If you join this Family you must ask, “Why ? To do what ?”

• I think the first thing the order would like to offer to you is just to share our life, to live with us. When Jesus calls his disciples he doesn't ask them if they agree with the programme or the ideas. He just tells them, “Come and see. Join us and see.” I think this is what we want to tell you: “Come and see.” We want to offer you the chance to share our life, the life of our communities.

  And this also means very different things. In some parts of the order we have only small communities like the one I was in in Algeria with Pierre Claverie, Jean-Pierre and François. There were four or five of us. It was a very nice community. There was friendship.

  Sometimes you have bigger groups - teaching communities like San Esteban or Oxford. Sometimes you have worker priests. Michel, who is here, has been a worker priest for many years in France.

  In our families, in our communities we have wonderful people, we have brilliant people and we have wounded people. We have people who suffer a lot. But this is family.

  I remember once in the novitiate in Brazil I met the previous provincial, Domingo. He was provincial in the time of the dictatorship in Brazil and he was very courageous and very strong. Now he is an old man. He has totally lost his mind. He doesn't know where he is. But the novices take care of him every day. They go to visit him. They talk to him. And every day after lunch they have ping-pong and they take Domingo in his wheelchair with them just to help him. And I thought, “This is wonderful”. In their novitiate perhaps they don't have beautiful talks about community life but they have a chance to live fraternity, to live out the meaning of community, just to be kind to the old Domingos.

  So this is what we would like you to do with us - to live community life and to have an experience. Living in community is not only because it's convenient to have your clothes washed or your food prepared. It's really because a community is a place for charity. It's a place for forgiveness. Yvon was in Burundi last week. You know what happens. Yvon has lived 25 years in Rwanda. You can imagine what it means for our friars and sisters, Tutsi and Hutu, to live together in the same house where there is so much violence, so many wounds and so much death in their families.

  Forgiveness. Even in Santa Sabina we have to try to forgive each other. But this is nice. It means charity and love. Sometimes I think we need imagination in our communities and you could help us with that as Timothy has already told you. We are afraid sometimes. We are used to doing things in certain ways. We need to open our communities and you could help us to do that. So the first thing I think you could do with us is share our life and share our community.

• The second thing we could try to do together is to pray together, to share our prayer. You know the old motto of the Order: “Contemplata Aliis Tradere” (to bring to others what you have contemplated). As you know, Dominican prayer is a community prayer. We pray together. And when we pray together it's not only reading books, it's going through the word of God, having in our minds all the experience of the world and all the suffering of the world. And often when I was a student in Paris, in Saint Jacques, I liked to hear Father Chenou telling us every day, “You have to read two books: the Bible and the newspapers.” Because it's through that that you can have together the possibility of really praying, of praying reality. It's what Felicísimo Martínez, the brilliant Spanish Dominican, calls open-eyed spirituality. To dare to open our eyes to the reality of the world but with the love of God and with the hope of God, which sometimes is difficult. So, join us for that also. To pray with us, to try to be with us, to share what life is.

  We were together in Brazil a few weeks ago and we visited these terrible places of death in central Brazil and we had a meeting of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Brazilian Dominican Family. It was wonderful because we started with two hours of prayer. The friars and sisters and the lay Dominicans came from many different parts of Brazil. Some had travelled thirty and thirty-five hours by bus just to come for a meeting and we started by drawing the map of Latin America. Each of us was invited to bring some earth to say, “This is the place I love. This is the place that I am worried about. This is the place I would like to fight for. Earth.”

  And we shared and one person said, “Oh, I am very worried about Peru.” Another said, “Haiti is a terrible situation.” Another said, “Oh, Argentina. So much violence.” And after that there was prayer. They said, “Now this is a reality”. There is a deep thirst. Let us bring some flowers because in the sadness of the world there are prophets, there are witnesses. There are people who are suddenly able to bring light, like Pierre was able to do in Algeria. In this crazy situation they say, “Well, I will not give up&” So we celebrated our prophets. Each one brought flowers. And we said, “Oscar Romero was a wonderful prophet for me in San Salvador.”; And each one named someone who for them was a prophet and each one brought their flowers and explained why. And after that they said, “To grow we need water.” And each one was invited to pour water. (It became a bit messy towards the end). And we had water and water means we are fighting for something. We have to do something together. It was prayer. And finally we were invited to bring lights, candles, signs of hope. This is what I mean by sharing our prayer. It's not just a matter of reciting psalms for ten minutes and then it's over. It's really a question of addressing the sadness, the difficulty of the world as it is but with our hearts and minds full of the love of God.

  So this is why I think you are very welcome because we need creativity and we need you to help us to pray in this way.

  And I see all around the world in many countries, many places where people are trying to do that. Sometimes in Rome we like to go in the evening to a community of Italian lay people and they really try to address the challenge of poverty in Italy. Even in Italy, nice Italy, there are poor people. They have soup kitchens and every evening those people who are journalists or who are teaching in the university or whatever, come just to help the poor. They have a shelter for people with AIDS. And afterwards they go to the church and it is packed every night of the year. People say that young people don't go to church and so on but this is not true. But you have to look in the right places. And this is a good place. So join us for that reason also. To share our prayer.

• And the last thing I would like to say about what we could share together is, I think, formation. If you want to be able to address the difficult changes of the world we are living in, without being fatalistic, being full of hope, of charity, we need to be prepared. And we have the chance in our Order to be prepared for that because we have masters; not only the Master of the Order but Schillebeeckx, Chenou and many people who are able to teach us, to show us a way. And formation doesn't only mean studies to be a scholar. It means to hear what are the questions of the world, what are its problems and to try to address that gently but firmly every day. As Chenou said:“Every day the Bible and the newspapers.”

  And because it is difficult we need to be prepared. We need to be prepared not only intellectually but also humanly and spiritually. And we need to be prepared to welcome the questions. There is a beautiful quotation of Lacordaire: “God gave me the grace to understand the century I loved so much.” And I think we need this. We need to be able to welcome the questions and not be afraid. But we also need to be able to bring answers. We need to be able to say something, not with easy words as Timothy said, but to really be able to teach. In the Gospel you see in every page that the people crowded around Jesus “and he taught them”. He taught them. He had something to tell them.

  In our world we see a lot of false prophets, gurus and many kinds of very strange people. Theirs are not real answers. We need to have real answers and for that we need places to prepare people, not only in the universities but places where we really study together the challenges of the world, we pray and we share our hope.