Note: This is a reflection from one of the participants of the Workshop on Communal Discernment and Ignatian Decision Making. Mr. John Bilog is a faculty member of the Ateneo de Manila Senior High School.
My experience at WISL 2 was like that of a refugee being taken in by the openness and hospitality of strangers with a shared mission.
I would first like to share a bit about my context before I headed to the mountains of Antipolo for this week-long workshop. The K-12 education reform has cast my school community out of what we considered our home as far back as we could remember. New structures had to be established to meet the demands of a changing landscape initiated by our government, and these came with a steep price. Longstanding traditions were uprooted, familiar practices were displaced, and all our comfort zones were stripped away. Adjusting has been harder for us who have been with the school for a longer time, as we hold more memories and feel more sentiment towards how we were as a community in the now seemingly distant past. Our administration has held sessions on transition management and venues for feedback. But more and more of us have become concerned and ask about decisions that were made as we go along the way.
With the light at the end of this rough tunnel nowhere in sight, I journeyed to Antipolo to search for what could help my people through this workshop on communal discernment.
The weeklong experience of WISL 2 was graced with quality conversations. School leaders across the globe engaged in honest discussions about different topics that usually involved difficult situations such as mine. People were very open in sharing and listened without judgment. Ideas were brought to the table, with the genuine intention of helping one another cope especially with the most challenging aspects of the work. The workshop became rich with perspectives from different countries, and we were able to see both the differences and similarities of how we proceed given our cultural contexts. We learned from the different sessions facilitated by Fr. Johnny Go, S.J. and Ms. Eva Galvey, but mostly from one another’s experiences. Perhaps most importantly, we were all engaged in prayer the entire time, affirming that despite most of us being strangers, we were all one in Christ and in His mission. The experience as a whole was very nourishing and prone to enlightenment. It felt like being offered shelter, a blanket, and some warm soup after walking in from a storm.
But I knew that the workshop was only a temporary refuge, and the mission now is to initiate this same experience in my own community that is currently in transit. The road ahead will once again be riddled with obstacles. For one thing, we are not strangers to our own people and are always subjected to some prejudice. Second, we may have some members with unaddressed needs that have festered throughout the years, hindering the openness to actively listen to one another. Third, we may be overlooking the power of prayer to predispose us for communal discernment and not just to express our individual intentions. In all these, some tough questions lay before us as we institute more changes in our school. Perhaps the most important one is if we are still able to engage in conversations that lead to communal discernment—as our response will tell if we are still an Ignatian community throughout all these changes.