26 April, Going Viral CX: the Bonds of Friendship

Part of the former Synagogue in Canterbury.

Did you think Covid was over and done with? Far from it! Mrs Turnstone cut short a hospital visit the other day because there were patients on our friend’s ward who were infected and potentially contagious. Nevertheless, two years after the first lockdown some reflection is in order: how did communities cope? How can we support each other and work together for common goals, challenging power where necessary? It is interesting to see the Board of Deputies of British Jews seeking a closer relationship with the Catholic church.

Deputy Director of the Catholic Union, James Somerville-Meikle, writes: 23 March will forever be associated with the day that life was turned on its head for many of us with the start of national lockdown in 2020. To mark the anniversary, I attended an event in Parliament hosted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to highlight the work of Chevra Kadisha, Jewish burial societies during the pandemic. Honouring Jewish burial custom became extremely difficult under Covid restrictions. A reminder that Catholics were far from the only community who found our freedom to worship suspended during the darkest days of the pandemic. While the event was a chance to share our experiences of lockdown, it also provided the opportunity to look to the future and areas of shared interest. Whether it’s promoting religious freedom at work or making our tax system fairer for families – it’s clear there are a many areas where Catholics and Jews can work together for the benefit of the common good. If the pandemic has done one thing, it has strengthened the bonds of friendship and understanding between people of different faiths. In an increasingly secular world, these bonds are becoming all the more important. From the Catholic Union website.

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25 February: The Open-handed Missionary III

A teenage girl I used to work with was prone to slashing her arms, but soon after conceiving her daughter she told me, ‘I don’t need that now I’ve got my baby.’ Is it oversimplifying matters to say that loving her baby gave her the freedom to be herself, to love herself? From the way she has surmounted major difficulties since then, I would say that the process of maternal service has indeed enabled her to become a more complete human being.

She is not a churchgoer, but she ponders these things in her heart. Her mustard seed faith enables her to deal with her second daughter’s disability and all the operations that will entail. I take comfort from Pope Francis’s reading of the Angelical Doctor:

37. Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that … What counts above all else is “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Works of love directed to one’s neighbour are the most perfect external manifestation of the interior grace of the Spirit: “The foundation of the New Law is in the grace of the Holy Spirit, who is manifested in the faith which works through love”.

My young friend’s unofficial faith works through love: she is not far from the Kingdom of God. That is what Jesus told the Scribe when discussing the two greatest commandments, love of God and love of neighbour.

24 February: The Open-handed Missionary II

Pope Francis opens the Year of Mercy in the Central African Republic.

Cast your mind back to yesterday’s post, or scroll back to it, then ask yourself what dies a brave little girl have to tell us about every Christian being a missionary? We concede that the professional missionary ad gentes may risk her or his life, prepared to die for the faith but also to live for it, or better, to live it. Yet Pope Francis reminds us that it is not just the professionals; every Christian is called:

120. In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19). All the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelisation, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelisation to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients… Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelisation; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love.

But we must go deeper even than that. Johannes Metz reminds us that the mission to go out and proclaim God’s saving love is not an add-on to our basic humanity, an optional extra for the Christian; rather it is an intrinsic part of being human, or as he puts it, of becoming human:

Becoming human … is a mandate and a mission, a command and a decision … freedom reveals itself at work when we accept and approve with all our heart the being that is committed to us, when we make it so much our own that it seems to be our idea from the first … the free process of becoming a human being unfolds as a process of service.

Metz refers us to John 8:32 – the truth will set you free – a truth we discover through service, obedient to God’s command; a service unto death, even death on a Cross, as we read in Philippians 2:8. Becoming human is a process of service: the little girl risking her life, shows how serving others, even in the form of a doll, is intrinsic to being human. And yet the little girl is totally dependent upon her parents as we are on God’s grace.

25 January: Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, VIII.

Photo: Mazur/cbcew.org.uk

As we join with other Christians around the world for the Week of Prayer we pray that our hearts will be open to see and hear the many ways in which racism continues to destroy lives, and to discern the steps we can take as individuals and communities to heal the hurts and build a better future for everyone.

Day 8 Restoring hope through the work of justice

Isaiah 40:1-11
Luke 1:46-55

Commentary

In facing up to the harm caused by racial injustice, we hold before us the promise of God’s love and the healing of relationships. The Prophet Isaiah speaks of God gathering and comforting all people who have been lost and have experienced suffering. In the Magnificat, Mary reminds us that God never abandons us and that God’s promise to us is fulfilled in justice.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Stephen was a young man growing up in south-east London with big dreams for his future. His life was tragically cut short when, on 22 April 1993, he was murdered in an unprovoked racist attack. The pain of his family and the wider community was compounded by serious failings in the investigation of this crime, which were later exposed in the Macpherson Report. In his memory a foundation has been established to support and inspire young people to have a bright future. Stephen’s mother, (Baroness) Doreen Lawrence, says of this work:

“Justice for Stephen is about all of us, every one of us, in society having justice. There are still too many young people who do not have a sense of hope, who just don’t get the chance to live their dreams. I want all our children and young people to feel inspired, be confident and have hope in their own future. We are building hope, but there is more to do.”

It is easy to feel hopeless as we are time and again reminded that we live in a fractured society that does not fully recognise, honour, and protect the human dignity and freedom of all human beings. An alignment of love of God, love of all our human family and love of justice are deeply needed for hope and healing. God calls us to continually live into hope, trusting that God will be with us in the midst of our individual and communal liminal space – on the threshold of what has been and what is, while yearning for what is yet to be.

Reflection

Fr Bryan Massingale, one of the world’s leading Catholic social ethicists and scholars in racial justice, reminds us of his hope and challenge:

“Social life is made by human beings.
The society we live in is the result of human choices and decisions.
This means that human beings can change things.
What humans break, divide and separate,
we can with God’s help,also heal, unite and restore.
What is now does not have to be.
Therein lies the hope and the challenge.”

Prayer

Creator God, please teach us to go inward 
to be grounded in your loving spirit
so we can go outward in wisdom and courage
to always choose the path of love and justice.

Questions

Many of the global protests that took place after George Floyd’s killing were led by young people, some of whom were connected to the Church. How can we use their ardour for racial justice to bring about change in the Church?

What substantive actions should have taken place after Stephen Lawrence’s killing? Why do you think they did not occur?

How did you respond to the killings of Stephen Lawrence and/or George Floyd? How have these tragedies encouraged you to take a greater interest in racial justice?

2 December 2022, Praying with Pope Francis: for voluntary organisations.

L’Arche UK entering Canterbury Cathedral on pilgrimage together.

We pray that volunteer non-profit organisations

committed to human development

find people dedicated to the common good

and ceaselessly seek out new paths to international cooperation.

Finding people dedicated to the common good has been difficult when covid got in the way of daily life. In L’Arche UK there was much less international cooperation in the form of young assistants coming from overseas for a year or so. But there was also a mass of protective legislation that severely restricted community life for many months. Imagine assistants having to wear masks all day, unable to eat together with core members, friends from different houses being barred from meeting in person.

Pope Francis’s intention was written more than a year ago; things have changed in that time! We in L’Arche should pray in thanks for all the imaginative ways in which people held the community together, and for the opening up that is now happening, including individual and house holidays.

Let us pray that all the people dedicated to the common good, many of them exhausted, may now have space to pause for a while on holiday or retreat.

23 October: Liberty the right of every human.

Oscar Murillo’s dehumanised migrant workers.

Yesterday we witnessed child labour in XIX Century England, but exploitation is still with us. I read recently that Garment Workers in England are still receiving no more than a fraction of the National Minimum Wage, legally established since 1999, and exploitation is rife elsewhere in the fashion industry world-wide. Here is John Wesley on slavery and justice. His first sentence sets out with great clarity why slavery is evil. Following on from that realisation, there should be action: give liberty to whom liberty is due … every child of man. The prayer that follows is also a homily that every one of us should reflect upon, for slavery, or near slavery, still exists in different forms and we all benefit from poor people’s suffering.

Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature.

   If, therefore, you have any regard to justice, (to say nothing of mercy, nor the revealed law of God,) render unto all their due. Give liberty to whom liberty is due, that is, to every child of man, to every partaker of human nature. Let none serve you but by his own act and deed, by his own voluntary choice. Away with all whips, all chains, all compulsion! Be gentle toward all men; and see that you invariably do unto every one as you would he should do unto you.

O thou God of love, 
thou who art loving to every man, and whose mercy is over all thy works; 
thou who art the Father of the spirits of all flesh, and who art rich in mercy unto all; 
thou who hast mingled of one blood all the nations upon earth; 
have compassion upon these outcasts of men, who are trodden down as dung upon the earth! 
Arise, and help these that have no helper, whose blood is spilt upon the ground like water! 
Are not these also the work of thine own hands, the purchase of thy Son's blood? 
Stir them up to cry unto thee in the land of their captivity; and let their complaint come up before thee; 
let it enter into thy ears! 
Make even those that lead them away captive to pity them, 
and turn their captivity as the rivers in the south. 
O burst thou all their chains in sunder; more especially the chains of their sins! 
Thou Saviour of all, make them free, that they may be free indeed!

20 July: Butterfly’s days.

Yesterday we looked at eternity and this world; love being the link between the two. Today school holidays are upon us again in England, and grandparents get to join in these days, keeping the third generation safe and occupied.But perhaps they – and we – should be allowed to experience a few butterfly’s days, ‘without design’, going nowhere ‘In purposeless circumference’, till sundown. If we let go of our business for a day, it’s possible that Another might get a word, idea or image in edgeways.

This red admiral was seen at the L’Arche Kent garden as it basked in the summer sun. Get ready to bask in an ‘audience of idleness.’

Enjoy your holidays and be grateful for moments of idleness!

THE BUTTERFLY’S DAY

From cocoon forth a butterfly
As lady from her door
Emerged — a summer afternoon —
Repairing everywhere,

Without design, that I could trace,
Except to stray abroad
On miscellaneous enterprise
The clovers understood.

Her pretty parasol was seen
Contracting in a field
Where men made hay, then struggling hard
With an opposing cloud,

Where parties, phantom as herself,
To Nowhere seemed to go
In purposeless circumference,
As ‘t were a tropic show.

And notwithstanding bee that worked,
And flower that zealous blew,
This audience of idleness
Disdained them, from the sky,

Till sundown crept, a steady tide,
And men that made the hay,
And afternoon, and butterfly,
Extinguished in its sea.

Emily Dickinson.

15 July: The Synod and the People of God.

https://www.synod.va/en/highlights/People-of-God.html

A posting from the Synod Office inviting us to reflect on belonging to the People of God.

We open with an extended thought from Pope Francis, and worth taking to heart, Synod or no Synod. But see the original post.

Christianity is not just an ethic. Yes, it is true, it has moral principles, but one is not Christian with only a vision of ethics. It is more. Christianity is not an elite of people chosen for truth. …Christianity is belonging to a people, a people chosen by God, freely. If we do not have this consciousness of belonging to a people, we will be ideological Christians, with a tiny doctrine for affirming the truth, with an ethic, with a moral code – that’s fine – or with an elite… If we do not have a consciousness of belonging to a people, we are not true Christians.

Pope Francis, Homily “Being Christians means belonging to the People of God”, 07.05.2020

CONTACT

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Tel. (+39) 06 698 84821 / 84324

synodus@synod.va

2 July: The Good Shepherd

St Mildred’s, Canterbury.

One of the classic Victorian hymns that still speaks to us today.

Souls of men! why will ye scatter 
Like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts! why will ye wander
From a love so true and deep?

Was there ever kindest shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Saviour who would have us
Come and gather round his feet?

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice
Which is more than liberty.

There is welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Saviour;
There is healing in his blood.

But we make his love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we lose the tender shepherd
In the judge upon the throne.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of man’s mind;
And the heart of the eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

FW Faber

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice.

John 10;27.

20 March: On not reinventing the wheel.

Two young mothers pushing their babies on Margate prom. Their buggies double up as shopping trolleys.

The discussion drifted to mobility and the challenges posed by diminishing powers in later life.

Jane had struggled with herself to adopt a walking stick, and then a walker with a seat and shopping box. ‘But that was silly of me, because now I can get down to the shops and the promenade.’ The thought of not seeing the sea, though living so close, had steeled her to swallow her pride and try the aids.

‘I can do so much more now’, she says.

Reinventing the wheel or even the walking stick seems excessive, but many of us learn the hard way. Jane would tell you how its tempting to be too self-reliant, too independent. In the 1980’s people in big mental hospitals were released into ‘the community’ to live independently; often in a one bedroom flat somewhere completely unknown to the person concerned who would have been incarcerated for decades.

‘The community’ did not exist for them unless someone made an effort to befriend them.

Jane’s first walker trolley was given to her by a fellow member of the exercise group, who had another that suited her better. The group is a little community, even when meeting by zoom.

What can we learn from this little story? To accept help or advice graciously, to admit that no man (or woman) is an island entire of itself, not even me! So we are all responsible for each other, and are diminished if a neighbour suffers; we are, or should be, involved in mankind, conscious of each other’s needs and gifts.

No Man Is An Island by John Donne

No man is an island, 
Entire of itself, 
Every man is a piece of the continent, 
A part of the main. 
If a clod be washed away by the sea, 
Europe is the less. 
As well as if a promontory were. 
As well as if a manor of thy friend's 
Or of thine own were: 
Any man's death diminishes me, 
Because I am involved in mankind, 
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee.