Building Integrity for Mission
The skills associated with prioritizing are significant for religious life and for living our missionary identity with integrity. When we sharpen our focus and direction, energy becomes available for action in those priority areas. In Section 10 of Self-Understanding, we will now delve into the dynamics of prioritization and examine how these dynamics influence and are influenced by our passion.
December is an important month as we celebrate that our life in Christ begins with the Incarnation. It also marks the beginning of our own history as Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. The responsibility of continuing to add to this extensive missionary energy, is in the hands of every MSC alive today. We celebrate with great joy and gratitude this fact that God loves us. This love empowers in us the responsibility and vulnerability of giving our lives for others.
This paper was presented to the participants of the 2021 General Conference to reflect on the process of deep change through generative listening in the congregation. It continues the process of Spirituality of the Heart began at the 2021 General Conference. This paper was written by Chris Chaplin msc.
Text of talk given at the 2019 General Conference in Busan, Korea, on SPIRITUALITY OF THE HEART: A PROCESS APPROACH. This paper was written by Chris Chaplin msc
Continuing on from Section 7 we now look more closely at how needs can appear to be motivating us in ways that seem to have integrity but in fact are inconsistent with the values of the Gospel. Our self-understanding grows in service fo the Mission of the Heart of Christ the more interior freedom we discover through coming into healthy self-awareness.
This is the sixth section in this series of reflections on self-understanding for the sake of mission. In this section we discuss in more detail the differing dimensions of human needs, in order to gain some understanding of how we, as MSC, are influenced by our own needs.
Religious vocation is a complex reality. As we try to live our vocation with ever deepening integrity we discover that not all our motivations are always what they seem. Even as we believe ourselves to be acting out of the highest religious and spiritual values possible to us when we make our vocational choices, we are not always aware of the ways in which those choices are influenced by social factors that require adherence to certain norms and come with a personal cost. Social psychologists have found people are highly susceptible to social influences as demonstrated by classic experiments in obedience and conformity. Why do people conform?
In Section 3 we looked at each of the motivational forces; Values and Needs. Now we will consider the various values, that mould and shape our whole life of faith as MSC, what Jules Chevalier calls the sentiments of the Heart of Christ. Our starting place is to understand the nature of values and the different kinds of values that influence human behaviour.
Understanding ourselves is an important part of giving our best to the Mission. In the interplay between our felt needs and the values we aspire to live, we discover the extent to which we have interior freedom and the motivation to live the life of the Gospel. As MSC we are called to live the sentiments of the Heart of Jesus. Knowing the boundaries around our needs and how to maintain them in a healthy way is vital to living from the heart of Jesus.
This is the second section of a series on deepening self-understanding in service of the Mission. In order to live our lives with a degree of ‘normal’ emotional integrity it is necessary to develop the capacity to ‘step-back’ from the self stuck in reactive emotional states.