Fraternity in balance : Edward Schillebeeckx on the gracious diversity of Dominican life

It is with some trepidation, but also with great pleasure, that I make this contribution to a collection about contemporary Dominican life. I am not a Dominican, nor a lay Dominican, and am sometimes and only indirectly involved in the activities of the Dutch or Belgian provinces. My first, more intensive experience with the Dominicans was due to a pastoral internship that I followed for a year at the Nijmegen student church, where Theo Koster was my mentor. He is a Dominican with a strong sense of identity and someone who wears the habit with pride. At that time we visited the monastery in Huissen several times with students. Between 1998 and 2000 I was a resident of the Blackfriars in Oxford and, due to the international character of that community, I became aware of the diversity of Dominican theology and spirituality for the first time. From 2000 to 2003 I worked for the Dominican Study Center for Theology and Society, also in Nijmegen. During that time I experienced the Dutch province up close and regularly visited the community in Brigittenstraat in Utrecht, and again in the monastery in Huissen, where I always felt very welcome. It was also the period in which I met Erik Borgman, who had just published the first part of the Schillebeeckx biography and a long essay on Dominican spirituality. He would become a close colleague at the then Heyendaal Institute in Nijmegen and co-editor of Tijdschrift voor Theologie, but also a theological friend to whose work I feel related, even though we each develop a very different theology. At the same time I met some Dominican theologians from Europe, with whom I have always kept in touch.
All in all, it was a period in which I felt like a distant, but committed member of the Dominican family; of the 'extended family' so to speak, but that 'extended family' also creates bonds that will not be broken so easily.

© Stephan van Erp and Anton Milh, 2016.