Unit of France
Thérèse-Marie Potelle, rscm
Here we go! The new tomb of Father Gailhac and Mother St. Jean is well underway. The strength, skill and gift of the stonemasons are at work.
And the Mother House is gradually being emptied. There has already been the tedious work of sorting out the archives and the important reflection on their distribution in their new locations. Now we are opening the cupboards and organising the distribution to the delight of the schools around us and the social associations of Béziers and the parishes such as Secours Catholique and Cimade. How rich we were with sheets, towels, files, books, dishes ! They have served life in the Mother House, they will now help disadvantaged families to live better.
Emptying the Mother House to let it go to others is a human and spiritual experience of disappropriation which certainly touches all the sisters of the Institute and particularly the sisters of the Unit of France and of Béziers. My ten years of presence and activity in this founding place of the Mother House have left a deep mark on my life and will leave traces. It is for me a call to live in the provisional. This does not at all mean letting myself live, but rather constantly updating my experience and my fidelity in an ever-widening way. For me, it means opening two windows, one on the past and the other on the future, to let the air of life circulate, rejoice and energise. Of course I have kept the photos as a memory of the international groups coming from London, Arlington, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Portugal, Brazil as well as the Enlarged Family of Béziers, England and Ireland and the group of young profess coming from the Institut that I had the joy of welcoming throughout these years. But I have torn up the programmes, the interventions, the celebrations, the journeys: they now belong to the past …. and I am trying to welcome a new reality of my life in the Sacred Heart of Mary.
The perspective of the provisional and the continuity in hope require a new and necessary understanding of the Charism that makes me live. I must understand it better, not as an inspiration from the founders that would force me to keep it alive at all costs through walls, texts, relics, but as a heritage to be received with gratitude and to be transmitted in an audible way for today. It seems to me that we need to start thinking in terms of a “renewable charism”. When I receive young parents asking for baptism for their baby and I have to explain to them, for example, the difference between a procession and a demonstration, the question of the transmission of what makes us live in the context of our present always comes up. What historical itinerary should we build to go beyond the transmission of knowledge of a story, however edifying it may be? What experience should we bring to life in order to make our charism come alive in the context of the world we live in today, which is losing its religious culture? It is very difficult to imagine what an RSCM of the future will be, what she will look like at the end of the 21st century. My choices today to reread, refound and interpret the tradition with others, I require to be careful that they are not an obstacle to the possibility of a future life.
