The impact of liberating education – Sr. Sandra

The impact of liberating education on the practice of social justice after 60 years of CND presence in Honduras

This year we are celebrating 60 years of walking with the Honduran people. Many feelings come to mind when we look back at the path we have followed… most of them are of gratitude and joy for the things we have experienced in the mission as sisters working in parish ministries with women, children, young people, and families. We are also committed to a liberating education reaching the poorest and most excluded.

I have been a member of this Congregation for 22 years. I can say that, since the beginning, the experience has been very significant. When I met the sisters, I was motivated by their missionary spirit, simplicity of life, and dedication to the poorest of the poor in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods of Tegucigalpa, the city I come from.

I was fascinated by Marguerite Bourgeoys's way of welcoming me into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus. I discovered in her a woman of faith, attentive to the signs of the times, courageous, capable of asking for help, searching, discerning, and welcoming the poor, especially women, children, the sick, in short, everyone. That was something I wanted to live in religious life.

The sisters were joyful, dynamic, and courageous women, true daughters of Saint Marguerite who welcomed and encouraged me with their witness and dedication to the poorest of the poor. A few days before my official entry, I had the joy of celebrating with the sisters the 300 years of Marguerite Bourgeoys with a very meaningful Eucharist at San Martín de Porres Church in Tegucigalpa.

It would be impossible to write all the experiences that I have lived throughout these 22 years as a sister of the Congregation in the different missions that have been entrusted to me. Some of the things that I learned during this time that I can share with you are to understand what it truly means to belong to an international community and the prophetic sense that community life has in today's individualistic world. All these experiences lived during all these years helped me to develop my sense of belonging to the Congregation and to mature and grow in different aspects of my personal life.

In Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Region, part of our mission and challenge is to be a significant presence of constant discernment in order to discover in these new emerging social groups an invitation to renew our call, to remember that we are part of the people and are called, like them, to live radical and profound transformations to be a coherent witness to the radical following of Jesus and his Kingdom project.

As CND Sisters, we try to reflect on these  three essential elements:

• Option for the poor and closeness to the people through liberating education
• Prayer and communion with God from our experience as consecrated women
• Radical following of Jesus and his project of the KINGDOM which leads us to a concrete commitment based on love.

By constantly renewing ourselves we make the hopeful effort to live in the way of Mary at her Visitation-Pentecost, following Christ with our life of "inner cloister" and "journeying life" for the Mission, as our Holy Foundress used to say.

We are invited to remember our Charism and Spirituality. Remembering is an expression with strong biblical echoes, which does not simply leave us in the past, but engages us today in our daily lives. Interpreting the past in a creative and meaningful way. Remembering is finding the common thread that unifies, motivates, enriches, and inspires our vocation. Memory must lead us to the two sources that brought about our mission: the person of Jesus and the Gospel on one hand; our Foundress, the first Sisters, and the charism they passed on to us on the other. Charismatic memory is more a love story than a theory. It shows the intervention of God in the past when our Congregation was taking its first steps. This intervention has continued throughout our history for more than 400 years and gives us the certainty that God is still present in our here and now and will be present in the future, revealing his providence and protection. It is a collective memory that gives us a sense of identity and belonging and must inspire our mission in all its forms.

Our God is a God who walks with his people, and is always in motion… Jesus came close to the poor, lived among them, loved them, was sensitive to their sufferings, consoled them, and condemned the injustice and oppression committed against them. Christ loved us to death, and loving Christ can mean the same for us if we want the mystical-prophetic religious life to be a bearer of hope.

In our time we are facing uncertain and particularly challenging signs. They invite us, therefore, to a discernment that allows us to go to the essential, without getting entangled in the secondary and circumstantial. They call us to take a look at what is to come, starting from the present without forgetting our roots. It seems to me that we are called to live the life and writings of our foundress Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys and the history of the first sisters who preceded us. Many of them were open to missionary and educational adventures that seem heroic to us today, as prophetic memory that commits us to our here and now, starting from the reality we are living in today.

This is our dangerous memory, this is our mission and the mission of each of our works in the CND. We were born as an instrument of salvation, integral salvation that embraces the whole person, all people, but with a very particular tenderness and as a first option for the poor, excluded, abandoned, women and children, and inspired by contemplating Mary in the encounter with her cousin Elizabeth.