Expanding the Tent

Our prayer during community days in June focused on the four “pillars” that give us an inside view of our Dominican charism. Another metaphor is the beauty of four shades of light within the whiteness that pieces the darkness: Common Life, Common Prayer, Study, and the Mission of proclaiming the just word.

Long ago we learned that common life meant the sharing of budgets, of food, of living space. What will common life mean as we enter the time after our 800^th Anniversary as an Order? I suggest we are being challenged to “widen the tent” of our early understanding.

We live in a world of instantaneous communication. We can be in Syria during the evening news grieving with the refugees fighting famine in their camps. We are no longer just living in our community residences. We are citizens of a world in great pain. Called to this wider sense of family, we extend our love and prayer to wherever it is needed. No boundaries prevent us. We can go to the fringes, to the frontiers. While lovingly aware of our closest local common life, we can widen our tents…we can widen our understanding of common life to our suffering brothers and sisters worldwide.  The evening news just might be our opening to expanding the tent of our common life as we live our way into our next hundred years.