Leading From the Peripheries: Lessons From ¡Re-Existe 2025!

by Romina Sapinoso, SC, Associate Director

The morning could not have been more beautiful. The air was fresh after an overnight rain and there was blue sky behind soft gray clouds. Under the trees at the Centro de Espiritualidad (CESP) in Guadalajara, Mexico, I sat in a circle with nine others. We were meeting for the first time, as were the four other small groups scattered across the retreat grounds. 

About 80 of us gathered at CESP and ITESO, the Jesuit University in Guadalajara, from September 22–26 for Re-Existe 2025, an intercultural and interfaith encounter convening collectives working for justice, ecological healing, and human dignity. Participants came from across the globe: El Salvador, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Spain, Austria, Italy, Indonesia, and the United States, to name a few. Some were faith leaders – religious and diocesan priests, sisters, shamans, and ordained ministers from other denominations. Others were university theologians, artists, activists, and community organizers. The diversity of the participants’ backgrounds was notable. 

This was the third in a series of gatherings (following ¡Resiste! in 2019 and ¡Re-Existe! in 2023), and this year’s theme, “The Spirit connecting the peripheries,” invited us to listen to the wisdom of those who live and lead from the world’s edges and explore how transformation is rooting there. 

My small group included Cecelia Fire Thunder, a Lakota elder from South Dakota, USA; Adelard Kananira from Gay Christian Africa; Sabina Rifat, Founder of WAKE (Women and Kids Education) in Pakistan; Dicky Senda, Co-founder of Lakoat Kujawas in Timor; and Anson Samuel of The Upper Room, working for LGBTQ+ rights in India and Austria. Sister Mūmbi Kīgūtha, CPPS of Friends in Solidarity and Watawa wa Taa moderated our circle, while Bernie Brady of St. Thomas University and I, representing the Leadership Collaborative, served as listeners whose task was to receive and weave together what we heard in our circle. 

At its heart, ¡Re-Existe! is about doing theology at the margins. We were invited to listen to those living in the trenches of the struggle to protect life and dignity and to practice a different kind of leadership, one that leads by making space rather than taking it. Re-existe seeks to create space for voices beyond the theological experts, and to trust that divine wisdom rises from the ground of shared experience. 

Each day revolved around each of the three themes: awakening, re-existence, and embodiment. Panelists shared how they awoke to the realization that the suffering and desecration of life in and around us “cannot be our destiny,” and how imagination and compassion have guided their work toward healing, both personal and communal. 

As I listened, I began to see that every story was also a story of leadership. This leadership grows not from power but from presence. Awakening is an act of love, a return to self that often begins in crisis. True leadership starts here: with self-awareness, courage, and the willingness to be transformed before transforming the world. 

Faith, family, and community either helped or hindered this awakening. Again and again, the courage of one person to live in their truth inspired others to do the same. In this sense, leadership, I realized, is inherently communal. It invites others into their own transformation. 

Cecelia shared how her mother, holding her as a newborn, told her who she was and the people she came from. Her story reminded us that leadership is rooted in belonging and knowing one’s place in the wider circle of life. Dicky showed me tattoos tracing some of his family’s history and reflecting the struggles of the Timorese people to preserve identity and dignity, a map of resistance etched on his arms. 

For Sabina, leadership meant refusing the only two options given to women in her culture: convent or marriage. She founded WAKE to educate and empower women and children in Pakistan. For Adelard who was raised in a devout Catholic family in Burundi, it meant imagining God’s unconditional love for him as a gay man long before his community and family could assure him of theirs, until that love became an unshakeable truth. And Anson, who called our circle an “oasis,” spoke of finding the Divine within his own consciousness and in his community, The Upper Room, where people could question, heal, and re-imagine faith and justice together. Each story revealed leadership as an individual act of courage, emerging from the intersections of vulnerability, conviction, and the community’s response. 

Midway through the gathering, we visited El Salto, home to a once magnificent waterfall now poisoned by industrial pollution. The stench coming from the water was almost unbearable that some in the group couldn’t join those of us who walked over to the river. Community leaders told us how over-industrialization and weak regulations had left residents sick and their river toxic. Yet they had organized Un Salto de Vida—“A Leap for Life”—to fight for environmental justice. Their work is slowly bearing fruit, raising consciousness in the people and not allowing the big industries to go unchallenged in their detructive practices. Standing before the foamy, contaminated waters, I saw what leadership looks like when rooted in community. It is grief transformed into collective action and sorrow turned into solidarity. 

Throughout the week, leadership took many shapes. It was in ritual, in art, in silence, and in deepening connections over shared meals. These simple acts of being together created a sacred space where personal and communal healing intertwined. As listeners, Bernie and I were entrusted with holding these stories, listening to the members of our small group dialogue and learn from each other. In the end, what became obvious to me is that we lead best when we lead together. 

Cecelia reminded us that healing wounds of colonization, patriarchy, and exclusion is sacred but demanding work. Because there was pain when the wounds were inflicted, releasing them will also bring about a certain degree of pain. However, healing need not be done alone. I remember bell hooks’ famous quote: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Dicky offered “manekat,” a word from his culture which means “heart to heart.” He described our time together as a “potluck of the heart,” where everyone who brought their authentic selves to the table was met with embrace, and consequently fostered healing for each one in the circle. 

By the end of Re-Existe 2025, I understood that what we had experienced was a kind of communal leadership: a way of being that honors both the individual journey and the collective heartbeat of transformation. Across the stories and songs, I heard one resounding message during our time in Guadalajara. We re-exist when we lead in relationship, when we choose healing over fear, and when we remember that none of us stands alone.