By Cecilia González-Andrieu, PhD.
As we know, the global Church has been involved in a synod process that began in 2021. I admit that the word “synod” feels alien, so I like to think about the synod this way: It is the process of teaching us how to be a community by actually doing community.
Why do we need this?
It happens to all institutions. It begins with a small group of people with a dream, and if the dream catches on, it starts growing. From there, structures become more complicated, layers of authority multiply, rules are set up, limits are enforced, exclusion and inclusion are debated, and so on.
When we think of the unfathomable timescale of 2,000 years of Christianity, we can see how the growth and also painful divisions of the faith spread like wildfire throughout the world. By the time we get to global Catholicism in the 21st century, we have more than a billion people spread across the entire planet and the dream that began it all is often hard to remember and even harder to live.
One of my favorite verses in Scripture is from the prophet Joel, when he exhorts his suffering community to remember who they are and to be filled with hope. He communicates God’s word to them saying, “I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions” (Joel 3:1). It is a truly beautiful image of how a community finds its sense of self again and begins to build a future together.
What is even more astonishing is that even the first generation of Christians were trying to figure out how and who to be in the world, so Peter quotes this same verse from the prophet Joel to point them back to their religious tradition’s wisdom (Acts 2:17).
During the moment we call Pentecost, when it is becoming clear that the intimacy of a tight-knit community is fading as people from everywhere are now hearing the Spirit proclaimed in their own languages, Peter searches for a way to ground them in what it means to be a community.
What Joel and Peter are both saying is that the Spirit of God is expressing God’s dreams through awakening our own ability to dream and imagine a different world and, in this way, propelling us to a better day together. In this vision, the generations are learning from each other, and all of it is happening because God is pouring God’s self out on “all flesh,” meaning on everything that lives.
“Doing” the synod is teaching us to dream again and to share those dreams with each other. It is forming us to be unafraid to communicate those dreams and to cultivate the generosity to listen to each other. The synod process has allowed us to speak of the pain of a broken community. It has made it possible for us to see how wounded many of us have been by structures of judgment. It has asked those who felt they had no voice to speak and, most importantly, it has shown us that the only way we can discern the path forward is together.
From Joel’s words spoken 400 years before Peter, to Peter’s spoken 2,000 years before us, the synod calls us together to remember to dream God’s dreams for the world.
Cecilia González-Andrieu is professor of Theology at Loyola Marymount University.
