoned, in all the vulnerable human flesh.”
The challenge from the assembly appears to be centred around us as national communities developing through practising greater communal discernment. There was no final document from the assembly as we as a world community continue the process of what began in Argentina. Perhaps it will only be known over the next five years what exactly the final document is as we live it out.
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