When Elie Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, having also been in Birkenau, Auschwitz and Buna, he imposed a ten-year vow of silence upon himself before trying to describe what had happened to him and over six million Jews. He believed that to try to write of the experience was to cheapen the memory of the suffering of those who had died - so unbelievably horrible was it. He was persuaded to break his self-imposed silence because he came to believe that to forget the past and the evil that had taken place was a greater dishonoring of the dead.

In his book, "Night" he speaks about how he came to be the sensitive person he was, how he tried to find God and how he "lost" God, until he discovered himself anew. Speaking of his early search in childhood he writes:

I found a master (to initiate me in the mysteries of the Cabbala) for myself, and Moshe the Beadle.

He had noticed me one day at dusk, when I was praying.

"Why do you weep when you pray?" he asked me, as though he had known me a long time.

"I don't know why," I answered, greatly disturbed.

The question had never entered my head. I wept because - because of something inside me that felt the need for tears. That was all I knew.

"Why do you pray?" he asked me, after a moment.

Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe? "I don't know why," I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. "I don't know why."

After that day I saw him often. Moshe the Beadle explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

"We raise ourselves towards God by the questions we ask God," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. We question God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!"

"And why do you pray, Moshe?" I asked him.

"I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

My Brothers, what a wonderful insight into my role as leader: Pray to the God within me that God will give me the strength to ask the right questions. Jesus of Nazareth was a great questioner. It would be a profitable exercise to put down all the questions he asked: Who do you say I am? What of those men proved neighbor to him? Philip, do you still not know me? Can you drink the cup that I will drink? Has no one condemned you?

A recent book of essays in memory of Joan Chittister speaks of the important questions for the 21st Century. The writers make cases for a variety ranging from peace to globalization to ecology to justice and women's rights. What are the big questions we Christian Brothers need to ask today? I suggest that one of the biggest is the one implicit in the Seven Chapter Insights: Who is God for me?

Jesus of Nazareth was at pains to get people to see the God that he experienced daily. It was not the God of the holy that aspects of contemporary Judaism preached. We are all indeed called to be holy, but it is not the holiness of the Old Testament, which implies separation from the wicked. It is the scandalous holiness of Christ, who embraces the impure, the wicked, the weak, the failed and the dead. The God of Jesus was immersed in the plight of humanity - that is the meaning of the Incarnation. Or as we were told on Monday, "Humanity is good enough for God". What does that mean for me?

Let us take this a little further. "To be a Christian Brother is to receive a precious gift which invites us to walk the Emmaus way into the unfolding mystery of our quest for God."

To walk into the unfolding mystery of our quest for God - Abraham did that. When I look at his story I recognize that the invitation from God was to disassociate himself from his present reality. Because we know something of the way that God talks to us in the daily events of our lives, we know that Abraham heard God speaking to him in the dissatisfactions of his life. His life was barren, his wife was barren, and he was living among a people who believed in a multitude of gods. Unlike most of us, Abraham decided to do something about it. He began the walk into discovering who this God who called him was. It is only by moving that Abraham will be able to have children and thus fulfil the "spiritual mission" that God is sending him on. While he knew that he must leave, he did not yet know his destination.

The Second call to journey comes 250 verses after the first. There is more learning now, more understanding of the mystery of God. There is a big difference between belief in a God who rewards and protects, and belief in God simply because God is God. The difference can be discerned in those who say, after they have experienced some tragedy, "I can no longer believe in God." Such a person never believed in God but in God's protection, and that faith was disillusioned - God did not help!

The second Lekh Lekha, which comes 250 verses after the first Lekh Lekha, which begins with God saying, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you" (Gen,22:2).

In the first Lekh Lekha, God promised Abraham that God would make his name great and cause him to become a great nation with offspring as numerous as the stars in the heavens. Now, in this second Lekh Lekha, Abraham is asked to forgo the fulfillment of all of these promises and to give up his dreams and his future.

Brothers, I give this only as an example. But somewhere in here is the story of the Christian Brothers. If we are to enter into the journey where we discover a little bit about of God, we must walk on God's terms.

I invite each of you today: To reflect daily on how your life interfaces with our sacred story. That is how you will receive the new wine. To look carefully at your personal and community life-style. Holiness does not sit easily at laden tables or splendid homes. It does not mix with habits that are more easily associated with the privileged classes of society. If you are for Yahweh then worship him, if for Baal, then worship him. To continue to spend time as Teams to reflect on the Chapter Insights. Make this a priority if you wish to have something genuine to offer your brothers and sisters. The greatest gift of leadership you can offer those you serve is to tell your story and listen to theirs. All else can be done by others. You and I are the storytellers, we keep the story alive and fan the flames of energy and help keep memory alive.

Nikos Kazanzkis wrote, "I asked the almond tree to tell me of God, and she blossomed."

With the pierced heart: pierced through by the godlessness of life, pierced through by the folly of love, pierced through by lack of success, pierced through by the experience of his own wretchedness and profound unreliability . . .

Jesus is the man with pierced heart because he is to lead us to the very core of our existence, to our inmost heart, because he can only do so if he has found his own heart; because he and others can only find this center of existence, the heart, if they accept its being pierced, pierced by the incomprehensibility of love that is pleased to conquer only in death.

I am so small I can

Barely be seen.

How can this great

Love be inside me?

Look at your eyes.

They are so small,

But they see enormous things.

(Rumi)

- Address by Br Philip Pinto, Congregation Leader, to the members of the Leadership Teams - Oceania and India - in Adelaide, Friday 7th February 2003