Diary from Indonesia - Week 6

From left: Tencia Ferreira, Anne Corry, Park Jeong Mi, Jovita Triwiludjeng,
Nance Murphy, Shanti. Photo by Anne Corry, rscj

Jakarta, 25 February 2013

This is my last diary from Indonesia. The Society document, ‘Dialogue towards Communion: Walking with Humanity’ from the 2008 Chapter, has new meaning for me.  “We discover that true community happens when we touch the heart and there recognise the presence of the Spirit.

Encounters of the heart have helped me to recognise the Spirit in the warm-hearted and hard-working RSCJ of this Area, in the vibrancy of the formation community in Bandung and in my brief time with the English students. I have witnessed the Muslim-Christian relationships of this Area and the diverse cultural expressions of Indonesia. On a more everyday level I have been living next door to mosques, travelling with local people on trains, small neighbourhood buses called angkots and long-distance Cipaganti mini-buses, and meeting neighbours, kindergarten mothers and street-vendors outside our front door daily.

I know that new insights are breaking apart my assumptions about myself and my understanding of culture and religion. A ‘reorientation’ has begun which will continue as I return home. I am glad to belong to the Society where our international identity impels us to see the world through cultural differences, and to be changed deeply because of them.

The RSCJ of Jakarta (currently five of them) came to farewell me from the airport. I had heard Park Jeong Mi say that Jakarta Airport is such a place of welcomes and farewells for RSCJ that it has almost become a community parlour. It makes me smile. The leaving is very different from my arrival. Over these six weeks I have been changed.

Anne Corry, rscj
Province of Australia-New Zealand