A Hopeful Gathering
The following is a welcome given by Tim Jackins at a gathering in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in May 2015, at which a group of Co-Counselors got to listen to thirty of the RC International Liberation and Commonality Reference Persons talk about their work.
First of all, welcome. Thanks for getting here, especially those of you who came from long distances.
Some part of the RC Community gets this opportunity once every four years. Every four years we gather the International Liberation and Commonality Reference Persons (those who can manage to get together) and spend a long weekend working on distresses about being a Reference Person, sharing information, and figuring out where we want to go.1 It is a lovely time, a great time. It is also important that these Reference Persons have a chance to speak to a Community like this—not just to the people they’re trying to think about all the time—and that the Community get to be with all of them. How many of these Reference Persons do you get the chance to listen to and be with? Not many. Some of them are your leaders because you belong to their constituencies. But twenty others you don’t get a chance to know, and they are doing interesting things that it is important for you to know about. So this is a very important event.
They each will have two minutes to tell you something about the work they are doing. They have months of information to impart, and they will have two minutes. In those two minutes you will be able to get a picture of who they are and the work they are doing. Then there will be two meeting times, and you will choose which Reference Person you want to go listen to for each of those times. This may mean that you meet with the ones who are most important and most central to you, or it may mean that you go to the ones whom you have no connection with but would like to know. It really doesn’t matter which you go to. You will get the chance to see two minds that have dedicated themselves to figuring out RC in a particular direction and to looking after2 a certain constituency.
Some of these people have been in their job ever since the job was created decades ago. Some have been in the job for a year or two but have been around RC for decades, helping to think about and build their constituency. All of these minds are remarkable, and what they have done and their commitment to the work are impressive. It should give you hope that there is such a group of committed people working together.
1 "Where we want to go" means how we want to proceed.
2 “Looking after” means thinking and caring about.