The 2013 General Chapter was held in Loyola Hall, Liverpool, UK. For over a year the Society engaged in a process of communal discernment regarding its Future Directions. This process invited each FCJ sister to seek God’s dreams for our Society’s future and to raise deep questions as to what God is asking of us as we live as Faithful Companions of Jesus in our world and Church today.
The Chapter planning committee took our responses to this question and formulated a discernment question … a question that is addressed to God as well as to each member of the Chapter as the Chapter body enters in to a further communal discernment to set future directions for our Society:
O Cosmic Christ, where are you leading
your small evolving Society of gifted companions
to be salt and light in your emerging universe?
Our question is a prayer of longing to know where God is leading us today, to seek God’s will in the contemporary Church and in the contemporary world. We desire to engage more fully the theology of the cosmos. We are aware of our diminishment and place our hope for the future ‚in God alone‘. Our FCJ Society is constantly changing and yet the deepest things remain the same. We desire to deepen, share and live our charism (Marie Madeleine’s vision) with our thirsty world in a way that is relevant today. We recognize too our giftedness as well as our vulnerability. As both ’salt‘ and ‚light‘, we desire to be contemplatives in action with a passion for mission in today’s world and church. We see ourselves as part of a changing and emerging reality in God. We desire to live this with hope in the 21st century so as to open new vistas.
The outcome of the Chapter was a document, the Chapter Directions. You can download a copy of these directions if you wish. As we FCJs — individually, as local groups, as Provinces and as a Society — live into and work with these directions, we hope that our FCJ Companions in Mission, families, friends and colleagues will also find meaning and inspiration here and will share the richness of their reflections with us. We are all invited!
