Communio Calling
Communio Calling
Living Discernment
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Living Discernment is the focus our latest episode. Following on from Dr Carmel Posa's earlier episode and her insights on Benedict and Discernment, host Gabrielle Sinclair welcomes Carmel back to deep a little deeper and unpack what it means to cultivate discernment within contemporary educational communities.
Welcome to Good Samaritan Education's podcast, Communio Calling. My name's Gabrielle Sinclair, and I'll be your host. Today we are really going to dig into our formation theme for 2026, and I'm going to be joined by Carmel Poser, whose journey really weaves teaching monastic studies and benediction spirituality. Carmel's work, as many of you will know, as she's no stranger to the podcast, has taken her from high school classrooms to doctoral research on monastic women and now teaches across a number of tertiary institutes, both in Australia, Rome, and in America. But today with her, we will be exploring living discernment, not just as a decision-making tool, but a lifelong practice of deep listening to life, prayer, and community. Today we'll also be really challenged in this conversation to reimagine our educational spaces as hospitable oases of silent pondering, listening to the world, mutual obedience, and loving conversation. So let's begin. Well, Carmel, welcome back to Communio Calling. You are certainly no stranger to our podcast, so welcome back. Thank you, Gabriel. It's wonderful to be back, really.
SPEAKER_00It's a fun time for me. Yeah, having a chat. Oh, good.
SPEAKER_02Now you'll remember that communio calling, we always begin with story because as we listen, we discover how we are all woven together in one story and how God shows up in our lives. So by telling story, we're hearing each other's and we start to lean into those shared connections and our incarnational reality and the many different ways we belong together and are called to go together along the path of the gospel. So Carmel, I know you shared your origin story as it were with us on the podcast before. So I wonder if you might share a bit about your academic journey, that being a significant part of your story and some of the things that have sparked your curiosity along the path.
SPEAKER_00Yes, well, it was a significant moment in my life. I was in Adelaide teaching in a high school, 14 to 15 year olds, loving it, and doing a theology degree part-time at night. So it was a fair bit of work. But then this weekend came where the Benedictine Union came to Adelaide and they had a party at our place one night. And over a drink, the superior came up to me and pulled me aside and she said, So what are you doing these days? And so I told her, and she said, Oh, the study you're doing, this theology degree, what are you going to do with that? And I said, Well, I think I'm going to teach RE a bit better than I do now. And she said, No, no, she said no. I was a bit taken aback. She said, We'd like you to do some more study. And I just was gobsmacked, really. And she said, What about scripture study or monastic studies? I was so taken aback. This had came right out of the blue. And I said, mumbling, monastic studies. And he said, Righto, off to St. John's with you. Look into it and get back to me. And that's where it all began, really. St. John's Collegeville, where you can do a master's in monastic studies. Just stop you there for a second.
SPEAKER_02Explain to our listeners what the Benedictine Union is, that gathering, who was there, what was the significance of it?
SPEAKER_00Back in the 80s, we discovered that, you know, the Benedictine world in Australia was very small. And so they formed a union to really support one another. So it would be the monks in New South Wales, the nuns that used to be at Pennant Hills now down at Jambaroo, ourselves, the Tarawarra, Cistercian monks, New Norcia, so all of those who were following the rule of Benedict. And so the superiors of each of those orders meet every year at what's called a Benedictine Union meeting. Chirunga, the Benedictine magazine, is run by the Benedictine Union, and we have a studies day normally every year that we invite people to. So that's what the Benedictine Union is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thanks, Carol. Most of our school libraries, or certainly the good STEM library at Glebe has a catalogue of all of the copies that you can have a look at it at your leisure.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and it's actually on the web.
SPEAKER_02Oh, they're all on the web too. Excellent.
SPEAKER_00Yep. So anyway, a year later I found myself driving up the freeway in Minnesota to St. John's University thinking, what the hell am I doing here? And two of the most happy years of my life really were spent there studying. I found a great love of all things monastic and Benedictine there, because it was then run by monks. So made lots of Benedictine friends from around the world, kept in contact with them all those years. Came back to teach back in a school, was a bit lost, and then was put at Notre Dame in Western Australia. I was really a tutor most of the time there because, in order to teach at a university, you had to have a PhD. But it started me off on a PhD track. So teaching there, and I ended up doing a PhD through the Melbourne College of Divinity, which is now the University of Divinity. And it was in a medieval monastic woman. It sort of continued the whole thrust of what I had been studying. Then eventually that led me to help start off the Institute for Benedictine Studies at New Norcia, which again led me to YTU to teach there. And now I find myself teaching back at St. John's, Minnesota every two years, either via Zoom or being actually there. And on the staff of the Monastic Formation Formators program in Rome as well, and editor of Chirunga, the Benedictine magazine here in Australasia. So that's really the story in a nutshell. But it was an exciting story.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. It's in some ways a roller coaster of discovery. What would you say as you kind of carved out your different elements of your study has really like sparked the wonder in you to continue?
SPEAKER_00The people I work with, the students I work with, it's a never-ending learning process. It's always open to surprises that things come out of left field and you think, oh God, I never knew that. I've always said a degree tells you that you know something, a master's tells you that you know nothing at all. And a PhD tells you that you know something about one thing. And so an academic career really leads you down this wonderful path of lifelong learning. And you learn not just through your own study. I think I learn more from the people that I interact with, both the academy itself and the students that I come in contact with. So at the moment, I'm teaching a wonderful bunch of seminarians and their ideas spark the imagination and you get lots of questions. I like questions more than I like answers. I think that's what academia has taught me and religious life.
SPEAKER_02Wonderful. Well, I'm hoping you can have a few answers to questions today, even if they're just questions again, answer my questions. But it's all really about stories. So let's go on that ride together. Continuing on a little bit from the keynote that you gave at our triennial conference last year, that really is a background and grounds this conversation. So those of our listeners who haven't listened to it yet, we published it on the podcast earlier this year. So have a background listen if you want more out of this conversation as well. To start our conversation today, living discernment through the lens of prayer and community is our formation theme for GSE this year. And I'm really interested to hear how we've framed this theme with putting living in front of discernment. How does this focus the disposition from a Benedictine perspective? Okay, not just simply discernment, but living discernment.
SPEAKER_00Look, I thought about this because often discernment can be equated with a process of coming to a decision. But in the monastic tradition, although it's still a process, it's a process of coming to know yourself more intensely through a life of prayer and community. It's through this deep listening to life, listening to life through the lens particularly of scriptures, first and foremost, therefore listening to the voice of God, this is discernment, within your deepest self. What's happening there? What's going on? It's the stillness, the quiet. It's in the events of everyday life with other people. It's in the messiness, it's in the noise, it's in the joys and the sorrows that you're listening to, discerning, knowing yourself, knowing God in all of it, knowing others. It's about listening then to the movements of God in your own life, but also in the lives of those around you. You're listening to that, your immediate community, no matter what that community might be. And this ends up then expanding your whole world perspective. And it expands into listening to the world, listening to the cosmos. So this discernment then is a process to be sure, but it's a lifelong process of living in this particular way, of attention, of leaning towards, of listening, of thinking deeply. So it's always listening to. There's always something to listen to, community, circumstances to listen to. So it's changing all the time. It's changing you all the time if it's living deeply. And God's always in every circumstance anyway.
SPEAKER_02So it's very much almost a disposition of a way of being rather than, as you say, a process. It's that open-hearted and you know, as the rule starts, the listening in that deepest sense to life.
SPEAKER_00Yes. It's not just a way of being, it's a way of becoming. There's me saying it's continual questions because you don't actually ever get there. There's no way that you get to a point where you're a discerning person. You continue along that path. And that's why it's a life of discernment.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Thanks, Carmel. When we were part of choosing that theme, that's something that we really wanted our community to come to understand more. When we talk about discernment, when we want to be a discerning community, it's not just about that process, it's about that way of living together, that disposition towards God's mission.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And it means the openness to change, conversion, transformation, always.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because if there's no more need for transformation in your life, then you know you better be careful because you'll stop breathing in it pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_02Too true. Yeah. So then when we're talking about communal discernment from this living discernment perspective that we're talking about, it really trusts that when we come together, the right people are there, that everybody has the capacity to tap into the divine and individually contribute to how the community receives God's guidance. It also kind of assumes that the leadership or whoever's running the process is attentive to the process itself and to the listening. And that the rule, as you've said, is close. But I guess in our contemporary context, in the context of Good Samaritan Education, we're a lay leadership, lay organization where we don't have, you know, the background of years of monastic training and daily rhythm of monastic prayer in common. So, how do we build that and form capacity in our community to live this way of communal discernment to share this journey and this mission we're on together?
SPEAKER_00I really like this question, but there's one thing I want to talk about first of all, because I'm really not sure I agree with you that discernment assumes that the right people are gathered. You probably mean it in a different way than what I read it, but rather it assumes that humanity is messy. So there's no right people, they're just people, all made in the image and likeness of God, all holding a piece of the wisdom, no matter what I may think of them or how wise I might think I am myself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So this is this messy thing. Discernment's such a messy thing. We talk about in the ideal that the right people are there, that the superiors or the lay leaders or whatever will listen intently and you know be receptive to what's going on. The fact is, and this is key, it's a messy thing. It's an eminently human thing. Oh, I don't disagree with you at all.
SPEAKER_02And I'm glad you said that. Because I guess where I was coming from in that context is that when we gather for a process, somehow you're called into that space. And your presence there is absolutely the right thing. And so the right people are in the space to have the conversation, not in an exclusive way. No, it's absolutely messy, and we need it to be messy in some ways. We have to let go and let it be messy.
SPEAKER_00I think so. And I think that is creative of who we are when we allow it to be messy, right? It because it's going to remain messy even when we try to make it nice and neat.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So really to build that capacity of discernment in communities, no matter what they are, no matter what community you're talking about, is first of all to take a commitment, make this commitment to building the community with all its mess. Not leaving the mess out, but building it with the mess, because that's what creates the beautiful picture, the weave, the colour. And so that means letting go of believing that I personally have all the answers, you know, which is hard for most of us, huh? Yeah. It means admitting that I'm not divine, which again, when you really think about it, it's pretty hard. And that I'm a creature just like everyone else. And thus I'm a sinner just like everyone else. And that I'm simply on the way to becoming my true self. To do that, that takes others. You can't do that on your own. That would be the grounding of it. But seriously, most of us think we do have the answers, as I said. And if only people would listen to me, you know, so many of the difficulties of the world would be solved. It would so be easy if it was a dictatorship and I was at the top and telling them what to do. So basically, it's a slow reorientation of my life to what I am made of the earth, made of mud, made of stuff. And to this I will return. You know, Ash Wednesday's so sobering, you know, and no one is exempt from that. And Benedict calls that humility. It takes this humility, you might call it a prime monastic indicator, some people call it a virtue. Humility is not something you practice, humility is something you become. There are indications of it by the way you interact with other people, by the way you believe that they too are made of the same stuff as you are. So I think that's where it starts. And I think it comes down to firstly coming to truly believe that, you know, really coming to that conversion point where you truly believe that you don't have all the answers and that other people, no matter how unlikely, have some wisdom that's worth listening to. And that can happen in any community, it happens in families. You know, when you sit around dinner table with your children, I'm sure. It's hard sometimes to listen to some of the interesting things that come out of children's mouths. But often they come out with an extraordinary piece of wisdom. So it's worth listening to. So in terms of leadership, this means the inclusion of the most unlikely, even the toilet cleaner, which we don't think about. And I was and you were too, Gabriel. We were both at the opening of the new building at Santa Maria College the other day. And what struck me that was key in the ceremony to celebrate the building was the handing over of the key, not to the principal but to the maintenance man. The key was handed over ceremoniously to the maintenance man, and that wasn't just practical, it was a recognition that maintenance was vital to the whole operation, to the whole itself. So inclusion of voices, no matter who they are, the least likely, can lead to a transformation in your whole understanding of who you are as a human being and your whole understanding of what it is to listen to the voice of God. And if leadership can do that, we wouldn't have any trumps in the world.
SPEAKER_02Yes, when we put out our invitations to programs, we always make it implicit, but I think it gets lost sometimes because schools think of their staff in compartmental ways sometimes. We're explicit about every member of staff is welcome to attend in a holistic staff formation or whether it's a staff retreat. Everyone from the person who holds the keys that opens the gate in the morning to the people that empties the bin all the way through to leadership are welcome. I mean, of course, it's an invitation, so sometimes they might not want to take up as well. But it's a very rare occasion when we get someone that's a bit outside of the box at our programs. But I absolutely delight in that when we do.
SPEAKER_00Of course, because it takes it in a new direction. That makes it far more exciting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, to completely different insights.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Different lens, different lens on what's going on, you know, and that expands your own understanding of life and your place within it all.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00If if leadership is the one with all the answers, well, the rest of us may as well not come because it doesn't give a sense that we are all made of the same stuff, that we're all community. It's a challenge.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely, because those leaders like myself or anyone else who's designing a process for dialogue or engagement, even with the best of intentions, there's factors of time and space and all those sort of things that take away some of the flexibility you'd like to insert into the process. And so there's always imperfect. It's such a challenge to make it authentic nonetheless, even when it's bound by things that are out of our control.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes, we're we're sort of production-oriented. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's a fixed date, we've got to have it done by this time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's a challenge, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And instead of, you know, human formative oriented, it is it is a huge challenge, particularly when I know what direction we should be going in.
SPEAKER_02Well, yes, lots of the eyes in the room that absolutely know where it's supposed to be going.
SPEAKER_00I think that's what discernment sort of reveals to you, how eye-centered your life can be. And when you really try to live this in the depth of your being, it is decentering, it is it's destabilizing as well. It's frightening. We won't get anything done. I mean, that's been my experience with when I was much younger, nun. Somebody needs to make a decision.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's finding a balance in when does it need to move on and when does it need to stay in the mess.
SPEAKER_00Realistically, all move on. That's right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So formation and creating the capacity of communities to do this, it relies on this gradual shaping this, living this out through prayer and listening of scripture attendance or awareness of the scope or the pointers of the way that the rule gives us. Many of our leaders today who want to inhabit this tradition in our context are also navigating, you know, complex professional and personal responsibilities. So if you were to give uh three priorities for fostering this Benedictine way of life for communities today, where would you focus your energy and why?
SPEAKER_00You know, I sat with this and tried to think of three things in particular that anybody could do. They're not exciting, they're very difficult because of the type of context we find ourselves in, and we all do, you know, nuns do too, production-oriented, academic, whatever. But I think that number one for me is praying with the scriptures every day. Now anybody can do that. Some way of praying with the scriptures every day. So listening to the word, focus beyond ourselves and to the ultimate, to listening to the wisdom. And it's not just a matter of reading it or studying the scriptures, it's seeing life. It brings you to see life through the lens of scriptures, through God's eyes. It's a gradual thing, it doesn't happen tomorrow. I can remember being on a team for a youth group, Antioch. Do you remember that way back? Oh, yeah. They're still around in pockets. Yep. I went to the nun on Antioch. And, you know, they wanted to know some tips for praying. So we did Lexio sessions. And about three weeks after I did that, one of them rang me up and she said, Sister Carmel, Sister Carmel, I need to come and see you. And I said, What's the matter? She said, I'm putting that Bible away. I'm putting it in a place where I can't find it. And I said, Why? Because it's changing my life and it's frightening. I thought, isn't that wonderful? If you're reading the scriptures and it isn't challenging, then you're not reading them. And if it's not transformative, then you're not reading them deeply. So it's this slow process of seeing life through God's eyes. And that takes a lifetime of learning. And there are high moments, there are low moments. So with this, we also learn the ability to admit that we're wrong, you know, which is a real hard thing in leadership to admit that you're wrong and somebody else was right, and yet it's one of the most transformative moments. There's a wonderful bit in one of Thomas Merton's book. I think it's The Seeds of Contemplation, where it has a whole chapter on being wrong. And the word of God takes you that way. Of course it's frightening. That would be number one to me. It's this formative, transformative thing that happens with the you know steady, constant praying of the scriptures and allowing you to listen with God's ear. It's making time for creating the time. Making time for creating time. To listen intently to that silent, deep down place within each of us, the God center. There's a God center in each of us that's shouting. If only we would take the time and the space to listen. In a fast-paced world, that's really hard. So here in the silence. Though and you can build it in. Anyone can build it in. The surprising and sometimes frightening truth of life emerges. And last night I was watching Brian Cox be interviewed. He's the most extraordinary fellow. And he said that what happens is in life today that silence is drowned out by the vulgar noise of certainty. I mean it's an extraordinary phrase.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Silence is drowned out by the vulgar noise of certainty. He's picked up something that's at the heart of silence in the rule. There's nothing certain about God. We can never know God. We can never know the direction God may lead us in when we sit down with the scriptures. But we know that it is a compassionate, embracing love that is coming with it. And to be open to that by creating silent spaces, silent times, you know, no matter how short. That I think is number two for me in this whole process that anybody can do. And number three is real practical. Talk to people, listen to them, learn their stories like you were doing at the beginning of today. We often in today's world talk about ourselves ad nauseum so much that we miss the truth of others. We've got so much to say. When somebody else is talking, I often find myself thinking about how I'm going to respond rather than really leaning in and listening to them, embracing the other. And what we do when we do the opposite is instead of leaning in, we end up moving away and judging people rather than taking the story, the context of another. We fear them. We fear their difference. And one of the driving things of division in our world today is fear of the other. We underestimate their worth and their wisdom when we just listen to our own stories or tell our own stories. It's listening to others and their stories actually creates community. This is what prayer takes you to as well. Like prayer, it expands your being. It expands your becoming, your own truth. And that gets bigger and becomes an adventure with the divine rather than just stuck in your own little story.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, everything becomes expansive. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And this is really what Benedict's saying when he says that you compete with one another in obedience, with obedience being really grounded by that word listening and bearing with one another's burdens. You know, some people are very boring to listen to. You'll never understand them unless you do take the time and the space again to listen to other people. So that'd be the three things, I think.
SPEAKER_02Top three. Thank you. There's a lot there. Well, there's a lifetime there, isn't there?
SPEAKER_00There is. It's all ideal, doesn't always work so smoothly.
SPEAKER_02We are all still messy even when we have the ideal at our heart. Let's talk about your own experience. Looking back across important communal discernment moments that you've been a part of, what worked?
SPEAKER_00I I thought about this a long time too. And the first thing that came into my head was, well, it doesn't always mean getting your own way. Absolutely. In fact, it often means not getting your own way. But I think back to particular communal experiences of discernment and what worked. I think the time that really shaped me was when there was real care in the process, in the way that we had our conversations, that we were allowed to have conversations. And we've got this process of inviting each other into conversations in our discernment process where you don't speak, you invite somebody to speak, and then you wait to be invited. And there's no commenting first initially on each other's contributions, but this simple listening that's key, the leaning into what this person is saying and letting it happen slowly. But there's also time for not only vigorous and respectful, exciting and creative, exacting and draining rich conversation on top of that. But it begins with the respect of each voice on its own with no comment. I think that's been really an important development for us. And these moments are also, it doesn't go down well in a modern world. We have these moments in all of it where there's this punctuation with profound and deliberate silence and prayer. You don't just move on to the next person that talks, you stop. You take it into that deepest part within you, you think about what was said. So real sustained silence and prayer, particularly when we're preparing for a decision-making process, or be at an impasse, or when we're ready to decide. Prayer isn't something you just do, it permeates life. You know, pray ceaselessly, says one of the tools of good works, you know, and Thessalonians. So how do you do that? Well, you build in this silence. You know, there's nothing worse than going to church these days and the readings are done and there's no gap between them yet. Who remembers the readings? There's no time to take it in to you. Well, the same with our precious words of wisdom to each other. Take it in. She said something really remarkable there. We need to stop. Quiet. So when that's happened, and it does, in our processes, I think you know we've got it. We're understanding what this discernment in our living is really all about. But in all of that, I think what works is the ability to participate, the responsibility you have to participate. There's really no room to sit back and not participate. That doesn't work. Because nobody knows what you're thinking. Nobody understands why you end up taking the position that you take if you don't participate. So it's tossing around ideas, making sure we all understand each other from what perspective. No matter how you express it, some people are good at expressing, some people aren't. You don't stop them from expressing their ideas because you're offended by the way they express it. That's small-minded. That's not leaning into the other person, stopping for clarifications. So it includes wild ideas with enthusiasm, but throws nothing out. There's no hanging on to positions unless they hang on to them lightly. Hang on to it lightly. You never know what might change. Laying it all on the table, basically, that's when it works in my experience and has done. And it's fabulous because when you you ask me the question, how did it feel? Being heard, you get to know each other. It's not just something for you, but you realize, hey, they get me, or hey, I now get them. And something new and graced filled is in that getting to know each other, and you feel it. It's palpable in such a process. You can feel that there's this growth together. So I can remember that at such times I watch in wonder as my own thinking expands, and I'm never the same after such times. I'm changed irrevocably. It's it's spirit-filled, I think. It's a dynamic movement of change that's not coercive but transformative. We become together more of what we most desired, Christ-like to each other. And that's an indication of the action of the Holy Spirit. It's not always like that. Sometimes we miss steps along the way, sometimes we don't get all the information. Sometimes we argue with each other in you know irreconcilable ways like everybody else. But when it works, that's what happens.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I particularly like the invitation to speak. So it's not just the latter's get their voice in. You actually have to be invited to speak, which actually means that those that are less likely to are almost going to get heard first sometimes because you know that they need that prompting too. And I also imagine that creating that space in the dialogue stops what often happens in modern meetings that groupthink. Everyone just piles on because there hasn't been space for the processing, hasn't created your own individual space for your own creative thought and understanding.
SPEAKER_00It can be quite frightening because you actually hear yourself and what you're thinking when you're given that sort of space. And it means you're going to be reshaped. When you hear yourself speak and know that everybody are really listening to you and you're going to have to really listen to them, it's risky. It also means that you're willing to change after the next person speaks. They put a different spin on it altogether that I'd never thought of.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And maybe we could put those two ideas together. You come up with a more creative sense of where you're going, and I think you also end up with a group who's prepared to own the result, even though they may not have got their particular way. I think it's difficult when there's conflicts, and that's where the time needs to be taken to do this thoroughly, really, to, you know, go back and start again. We've done that too. I can remember having discussions where one person could not live with it. Okay? One person out of, you know, 250 couldn't live with where we were going to go. So we stopped, we started again. We had more conversation until we could all not agree with it, but we could all live with it. You know, in this world we like to get to the end, but we can often get to the wrong end in our hurried world, and that's counterproductive. So the time it takes is so much more creative of each human being there and respectful of them, but also so much more creative of the direction we might take.
SPEAKER_02It's a courageous way of doing it. Like it takes bravery to you know, go, okay, we're gonna start again. Again, the egos are put to the side, we're not done. We have to clear the floor again. It admits the messiness. We're not good at that. Even if when we at some point we do, we still want to tidy it up.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, we do, because we've got the answer. Yes, it goes deeper than that. Discernment is an act of faith.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, very much so.
SPEAKER_00Not a business model.
SPEAKER_02Well, thanks for sharing that, shifting the conversation a little bit. So I wanted to talk to you about pulling back a quote from your keynotes in the triennial conference last year that you proposed towards the end a model for education and what it would look like. And the quote is education would look like a hospitable oasis of silent pondering, listening to the world, mutual obedience, and loving conversation. Just love to dig into this more because it's a beautiful articulation of the living discernment in this way as a community. So, in your experience with your own students, how do you model this? What does it look like in practice? In a flawed way?
SPEAKER_00Can I start there? Of course. It's a great question, though, and it's a challenging question because it makes you rethink how do I model it? But I know that over the years, some people are embarrassed about this, but starting and finishing a class with a moment of silence and prayer, just a moment, at the beginning and the end, has often been commented on as conducive to a communal approach in the classroom. And that can be done in a number of ways, but so long as the silence, the stopping is there as well, not just rattled off prayer at the beginning and the end. I had a little office at the base of the chapel at Santa Maria for a long time before I moved up here to Box Hill. And I noticed there, the prayer times at Santa, they'd ring a bell, and there was absolute silence on the campus at Santa Maria College. They had this time of silence. I was always impressed by that. I mean, it was at least an opportunity for anyone who wanted to to really take in life at that moment, that silence, and they ran with it. They did it. So I think that's really important. I also think that in a world that rushes unthinkingly into answers to complex and even simple questions, something we can change, that allowing time for a student to think through their answers so many times, you know, exams means they have to think quickly. How do we help them in a classroom really think? Because that's not thinking, that's just memory, okay? And that can be flawed. How do we allow time for a student to think through their answers that can be far more creative of the human spirit and to deeper thinking, to really getting to the core of what they really believe here in the situation? To do this, it's often good to probe more thoughtfully into the answer a student might give through encouraging them to take that answer into its implications, alternatives, challenges, circumstances, another person's opinion, and create that loving conversation hospitably. That sort of thing. But not expecting an immediate response is important too, because that can be quite confronting for somebody. I haven't thought of that. Well, go away and think about it. We'll talk about it again tomorrow. But in an academic arena, this sort of encouragement is what we call critical thinking, and it demands time, silent pondering, but it produces extraordinary results. I find creative examples of essays that come out of left field that they would never have imagined they could write about, and then they love doing it. So the idea of hospitality extends then far beyond simply opening a door to another who is different. It implies an openness to their perspective, their ideas, their critique, which is frightening, and their critique of their own ideas. It's leisurely spending time in conversation about those ideas, leaning towards, inclining, if you like, from the rule, towards the other in order to create that conversation, creating a container in which life can flourish. That's what you're doing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's what schools do.
SPEAKER_02That's certainly what we're hoping to do in our schools. Yeah. Yes. So I'm just going to read the quote again for our listeners and put all of that in context. So we would Carmel's quote from her keynote. Creating a hospitable oasis of silent pondering, listening to the world, mutual obedience, and loving conversation as a model for education. Thank you for sharing more deeply on that one, Carmel. It's such a beautiful articulation of what we're all hoping to do, I guess, in our context and particularly in our schools. Sometimes we just cloud and clutter the space, and education in the modern world is so content-driven, it's our curriculum. And so it's really important to create those spaces for the deeper thinking and the deeper imagining. And to question what are we producing and why? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So not necessarily just to jump on the train, but to be critical ourselves in the way that we go about our education experience for our students. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00I noticed the fruit of that in those students that were at that conference that spoke. They were stunning. They were amazing and a huge insight into the teaching methods that GSE does inculcate in its schools. It was very impressive.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, that particular program, prophetic voices, is very much at the heart of that way of being in the world and giving them a space for hope, for critical thinking, for questioning their assumptions to open up new ideas and help them be more expansive to then take back to their schools and their peers. Lovely to hear that some of that's robbing off and it's been successful. Now I have one more question for you as we wrap up. And so this is without notice. What in the rule is your heart wrestling with or providing life for you at the moment?
SPEAKER_00I've been reading a little bit about some of the ancient women. I teach the ancient monastic women every second year to their students at St. John's, Minnesota. And one of them is McCrina. She has this eschatological stance, you know, this the end is the beginning for her. Benedict puts it as keep death daily before your eyes. This whole idea, if we lived from that perspective, life is even fuller. There's no time to waste on petty things, no time to waste on not listening to the voice of God or to others. If we believed the early monks and nuns, heaven was everything. So to keep death daily before your eyes is not a morbid thing, it's actually this joy. It's a celebration. Yes, yeah, life. End point of the journey. And we're so, you know, deaf-denying in this culture at the moment, and yet it's so in our face at the same time. And McCrina's story, she dies so well. An example of how to die. And I think it's the joy of believing the resurrection. You know, we're in the Easter season. I'm speaking in the Easter season now, and to keep singing those allelujahs with full voice for six, seven weeks is a real ask, you know, to keep eating that chocolate for six, seven weeks. If it's lasted that long. That's right. It's supposed to be this continuous high moment. And that's in fact what Benedict is saying when he says keep Death Late Daily before your eyes, because you know, heaven is before you. What could be more inspiring to keep going in life, to keep the energy flowing in life?
SPEAKER_02And it's not just the weeks of Easter, it's every Sunday, the Paschal mystery. And I think we lose sight of that face kind of there in the background sometimes. We go through the motions a lot sometimes. And even our blessings are often talking about, you know, we go together to everlasting life, but that's not before our eyes very often, really.
SPEAKER_00This is what we have in front of us. And the closer you keep the scripture to your heart, the closer you keep the rule, because it's just a commentary on the scripture, really, the more that becomes obvious to you, I think. And you see it in people who live that way, you see the joy, you see the excitement about life. And yet there's a deep down seriousness about it at the same time, because you want to go all together. You don't want to go alone, you want to go all together.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I don't want to be there by myself.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you so much for sharing your joy with us. Always a joy to talk to you, Gabriel, anyway.
SPEAKER_02Well, thank you for joining us for this rich conversation today about living discernment as a way of being and becoming. If there's one thing you can take away from today's conversation, let it be this. Discernment is not about having all of the answers or finding a perfect process. It's about cultivating humility, creating space for silence, for creative and deep thinking, and truly listening to every voice in our community. The Carmel offers us three simple but accessible practices from daily prayer with scripture, silent spaces to listen and be centred in the God within you and to actively listen to the stories of others. These aren't complicated but hard nonetheless, and they are invitations to slow down and pay attention. Perhaps today in your space in community life, it's worth considering how we show up differently, how we create space, how we are creative with our time, how we embrace the messiness of this communal discernment, to find how wisdom and trust that wisdom will emerge when we acknowledge that each of us holds a piece of that wisdom. May you find the courage to create hospitable spaces in your own communities, places where silent pondering, mutual listening, and loving conversation can flourish. So as you take this space within you as you continue along your day, may the table of hospitality be wide, embracing love and compassion to go and do likewise.
