Click on the heading above to read about this man of the desert who lived and died among the Muslims of Algeria. Bishop Claude Rault, former Bishop of the Sahara, traces how St Charles sought to follow the hidden life of Jesus in Nazareth in a little corner of his diocese, and shows how important those years were both to Jesus and to his follower Charles.
From the Missionaries of Africa website.
Filed under Daily Reflections, Justice and Peace, Mission, PLaces
Bishop Claude Rault, Bishop Emeritus of the Sahara, shared this prayer by an early Muslim mystic, Rabi’a al Adawiyya, (717-801). It is a prayer that anyone could make their own. Bishop Claude has devoted his life to being present in dialogue and neighbourliness with the Muslims of Algeria, and to the study of Islam.
Oh my God, if it is through fear of hell fire that I adore You, then burn me in hell fire. And if it is through hope of Paradise that I adore You, then chase me out of Paradise. But if I adore You simply for Yourself, Do not deprive me of Your eternal beauty. Oh my God, all my desire in this world is to remember You and all my desire for the world to come is to encounter You. That is how it is for me but You: do whatever You will.
+ Claude Rault, Jesus, l’Homme de la Rencontre, Marseille, Publications Chemins de Dialogue, 2020, p31.
Filed under Daily Reflections, PLaces, poetry
Eddie Gilmore has been reflecting on Lent with the help of a couple who run the local greengrocery shop.
A significant conversation for me was with the woman who runs my local green grocer. She and her husband are Muslims from Pakistan and they observe Ramadan, which means not eating or drinking during daylight hours for about four weeks. I was speaking to her one time in the first week of that holy month and she seemed quite joyful and serene (her husband slightly less so, and by Week 4 he was visibly feeling the strain!). She remarked to me, “It’s a time to be purified,” and I find that a lovely image for Lent: a time to be purified, from whatever it is we need to be purified from, whether that’s unhealthy food or unhealthy thoughts or images or habits or addictions. One of my favourite lines in the whole of the bible is one we hear read out in church on Ash Wednesday. It is found in Joel Chapter 2: ‘Come back to me with all your heart.’ What an invitation! However much we mess things up, God will be waiting for us with open arms. Come back to me with all your heart. And we’ll always be given another chance; if we don’t get it ‘right’ this Lent there will always be next Lent.
The woman at the green grocer gave me another valuable insight into Lent when she explained that Ramadan was also a time to do good deeds to those in the community in need. Again this has biblical echoes for me, in the book of Isaiah, Chapter 58: ‘Is not this the kind of fast that pleases me…to break unjust fetters and undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry, and shelter the homeless poor.’
As well as being filled with numerous occasions for temptation, Lent also happens to coincide, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, with the magical season of Spring. Indeed the word ‘Lent’ is simply derived from the old English word ‘lencten’ which means Spring season. As we enter Lent the world is quite literally exploding with new life. The snowdrops begin the show, closely followed by the crocuses and daffodils, then a little later some very brave early tulips. Meanwhile the first specks of yellow appear on the forsythia, the trees and bushes begin to bud, the days lengthen and the birdsong starts earlier…and finishes later.
So let us not in this Lent season be too harsh on ourselves. Let us perhaps instead hear anew the invitation to come back with all our heart. Let us find ways of reaching out to ‘the poor’, whoever and wherever they may be. And let us rejoice in this incredible annual miracle of creation.
To read more about Ramadan, we shared this post from the Missionaries of Africa, who live beside Muslims in Islamic lands.
A neighbourly gesture: solidarity between Muslims and Christians in Canterbury as we reported in another previous post.
Filed under Daily Reflections, Justice and Peace, Lent, PLaces
For true human fraternity
We pray for all those suffering from religious discrimination and persecution; may their own rights and dignity be recognised, which originate from being brothers and sisters in the human family.
We first showed this picture in May 2018. It shows an installation then in Canterbury Cathedral: ‘Suspended’.
The garments hanging above the congregation came from refugees on the Isle of Lesbos or the camps around Calais; clothes they were glad to discard when they were offered a clean change. I hope they found something they liked to wear! Their lives have been suspended between their old homes, destroyed or stolen, and who knows what future.
There the clothes hang, reminding us that these refugees are sisters and brothers of ours, thrown on very hard times, as were others – including perhaps their grandparents – seventy years ago, after the Second World War and the establishment of Israel. Often their religion – Christian, the ‘wrong’ sort of Muslim – has made life very dangerous for them, and they need asylum, begrudged by many of us.
Let us pray for peace, and support those who support the refugees; our sisters and brothers.
MMB
Filed under Christian Unity, Daily Reflections, Justice and Peace, PLaces
This is an extract from an article by Dominique Greiner, editor in chief of Croire-La Croix.
Pope Francis is due to visit Iraq from today.
Pope Francis’s journey has a strong interfaith element. It’s notable that he is going to Ur, the tradition starting point for the journey of Abraham the common patriarch of the three great monotheisms. Those who claim him as such cannot but recognise each other as brothers and sisters, and work together for the future of their country. This call to fraternity is an invitation not to remain prisoners of the sufferings of the past and to work for the material and spiritual rebirth of Iraq. It is a call which goes out to us too.
Filed under Christian Unity, Justice and Peace, Lent, Mission, PLaces
On the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus, or Candlemas, some thoughts about Mary, the obedient, subversive woman who said ‘yes’ to great personal sorrow, as Simeon warned her on this day, because that was part of her vocation as mother of God. This reflection by Father Gerry McFlynn is reblogged from the London Irish Chaplaincy website.
It took a bit of adjusting, coming in from the bright sunlight to the small, dark, one-roomed house. It was the House of Mary in the ruins of Ephesus, in Turkey, where Mary is supposed to have lived out the last years of her life. The only light was provided by an array of candles, some in front of a darkened icon of the Virgin holding her Son. And I remember that there was only one other person there, an old Muslim woman who, unlike me, was praying.
Read on. Recommended by Christina Chase, with whom I shared the article as soon as I read it.
Filed under Advent and Christmas, Daily Reflections
‘When I stand before thee at the day’s end thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.’ Tagore
Pere Hamel had worked hard, networked hard, to help his local Muslims integrate and feel welcome in the neighbourhood of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. But on this morning in 2016 he was cut down while celebrating early morning Mass. Two men of the Islamic State terror group wanted to keep hold of the differences between people rather than celebrate our unity before the God who made us.
May those who bring violence to our streets, homes, churches and schools, have their scars anointed and healed.
from “Stray Birds” by Rabindranath Tagore
Filed under Daily Reflections
Mrs Turnstone and I grabbed a cup of tea and a quick bite after getting up late one Sunday morning, then off to Mass. I could not help but remember a passage from Father Gerard Rathe’s Mud and Mosaics, an account of his ‘missionary journey’ through Africa in 1960. Here he has just arrived in what is now Mali.
We drove through the city gate [of Mopti] and round to the river. On the steps of what looked like a large warehouse we saw Monsignor Landru, the Prefect Apostolic,+ a lively, clean shaven little man, who took us into the house where we enjoyed a glass of cold water before saying Mass.
I wonder if the Holy Father ever thought of the tremendous refreshment he would be giving priests like ourselves, when he said: “Water does not break the Eucharistic Fast”.*
You have to go to the tropics, anyway, to appreciate cold water. Leo, our photographer, preferred beer, and we left him perspiring and content in a deck chair as we went to the church. We were on a tiny Christian island in a sea of Islam and I offered my Mass for this handful of missionaries and for the conversion of the Dogon people on whom they pin their hopes.
We are blessed to live in less rule-bound times, when we can more easily respond to the Lord’s invitation to take and eat.
+ A priest who leads the church in a territory that is not yet big enough to be a diocese. * Pius XII had relaxed the rules on fasting to allow Catholics to take liquids up to an hour before receiving Communion, though solid food was still prohibited from midnight.
Filed under Daily Reflections
Bishop Claude Rault M Afr was bishop of the Sahara before retiring. He knew most of the Algerian Martyrs whom we have reflected on before. Their feast day was May 8th, and Bishop Claude preached this homily in Paris. What do you think makes someone a saint?
Here are Vincent Somboro’s reflections on Christian Mission in Algeria today. And here the reflections of Blessed Pierre Claverie, one of the martyrs.
A banner of the blessed martyrs at the beatification ceremony in Algeria.
Filed under Interruptions, Mission
The Diocese of Nouakchott covers the desert land of Mauretania. The local population is 99% Muslim, but there is a growing expatriate Christian community under the care of Bishop Martin Happe, a Missionary of Africa.
He wrote at the end of last year:
We in the Diocese of Nouakchott had the joy of living through a special moment of grace, culminating in a big feast: the golden jubilee of our Cathedral of Saint Joseph!
The visible sign of this grace are the two side aisles we have added to our cathedral, since it had become too small on Sundays, and also the new altar in Atar stone which I had the privilege of consecrating on Gaudete Sunday, 15 December, with two bishops, many visiting priests and numbers of faithful. Gaudete! an invitation to the whole Church, just few days before Christmas, to be joyful. We had the grace to live this joy and taste it in an extraordinary way last 14 and 15 December.
But let’s not forget one thing: each time the Lord gives a particular grace to a person, a community, a people … this grace is always bound up in a new mission! Both the Old and New Testaments are full of examples. So we must not forget that the enlarged and refurbished cathedral has as its vocation to be the place of where the Church of Nouakchott gathers together. I recalled in my homily that the Greek word for church ‘ecclesia’ means a people called together. Here in Nouakchott, we are called together every Sunday to receive once more our mission: to be witnesses to the Love of God for every person. For us, this means first and foremost the Mauritanians, the people who make us welcome and to whom the Lord has sent us.
Wherever we are, we can feel like a voice crying in the wilderness; people are indifferent to the Church, or downright hostile, the faults obscuring the graces for them. But whether our desert is in the sand or in the city, our mission is to be witnesses to the Love of God for every person; first and foremost to the people who welcome us into their lives as neighbours, work colleagues or family. To witness to the Love of God rather than seeking conversions.
Filed under Daily Reflections, Lent, Mission, PLaces
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