OR ALL OF US there is an element of tension in life in the art of loving. To be a successful lover one needs to learn both how to give love and how to receive love.
By some process of unplanned chance, serendipity or "God-incidence" this edition of Edmund Rice Network News has turned out to have a focus on the Social Justice dimension of the Edmund Rice endeavour. As I've been reading through the various articles that have been submitted for publication though it seems to me there is another dimension peeping through what various writers are thinking about. It is connected to this tension between seeing ourselves as the dispensers of love and our need to also see ourselves as the receivers of love.

It could be suggested that had Edmund Rice not got this balance right, his mission would have failed — we today, would not remember him and he might have died remembered only by the people in his immediate circle of friends and family perhaps two, three or four generations beyond his life.

Unlike most of the people who make their brief mark on earth as a human being though, Edmund Rice is one who is remembered. It is a reasonable assumption to make that as each year passes these days the name of Edmund Rice is becoming known to more and more people around the globe.

Of the billions of people born down through history, very few earn this distinction of being remembered by increasing numbers of people as history marches on. We can be almost certain that Edmund Rice did not set out in life though to be remembered in such fashion.
His objective in life was almost wholly focused on helping the poor — helping those whose names were least likely to be remembered much beyond their own lives.

Peter Hardiman in the contribution he has written for this edition of ERNN explores the tension between Edmund Rice as dispenser of charity and Edmund Rice the social justice activist. Peter explores the tension in the dictum "Give a person a fish and you can solve their hunger for now. Give them a fishing line and you give them a livelihood."* He frames his essay in a context though of exploring the balance those working in Edmund Rice ministries need to find, either individually or institutionally, between seeing ourselves as dispensers of charity and as social activists who are actually contributing to change in the structures that help eradicate poverty and injustice.

Laurie Negus though, in his letter from the frontline in Africa, tells us some stories that must sear even the most hardened human heart of women and children living in abject poverty. The urgency of the situation faced by such people reminds us that it is not just enough to be social justice activists fighting for structural change. For many who are the prime focus of the love of those who further the work of Edmund Rice there is an urgency for our love RIGHT NOW — and preferably yesterday if that is at all possible.

Province Leader, Kevin Ryan, in his address to the old boys of his alma mater at Aquinas indirectly underlines another of the essential tensions in the mission of Edmund Rice. In order to dispense love, or charity, we ourselves need to be the recipients and beggars for love and charity from the better off and leadership realms in society who have the resources to bring the Edmund Rice vision to life.

Peter Hardiman ends his essay suggesting that "Edmund was prepared to shunt between both ends of the line beginning with charity and compassion and ending with dismantling unjust structures". Kevin Ryan's address, might remind us that right back to the foundational work of Edmund, one of the skills needed by those who emulate Edmund is the ability to shunt between both ends of the line in mixing with the affluent and powerful to generate the wherewithal that is dispensed as love and charity in those places where human beings are found on the edges of despair often where the found of human love has run dry.

As followers of Edmund Rice we need to be constantly "seeking the balance point" in our lives and in our endeavours. All of us who are attracted to the charism of Edmund Rice are perhaps entitled to call ourselves lovers. We are dispensers of the love of Edmund and the love of Jesus. All of us, like Edmund for all his alleged wealth, have limited resources – including limited resources of personal love – so we need "to find the balance" and ourselves acknowledge our own need for love and for the constant recharging of the resources that enable the work of Edmund to continue.

Brian Coyne

*Footnote: And that reminds me of a joke I found when trawling the internet for a suitable graphic to use with this story: "Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks!"