Thérèse-Marie, rscm.
– Unit France –
« A tree blown over by the wind had more branches than roots »
This Chinese proverb, recently found in a magazine, struck me in the silence of the chapel of our Mother House. During a whole year, we sorted out the archives and emptied the House in view of its sale. Everything was classified, catalogued, distributed or eliminated, leaving only the fabulous light of the sun’s rays illuminating the rotunda and the stained glass windows of the chapel. I have often felt dizzy in front of the void, downcast in front of the magnitude of reality as after a storm. Will everything that kept me upright let go of me? All that I lived for ten years in this founding place, and many others before me, through the service of welcoming groups from the Institute and the city, these beautiful branches of success, what is left of them? They have been cut off. But there is still a small shed with gardening tools at the back of the courtyard of the Motherhouse. To take care of the roots of the SCM tree, a new “little tool shed” is being created to remember our Founders and our apostolic mission: two rooms at the Good Shepherd in Béziers and several spaces at Solar da Torre in Braga, Portugal. But above all, so that the SCM life continues to bear fruit, the roots of the tree remind me, and each of us, to dig again and again within ourselves in order to take root in Christ, who is invisibly present in the meanders of our personal history linked to that of the Institute. When the disciples came down from Tabor, they saw only « Jesus alone ».
On the way to new life and to the new SCM projects that we will have to bring to life, the Cross will always be the tree planted in the earth that bears forever the one who opens the passage from all death to life.
