Marguerite Bourgeoys Lecture Series Inaugural Address March 12th, 2003 McGill University Speaker: Sister Lorraine Caza, CND

The plans were that the Honourable Lise Thibault, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, would be the speaker for this inaugural event of the Marguerite Bourgeoys Lecture Series at McGill University, but the creative and courageous woman who is the inspiration for these lectures would expect us to turn the disappointment of not having our honourable guest speaker with us into somewhat of an opportunity.

I suggest that we ponder over the challenges facing Marguerite Bourgeoys when she left her beloved Troyes in France, sometime in February 1653 for the New World. The woman who arrived in Montreal on November 16th, 1653 was already a different person from the woman she was at her departure from Troyes. What had the trip taught her? What helped her through the journey not to let herself be overcome by her fears? Why would she have been ready to pay such a price to allow the children in Montreal to attend school? How did she view education?

Having arrived in Montreal, we are told that her skills as teacher were not required because all the children died at such an early age. We know that her presence, the quality of her being with the people in Montreal were invaluable to the population, but how did the waiting affect her? Did it have a deepening effect on her? After four years, she was given an old stable as a school. For her, this gesture of Monsieur de Maisonneuve was something of a prophecy. Such great things, such life for the whole world had come from the manger in Bethlehem. Let us picture her in the stable school, and let us go from that image of education to what is presently offered in Montreal. What were her dreams? What are ours? Each one of us has had to cross, culturally speaking, great oceans in the short time that we have been around. The outside changes have brought about changes in our ways of seeing ourselves, others, the world. What have we learned that we consider most important? And when we reflect on our journey, what do we identify as being most useful to us in order to overcome our fears?

What importance do we give to education? What ingredients do we feel are most important today for an education to prepare a person well for what lies ahead? Many of us had to learn to balance our commitment in formal education with many other levels of responsibility, somewhat like Marguerite Bourgeoys. Have we taken time to identify how these other engagements have enriched our views of education, our way of walking with people? And I dare say that probably most of us know something about the experience of the "stable school" and of the importance and very special virtue of small beginnings. We know about small beginnings but do we believe enough in what can come out of small beginnings? Do we see the tree in the seed?

Marguerite Bourgeoys wanted the women walking in her footsteps in Montreal and, later in so many corners of the world, to think of their commitment to education as a commitment to a Visitation-style of education, that is education, as she saw it portrayed in the Visitation narrative of St Luke’s Gospel where Mary, pregnant with Jesus, carrying the one who is The Life, goes in haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist.

In remembering the encounter I hear a philosopher such as Gadamer¹ stating that there is a sweeping power of transformation in an authentic conversation. I think of Professor Peter Emberley ² analyzing the difficulties and challenges of Canadian Universities today in the book published in 1996: Zero Tolerance - Hot Button Politics in Canada’s Universities. According to Professor Emberley, universities must not only transmit knowledge, develop certain skills, give out diplomas, but they must strive by all possible means to cultivate fundamental human skills. And if they did just that, they would simply be going back to what they were in the Middle Ages. And should we ask Professor Emberly to establish priorities among these fundamental skills that universities should aim at developing in their students, he would give first place to what he calls "the aptitude to conversation".

I see this same "initiation to the art of conversation" being praised and highly encouraged by Margaret J. Wheatley³, the renowned organizational consultant and professor of management in graduate business programs – this woman who made such an important contribution to the reflection on leadership and the new science. Different from all her previous books is this simple work : "Turning to one another. Simple conversations to restore hope to the future." As an introduction to this book on the art of conversation, she writes :

I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again. Simple, honest, human conversation. Not mediation, negotiation, problem-solving, debate or public meetings. Simple, truthful conversation where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard and each listen well.

What would it feel like to be listening to each other again about what disturbs and troubles us? About what gives us energy and hope? About our yearnings, our fears, our prayers, our children? (p. 3)

Are Margaret J. Wheatley’s "turning to one another in simple conversation to restore hope to the future," Professor Emberly’s call to develop the aptitude for conversation, and Gadamer’s trust in the power of an authentic conversation that far removed from Marguerite’s dream of educating in Visitation-style? My sense is that the first teacher in Ville-Marie would have recognized these people as kindred spirits. The fact that she left us with an image rather than with a developed theory on education makes it possible to pursue our own reflection on Visitation-style education. For me, a spirit of visitation is an attitude, a way of being with people that stresses mutuality, receptivity to what is other, different and foreign, fidelity to oneself as well as openness to the other’s point of view, deep respect for every human person, conversation with God, gratitude and gratuitousness, hope.

Mutuality in relationships works from the principle that each person has something to teach other human beings and that each person has something to receive from the other. In a formal education setting, this could be translated as follows. The meekest, the poorest, the most vulnerable student could be a great teacher for his fellow students but also for his professors. We miss a lot in life because we are unaware of the hidden riches in the lives of so many of the people we meet. I often ask myself if we give each person in life a chance to share what he or she has learned about human life. Too often, we allow our prejudices to take over and decide that because this person has this particular weakness , we will not in any way welcome any thought of his or hers. For mutuality to be honored in conversation, the art of listening and of sharing must be developed.

Speaking of listening, Margaret Wheatley makes the following observations:

I think that the greatest barrier to good conversations is that we’ve lost the capacity to listen. We’re too busy, too certain, too stressed. We don’t have time to listen. We just keep rushing past one another. This is true almost everywhere these days. One gift of conversation is that it helps us become good listeners again. (p. 31)

Speaking of engaging in conversation, of sharing, Margaret Wheatley says:

It’s not easy to begin talking to one another again. We stay silent and apart for many reasons. Some of us have never been invited to share our ideas and opinions. From early school days and now as adults, we’ve been instructed to be quiet so others can tell us what to think. Others of us are accustomed to meetings to discuss ideas, but then these sessions degenerate into people shouting, or stomping out angrily or taking over control of the agenda. These experiences have left us hesitant to speak and frightened of each other. But good conversation is very different from those bad meetings... Where can we find the courage to start a good conversation?... Well, courage comes from the Old French word for heart (cuer). We develop courage for those things that speak to our heart.

In a society promoting individualism such as the society we belong to, one would expect that each person would be most vigilant in allowing the other person to be herself, since we expect other people to allow us to be ourselves. Nevertheless, what we witness in everyday life is so many people feeling threatened by what is different, who fear being disturbed in their ways of thinking, of speaking, of acting by the challenges other people represent. For these reasons, they avoid contact with what is other, foreign. Living out of a spirit of Visitation, of the art of conversation pulls us in another direction. It calls us to develop availability to widen the space of our tent, to welcome experiences different from our own. Margaret Wheatley refers to "willingness to be disturbed". (p. 34)

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally, our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

We weren’t trained to admit we don’t know. Most of us were taught to sound certain and confident, to state our opinion as if it were true. We haven’t been rewarded for being confused. Or for asking more questions rather than giving quick answers. We’ve also spent many years listening to others mainly to determine whether we agree with them or not. We don’t have time or interest to sit and listen to those who think differently than we do. But the world now is quite perplexing. We no longer live in those sweet, slow days when life felt predictable... We live in a dense and tangled global system... (p. 34 s)

Willing to be disturbed by the people around us, but also, developing a global awareness, be willing to be disturbed by the North-South gap, by the Middle-East situation, by what is happening in so many African countries, by the ways wars are decided....

Talking of openness to what is other leads us to reflect on community perspectives, on solidarity. Wanting to be in solidarity means that my aim is not to win you over but to walk with you. How do we take such a stance in a world where profit lords over all? Any person who has a responsibility in the field of education must prepare youth for a world where solidarity can prevail, where solidarity is valued, encouraged, sought for. We can never say it enough : the globalization of the economy must correspond to the globalization of solidarity. Let us simply think of unthinkable situations millions of children are facing today : hunger, illness, sexual exploitation, children victims of war, children soldiers, what we call separated children, that is children who arrive in our countries alone, who can easily be picked up by prostitution and other networks. Last week, I was informed about 5000 children presently detained in the U.S. who have arrived alone.

And talking about global awareness, of community perspectives and of solidarity leads us to insist on how much a Visitation style education works hand and hand with a culture of peace and of non-violence. Our society is so focused on achievement, on competition that it tends to become harder and harder, tough, violent. Whatever educators do, they must be forever in search for ways of fostering peace and non-violence. And we all know that non-violence has nothing to do with giving into injustice, acting as if everything was going well. Non-violence speaks of strong resistance to evil, of persistence in identifying the causes of violence and working at correcting unjust situations. The non-violent way of resisting expresses itself in unfailing respect for every human being.

Openness to what is other, to other people’s point of view must be coupled with a clarity about one’s own identity. A person who, instead of being led from within lets herself be carried away by peer pressures, by pressures from the environment and by the most superficial "wants" is of little weight in a conversation. Part of the art of conversation, I would say, is the ability not to let ourselves be dominated or manipulated by others, not to let ourselves be enslaved by self-created needs. In other words, to be a significant partner in a conversation, one has to inhabit one’s own home. We help people develop an aptitude to conversation when we encourage them to identify for themselves what is going on inside themselves, whether or not they are totally possessed by a given worry or concern, by a feeling of hatred or of violence because of something that has happened to them, by severe fatigue, by a certain rhythm of life. A person who doesn’t come to grips with what she or he is carrying will find it difficult to face reality in conversation. Also related to the fidelity to oneself is the need to clarify one’s relationship with other people, to check just how free he or she is within these relationships. Whenever people feel imprisoned in their human relationships, they do not enjoy the inner freedom allowing them to give their best in human conversation.

A Hungarian philosopher who has majored in Philosophy of sports, Professor Gabor Csepregi⁴, from the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology in Ottawa has been struck by Prof. Emberley’s thinking on education as initiation to the art of conversation as well as by Gadamer’s thought on the power of transformation of conversation. Pursuing his reflection, Prof. Csepregi underlines the importance of valuing courtesy, politeness and tact, if you want to achieve respect for the human person. He insists on including a fourth ingredient in this education to respect for the person, in this culture of the art of conversation : a good sense of humour, an ability to distance oneself from self, not to take oneself too seriously, to critique one self in a relaxed way. And this suggestion, he takes from Aristotle who defines a sense of humour as a disposition half-way between complacency and inflexibility, between frankness, the quest for truth and the talent to know how to laugh appropriately.

Speaking about this dimension of respect for the human person brings back to my memory the story of Maria, a woman from Saint-Louis-de-Kent, New Brunswick, who regularly kneads bread for the household and people passing-by. Kneading her dough, that particular day, Maria prayed in her heart: "Lord, I would want today’s bread to be so delicious that, should you knock at my door and should I offer you this bread, you could say to me in all truth : Maria, this bread is the very best you have ever baked in your whole life." A little later on, someone knocks at the door. Who comes in but the man most despised and scorned in the neighbourhood. After the usual greetings, Maria offers him a loaf of her fresh-baked bread. The next day, this man meets Maria on the street and says : "Maria, this bread is the very best you have ever baked in your whole life." Is it not a deep respect for people that allows us to identify God’s power at work in every brother, every sister?

When, as early as 1962, professor Michaël Oakeshott⁵ defined education as "an initiation in the skill and partnership of conversation", he added that part of this initiation was learning to recognize voices, learning when the time has come to speak up, acquiring a number of intellectual and moral habits that characterize conversation.

You know out of what background I am speaking; you know that I share gospel values. Allow me therefore to share with you my deepest conviction about Education as the art of conversation. No road seems more conducive to conversation with the men and women I journey with, nothing helps me more in recognizing voices than to be attentive to a higher voice, to experience conversation with God.

With all my heart, I wish that the Christian proposal concerning the meaning of life, that the Good News concerning God and the style of humanity that Jesus taught us be presented wherever possible. And this presentation that must be done in the greatest respect of consciences, of the personal religious experience of each one is not to be thought of in terms of speeches, but in terms of witnessing with one’s life. And for the time we are given in this life, let us wish each other an openness to the disconcerting God who is disarmed love, love expressed in solidarity, to this God who, in Jesus, appeared as the suffering servant, opening to us paths of hope precisely where other eyes can only see signs of death, reasons to despair. In the light of the cross of Jesus, let us remember the African proverb which says that: "the tree that comes crashing down makes more noise than the growing forest" takes on new dimensions.

In the Visitation narrative, Mary responds to Elizabeth’s greeting and evangelization with a beautiful hymn of thanksgiving that speaks so powerfully of human gratitude and of God’s astonishing gratuitousness. A Visitation spirituality cannot be true to itself if it isn’t an extraordinary school of gratefulness, of consciousness of the central place of gratuitousness in human experience; Mary and Elizabeth are grateful hearts; Mary and Elizabeth can’t get over how God is super-generous with his gifts; how our lives are founded on God’s gratuitousness.

A Lebanese philosopher born in Egypt, René Habachi, has spoken eloquently about the gratuitous dimensions of the human condition:

Gratuitousness alone will remain - and with it all the expressions it has taken since the creation of the world. That is the unveiling of the apocalypse: the reversal of the "for" into the "against" and of the "against" into the "for". All that was motivated uniquely by exclusively temporal necessities will end up in nothingness, and all that sprung out of gratuitousness will appear as a growing and irreplaceable presence. Then will rise, from the contingent values of time, the necessary sun of gratuitousness. Gratuitousness was the unique necessary. There was no other necessity than gratuitousness."

Visitation spirit calls us to develop and encourage in every human being an attitude of gratitude, of thanksgiving. I think that it is Master Eckhart who says that if our only prayer is "Thank you" that is enough. Maybe he realized how fundamental gratitude is. And I would say that forgiveness is never far behind thanksgiving.

Mary and Elizabeth were asked to trust in God and knew deeply that the humanly impossible is possible for God. Visitation spirituality is hope against all hope. I always carry in my bag two quotations, one from G.K.Chesterton and one from Edith Stein. Chesterton reminds us that:

^1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, L’inaptitude au dialogue in Langage et vérité (Paris, Gallimard, 1995)
^2. Peter Emberley, Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada’s Universities (Penguin, 1996)
^3. Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another. Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (Berrett-Koehker Publishser Inc. 2002)
^4. Gabor Csepregi, L’aptitude B la conversation in Koinônia 13 (CollPge Dominicain, Ottawa, 1996)
^5. Michaël Oakeshott, "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind" in Rationalism in Politics (London, Methuen & Co., 1962)