Oceania, as a Province, is about linking islands and oceans (East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines). It is fascinating to watch how a province renews itself, waking itself, shaking itself, and ever making itself anew. There have been new appointments, staff changes, new structures (ministry directorates and community clusters), and all this while people are linking hearts and souls, across a new geography, in a common search for their future.
Oceans eat into islands, islands shift shape and drift (over millennia). There is loss and grief, loneliness and conflict, as the new shapes itself. But the new excites and intoxicates too – new voices are heard (including the Earth’s) and new vistas open (new forms of religious life, new forms of Edmund’s charism).
Ken Wilber says, “Go within, to move forward” as he ponders the future of the human race. Oceania is deepening itself, through profound renewal, as it links people from East Timor, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand, and opens towards Asia. The ceaseless work of oceans and islands on each other is a guiding metaphor for such renewal, the formative processes that birth a new world.