A Reflection from the CMSM National Assembly, Phoenix
I have returned from the annual National Assembly of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men (CMSM) in Phoenix, where this year’s theme, “One in Christ: Communal Life Today,” invited superiors, formators, and brothers in religious life to reflect anew on community as the beating heart of our vocation. One truth kept resurfacing through presentations and panels: isolation kills; community heals.
As Divine Word Missionaries, this is written into the very DNA of our charism. We are, before missionaries sent to the ends of the earth, first brothers gathered around a common table, a common prayer, and a common calling. Our founder, Arnold Janssen, understood that mission does not begin with the individual but with the community. This Assembly reminded me how urgent it is that we carry that charism well.
One phrase from the Assembly has stayed with me: sanctification through community. We often think of holiness as a personal achievement — my prayer life, my discipline, my fidelity. But religious life proposes something more radical: that I am sanctified not in spite of my brothers, but through them. Community is not simply the container in which I pursue holiness; it is the instrument God uses to shape me into Christ. The friction, the forgiveness, the shared meals and silences- all of which are grace at work, slowly sanctifying us together.
This is why religious life itself is a witness. In a world that increasingly isolates and fragments, men of different cultures, ages, and backgrounds who choose to live, pray, and labor together for the Gospel are themselves a proclamation: the Lord is with us.
Yet the Assembly named a hard truth: many of our houses are, in practice, common residences and not communities. Men living under one roof, sharing a kitchen and chapel schedule, but not truly sharing life. We eat and pray in proximity without entering into real presence with one another. And one of the quiet epidemics of religious life today: loneliness and the ache of feeling unappreciated, even while surrounded by confreres.
If we are honest, this is where much of our suffering as religious actually lives — not in the sacrifices we knowingly embraced at profession, but in the ordinary, unacknowledged isolation of houses that have forgotten how to be communities. The Assembly’s challenge is clear: we must turn residence into communion by offering support as fraternal care.
As I return to the responsibilities of the Province, I carry a renewed conviction: our mission ad gentes will only be as strong as the community life that undergirds it. We cannot pour ourselves out for others if we are quietly starving for a sense of belonging among our own. Let us again commit ourselves to build houses and rectories that are truly communities, where support is real. And every confrere knows that the Lord and his brothers are with him.
Isolation kills; community heals. Let us choose, again, to heal one another.
Fr. Peter Zhai, SVD