The Prophetic Ministry of Cleaning

Cleaning is an important part of our work as volunteers at Corrymeela.

We are here to serve others. That includes the more glamorous sides of service: having discussion, serving food, being involved in developing new ideas. But it also includes the less attractive jobs which are often not seen. Cleaning the rooms of departing guests is an interesting experience. Most of us as able-bodied adults clean our own homes. So cleaning a bathroom which has been used by a complete stranger can feel like an intrusive act, an invasion of personal privacy.

At the very core of peace and reconciliation work is the belief that all people are equal. We are all equally valuable. It is very easy to hold this belief as an intellectual idea but not really believe it in relation to how we live. We can all too quickly fool ourselves into thinking that we are too good for certain kinds of work, subtly believing that we are in some way superior or of greater value than other people. These feelings of being of unequal value can all too quickly lead us into conflict because when they are challenged we react.

If we aspire to believe in equality as an important building block towards peacemaking then we have to make concrete decisions to affirm this equality. What we believe is testified to, not by our words, but by our actions. Ideas are not enough; it is our actions which count. So we need to practically remind and re-remind ourselves that we are all of equal value. This means that everyone (especially those in leadership positions) has to do the work considered the lowest in status, in our cultural context this means that everyone has to clean!

Gandhi was a strong advocate of this kind of practical equality; he famously insisted that absolutely everyone, including himself, had to take turns in cleaning the toilets. No one is too important to do the work of the least cultural value.

This sense of superiority and inferiority is often engrained into our mentality. It is really fascinating to observe how many of the guests react to you when you are cleaning. It is often as if they have subconsciously made the assumption that being the person who is cleaning automatically makes you inferior and them superior. One example of this mindset is exemplified by how messy the rooms are often left, when leaving a room many guests clearly haven’t given a moment’s thought to the person who will have to clean that room.

So perhaps one of the ways in which we are prophetic in the way we live here is to clean. And not just to clean but to encourage others to clean alongside us. We are here to make people feel welcome. At a superficial level to make a person feel welcome is to do things for them, to allow them to feel superior.

But there is a deeper level of welcome which we can offer, we can challenge them to be our equals. Making someone feel at home can sometimes involve reminding them that when at home they have to clean their own bathroom.

Affirming our faith in the reconciling power of God

Steph and I have been living at Corrymeela in Northern Ireland for more than four months. I have written very little during this time, there is much to say about life here but it isn’t always easy to know how to express these things.

Corrymeela is a Christian organisation which exists to promote peace and reconciliation. The 150 members are asked each year to affirm their faith in the reconciling power of God in Jesus Christ.

Christianity holds a peculiar space in the society of Northern Ireland. Christianity is at the heart of the conflict. The two sides self define themselves as Catholic or Protestant. Many church leaders on both sides do very little to challenge sectarian thinking, their defence of segregated education being one example of this. There are, and have been, many examples of preachers angrily criticising the other. Many people have been damaged in the name of faith.

So there is a persuasive strand of thinking which argues for the road to peace being found in a rejection of Christianity. Removing faith from society would be a positive move towards peace. Atheism = Peace. At the heart of this thinking is a belief that the experience of God separates people one from another. We imagine a God who divides humanity into group, an in-group and an out-group. Our image is of a God who loves us conditionally and favours those who do as we imagine he commands. Many people here have rightly rejected religion because this understanding of God is the only one they have ever experienced.

This God of separations is still worshipped by many. It is lived out in the practises of many groups whose religious ideology is exclusive. Those in our group are favoured by God, while those in the other group are not. Christian identity is too often formed in relation to what we are ‘not’ rather than what we ‘are’.

Here at Corrymeela we experience a lot of this kind of ‘Religion is part of the problem’ thinking. Our most important role here is to attempt to live in a way which proclaims a different gospel. As Catholics, Protestants and Agnostics we are called to live in way which proclaims a God of unconditional love, a God who makes no distinction between peoples. We are called to be inspired by an encounter with a God who is continually goes out to meet those on the outside. We are called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, embracing a way of life which is constantly looking outwards, to wider relationships, to wider community and to deeper sharing. Our challenge is to live our Christianity as a religion of reconciliation which pulls people closer together.

Our little lived community here does not exist to talk about reconciliation, nor does it exist to be perfect all the time but rather to show that when we fail reconciliation is possible.

This is our vocation. We don’t always live it very successfully.

The Corrymeela Commitment

this weekend the Corrymeela community will hold its annual dedication service. Every member of the community (about 150) will make this commitment for the year to come. Volunteers and Staff are not asked to make the commitment personally but are expected to work in a way which is in harmony with these commitments. (the capitalisation is in the original text)

Statement of Commitment 

made by Corrymeela Members

As a community drawn from many traditions, we

AFFIRM our faith in the reconciling power of God in Jesus Christ;

CELEBRATE the promise of life;

CONFESS our own responsibility for the destructive conflicts in our society;

BELIEVE that we have been called to seek a deeper understanding of our faith;

SURRENDER ourselves to the spirit of Jesus to overcome our own divisions and make ourselves instruments of his peace.

COMMIT ourselves to to work for a society whose priorities are justice, mutual respect, the participation of all, concern for the vulnerable and the stranger, stewardship of resources, and care for creation;

AGREE to pray regularly for each other,

To join in the worship of the community,

To give time to the life and work of the community,

To care for and support each other,

To live out our commitment in our daily lives,

To give, according to our ability, to the funds of the community;

And WISH, through the power of the Spirit, to walk the way of the Gospel together.

Members are asked to contribute between 4% and 10% of their net disposable income. 

Taizé in Rome

These are my Photos from our recent trip to Rome for the Taizé Communities European Meeting.

What I was doing one year ago!

How Big is your Vision?

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom  and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.”  This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. John 2:1-11

Commentary

Inadequate preparations have been made for a wedding. The first words spoken are those of the mother of Jesus, she states a simple fact “they have no wine” (v3). 

When we find ourselves in any situation where there is not enough for everyone we can look at the problem in two ways, we can either say “There is not enough wine” or we can say “There are too many people”. The mother of Jesus chooses to identify the problem as being the lack of wine, not the surfeit of people. Note, she does not say “they have run out of wine”, despite the narration of the story, for her it is as if there was never any wine. Something important is missing from the celebration; this lack stands in the way of greater life.

The wedding organisers have under-estimated the size of their community. Their vision has been too small. Their view of their community was much smaller than the reality. In their minds they had built walls, they had defined who was in, and who was out. They had set limits on who was welcome and who was not welcome.

Perhaps the organisers of this wedding feast have a lot in common with us. Let us consider how we choose to organise our own modern day feasts. In general we choose to limit our hospitality and our table fellowship to the numbers we can afford to treat well. Often when we celebrate we will choose to offer a lavish meal to a relatively small number rather than something much simpler to more. In justification we plead that we have no other choice because it is the most we can afford. We say that we would have invited more if only we could have afforded to invite them! The wisdom of the world tells us that we need to put limits on our hospitality and our friendship.

At the beginning of our story the wedding is being run according to this kind of thinking. The organisers have not deliberately chosen to exclude anyone; it is just that their estimation of how many people are part of their community has been woefully inadequate, far more have arrived than were expected. Because they have made this underestimation they now feel overwhelmed, the text does not say it but we could imagine their immediate reaction: To shut the doors, to reduce their welcome.

Then Jesus arrives! The presence of Jesus changes the whole dynamic of the feast, there is no longer going to be a distinction between those who are welcome (those who have been given wine) and those who are not welcome (those without wine), he destroys this distinction.

Instead of focussing on the lack (wine), as did Jesus’ mother, Jesus takes what they have in abundance (water). The organisers of the wedding can no longer give from their riches, they no longer have any wine but that does not mean they have nothing to give, they can continue to give from their poverty, they can continue to welcome even though all they have is water. Once this revolution in mindset has taken place among the servants then gates can be opened and everyone can be welcomed. The hosts of the party discover that the new bigger reality is much more life-giving (better wine) than was their previous closed mentality. The wine which was lacking at the beginning of this story was a new more open vision, a more astonishing realisation of community.

The events of the wedding at Cana are described by John as a ‘Sign’. A sign is something which points us to somewhere else. A marriage is the beginning of something new. We are being pointed towards the birth of a new community whose values will be very different from the established norms of society.

Both symbols, wine and water, will return at the end of John’s Gospel[1] in the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. It seems that at the centre of his story of redemption the author of John wants to remind us of his earlier teaching, we are being pointed back towards the wedding feast as a way of understanding the crucifixion and resurrection. But this time the transformation is reversed, the wine which passes into the crucified Jesus through his death re-emerges as water and blood.

The community which emerges from Jesus’ death and resurrection is called to live very differently from the world by which it is surrounded.

---

[1] Wine (John 19:29-30), Water (John 13, John 19:34, John 21)

Keeping entertained on a Monday Evening

Another exciting Monday evening.....

Living Beside the Sea

Christian?

Here at Corrymeela Steph and I are living in community. The Corrymeela community describes itself as an Open Christian Community. What does it mean to live in Christian community? It is a complex question with many answers. Here are my thoughts on the question.

Throughout the UK and beyond there are all kinds of institutions and organisations which bear the name Christian. Often when one speaks to those responsible about what this Christian-ness means they will speak of a Christian ethos; by this they often mean, sharing, concern for social justice, equality, and care for each individual. All of these values are labelled as Christian values.  Undoubtedly they are part of Christianity, but then are they not also part of Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and Hindusim? Are there not many humanists, socialists and communists, who would ascribe to such value? Why then is it felt necessary to fence these values off and make them possessions of Christianity?

Maybe we have to look a bit deeper in order to define what it really means to bear the name Christian?

I recently saw an intriguing bio on a twitter account it read:

echthrophiliac ~ \'ek-thrŏ-'fe-lē-,ak\ (noun)

1. one having an abnormal love for one's enemies

2. a Christian

according to this twitterer to be Christian is to take Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:38-48 seriously. Maybe here we have a good answer to what it means to be Christian?

Such words are easily said, but how is it possible to actually live this love of your enemies, it might sound nice in theory but what about practise? As human our immediate instinct is too often to turn inwards, to build walls, to respond to those who threaten us by hiding, by running away, with aggression!

Staying with Matthew’s Gospel for a moment longer, it is no accident that the passage referenced above about love of enemies is followed immediately by another on the subject of prayer (Matthew 6:1-34). According to Matthew's Jesus living this love of enemies is not possible unless we are able to draw on a source much deeper than ourselves. This wisdom comes deep from the experience of both Jesus and the community who wrote this Gospel. 

God’s ability to love is far greater than our own. It is by immersing ourselves continually into this all embracing unconditional love which God has for us that we are enabled and empowered to love others in the same way. It is in the struggle of constant reflection and contemplation that we are transformed into people better able to love.

So perhaps the deepest and most basic definition of being Christian does not relate to our actions at all. To be a Christian is to be one who seeks constantly to be transformed by an encounter with God. To be an authentically Christian community is not about doing or about believing, it is about being collectively transformed by prayer.

Lots to Learn, much to Observe

Just over a week ago Steph and I nervously disembarked from a ferry in Belfast. During the last week we've seen much more than I would be able to put into words or express clearly. Lots of thoughts, ideas and premature conclusions are running around my brain right now.

For the next twelve months we will be living at the Corrymeela centre near Ballycastle in Northern Ireland. We will be working with all sorts of groups from different parts of the region each of whom will come to the centre for a few days. The overarching focus of our work will be Reconciliation.

There are all sorts of different people who live and work here. Some people work here but live in nearby Ballycastle, others actually in the Centre. Of this 'lived community' there are those who come for just a few days, others for a few weeks. Alongside these short-term residents we, along with twelve others, will be living here for a full year. The one-year team is a diverse community

We are:

Josep (Spanish)

Jamie (Northern Irish)

Mark (Northern Irish)

Leanne (Northern Irish)

Helen (Northern Irish)

Mohammed (Palestinian)

Maria (German)

Josué (El Salvadorian)

Pradeep (Nepali)

Kara (USA) 

Steph (English) 

Matthew (English)

Below are a few photos of the centre where we live, the local area, and of Belfast...........

New Challenges

It has been nearly two months since we left the Philippines. We have enjoyed a good summer of visiting family and friends, and of watching lots of sport!

The last days in Cebu seem a long time ago. For those interested the blog posts I posted while in the Philippines will remain on this blog. The text can also be read (perhaps more easily) at this Link: Mangos and Mosquitoes - Blog Posts from the Philippines

In less than two weeks Steph and I will be moving to Northern Ireland, we are going to be living and working with the Corrymeela Community at their centre near Ballycastle. 

You can find out more about Corrymeela here: Corrymeela

This Blog will continue. I will continue to post my news, thoughts, ideas and reflections during my time at Corrymeela. I expect to post much less regularly than I did from the Philippines.

So here's to pastures new and fresh challenges. If any of you would like to visit then please let us know!

Seeds

Today we have reached the end, at 4.00pm we will leave DBTC for the last time. When tomorrow arrives we will be in a different country and a different reality.

Emotions are very mixed, sadness and happiness running very close together.

The last nine months have been quite an adventure, we have learned a lot, experienced a lot, celebrated a lot and eaten a lot. Most importantly of all we have been touched by a lot of different people.

I would like very much to thank the Salesians of DBTC who have made us feel incredibly welcome and valued during our time here.

The last nine months has been a time of planting seeds. We have had the privilege of serving and helping a group of young people who, by all of the comparisons which most of our world value, are extremely poor and live with a constant lack. We have had the chance to plant seeds of learning in each of them, it is now time to walk away, what these seeds will become we do not know.

However, even more profoundly these young people have planted seeds in us. They have shown us that the standard economic measures of well being are not the full measure of a person. They have shown us what it is to be joyful even when life is hard; they have shown us what it means to really live in community and they have shown how valuable simply smiling can be. These young people have given me a new world of possibilities, many of which I am undoubtedly unaware of; I do not yet know what these seeds will grow into within me.

I leave with sadness but also a lot of hope.

If you are still reading this blog I thank you very much for sharing in my journey. I will end with a quote from a South African Christian[1] which, I think, sums up how I feel right now. It is a sentiment I hope I will be able to carry with me as life moves on:

"The deep joy, which only comes from God, can only be present in us if we live with others, because happiness is only true happiness when it is shared."

---

[1] Taken from Lettre de Taizé Sept-Dec 2011, my translation from the French

Finished Programme

After eight months of hard work our programmes for English and Maths are now finished. On Tuesday Steph and I had the chance to meet the training directors of the nine training centres which will be using our programmes; we have also had the chance to introduce the programmes to the teachers here who will be taking over from us in the new semester just starting.

I feel an enormous amount of satisfaction in having completed this work; I am pleased to be leaving behind something which I hope will be useful. 

Our work is now done it is up to others to carry on. Whether our efforts will bear fruit we will probably never know and in any case it is no longer in our hands. There is a sadness in that, letting go and ceasing to be in control of your own creation can be hard. Yet at the same time there is something inspiring about allowing others take up the baton and continue to create with what we started. I think overall it is a cause for celebration, we have played our part. It is time to let go.

An Update

A few weeks ago I put up a post which talked about 18 students who had failed Maths. These students had to continue with Maths for a few more weeks. So for the last few weeks Steph and I have been giving maths lessons to very small groups trying to give them an extra boost of learning. I am pleased to write that of the 18 who had failed, fourteen have now achieved a high enough level to proceed, and three have dropped out. 

Which leave one remaining student who still doesn’t have a good enough level of maths to cope with the course demands. He is a junior going into senior, he will continue into the next semester but with a programme of extra maths. For us it will very soon be time to move on, our last one-to-one lesson with him was yesterday, it will be others who have to help him going forward.

Waving the Flag

One of the quite surprising aspects of living here is how often we see our flag.

After the Filipino flag the second most common flag seen on the streets of Cebu is without doubt the British Flag. It is found on t-shirts, on cars, on sandals, on jeepneys and in shop windows. 

I don't think this is because there are hordes of britophiles in Cebu who adore the UK,  I think it is more likely because we have quite a good flag which people like the look of.

It is not only our flag which is commonly seen in Cebu, by far the most seen football shirt is that of the England national team, followed in second place by either the French national team or Barcelona. Among those who follow football, which is perhaps the fourth biggest sport behind boxing, basketball and cock-fighting, it is the english premier league which is followed. David Beckham and Wayne Rooney are probably the most well known Britains among Filipinos. 

below are a few examples among many......

Rain

Being a tropical country surrounded by a lot of water it tends to rain a lot here.......

Mary

Our rhythm of life while living with the Salesians has involved a lot of prayer. One of the features of this prayer which is sometimes a bit uncomfortable is the extent to which these prayers centre of Mary the mother of Jesus rather than on a person of the Trinity.

Personally I have no problem with acknowledging Mary as a person worthy of special praise, there is much that is inspirational in her story. I also believe that we can ask others members of the Church to pray for us, be these fellow Christians living or dead. Thus I have no problem with us asking Mary, as a fellow Christian, to remember me in her prayers.

Where the spirituality of Mary gets very uncomfortable is when it is elevated to such as level that she is presented as if she is a god. While nowhere in ‘official’ Catholic theology is this claim made, within the culture of devotion and worship she is often presented as if she is God.

Here at DBTC the feast of ‘The Immaculate Conception of Mary’ was celebrated in a far bigger way than was ‘Epiphany’, ‘The Annunciation’ (the conception of Jesus), ‘The Ascension’, or ‘Pentecost’. The Feast of ‘Mary Mother of God’ was celebrated in preference to ‘The Holy Family’ which fell on the same day. The campus has many statues of Mary holding the child Jesus, yet when these statues are mentioned it is Mary rather than the child Jesus who is evoked and reverenced.

In preaching Mary is spoken of far more than is Jesus, she is the one who can grant us special blessings, she is the one who can assist us in need, she is the one who can answer our prayers. It is praying to Mary which is most often encouraged and celebrated.

So why this emphasis on Mary?

Centuries of hierarchical Church leadership have emphasised the masculine. When preaching to a mostly illiterate laity, unable to read the gospels for themselves, the medieval priesthood preached a God who was male, a God who was powerful, a God who was a judge. Thus the attributes traditionally seen as feminine were driven out of God. Perhaps it was a subconscious reaction to this lack of wholeness that devotion to Mary evolved. She is the merciful one, she is the caring one, she is the one who understands our weakness. When God became inaccessible in the eyes of many, it was Mary whom people looked to for consolation.

It is easy to see why Marian devotions have grown, and easy to see why it persists in a Church which is still male dominated, still hierarchical and still denies many of the feminine aspects of God.

But there are dangers in this spirituality. When speaking about Jesus we are obliged to hold true to the New Testament, we cannot credibly present Jesus in a way which contradicts these texts, and so when it come to Jesus every Christian must remain rooted in the earliest origins of Christianity. The same in-built safety mechanism does not exist when we consider Mary; she is mentioned only six times in the New Testament outside of the nativity stories and even then only briefly. Thus it is all too easy for devotion to Mary to collapse into superstition and tribalism. Sadly I think it often does and in doing so does her a disservice. 

Summers Over, it is back to school!

Here in the Philippines May is considered to be the height of summer so their school year runs from June through to March, each year being separated by a three month holiday (TVED where we work only stops for one week!). This week has been the return to lessons for the high school and elementary student.

Here at DBTC a large number of the students board. Some board inside the school campus in the boarding house run by the Salesians and many more board outside in private dormitories. Children as young as nine or ten will often board in large dormitories with very little supervision.

The pupils who board are financially well off by Filipino standards but by no means super-rich. In most cases they are boarding for one of two reasons, that their family home is somewhere remote on another Island far away from a good school, or that their parents are working abroad.

For many among the Filipino middle class the economic reality is that they have to work abroad if they want to live a comfortable lifestyle and send their children to private schools. Millions of Filipinos live and work all over the world many returning home only once a year or sometimes less often. Many of these workers have no option to take their families with them and so spend years away from their husband, wife, children and parents. A large proportion of the school boarders have either one or both parents working abroad. Weekdays are spent in school and weekends are spent with aunts, uncles or grandparents.

The Salesian High school here is a private fee-paying school. The fees are approximately £1’000 per year, nationwide only about 5% of children attend a private school with the majority attending the free government funded schools. To board in the Salesian boarding house costs about £60 a month. Thus to send a child here as a boarder the yearly cost to the parents is around £1’540 for the nine-month school year, for many these fees can only be paid because they are working abroad.

What is best for your child, to stay here and be poor, or to live away and be financially better off? Such is the dilemma facing many parents.

Exciting Plants

These plants still remain exciting even after eight months..........

The Spirituality of the Scapular

Many of our students wear scapulars. Scapulars are two pieces of brown fabric (or sometimes plastic) joined together by two strings. They are worn over the shoulders with one piece of fabric resting on the chest and the other on the back.

These Scapulars are worn as a form of religious devotion. Their historical origin is not completely clear but they seem to have developed in Medieval Europe as a way for ordinary people to symbolically participate in monasticism, the little pieces of fabric being a type of mini-habit. Over time the spiritual beliefs about scapulars evolved, and for many people they came to be seen as having magical powers such as the ‘Scapular Promise’ (see the picture). Such beliefs are not accepted by ‘official’ Catholic teaching but they are still commonly believed.

I mention all this about scapulars because they are a good example of the wider religious culture here.

Religion here is not principally about ‘believing’ it is much more about ‘doing’. Religion is very practical and very immediate. Whereas in Europe we emphasis the intellect and the mind here it is the experiential and the physical. Religion is much less about books and much more about ritual practises. Trinkets, statues and medals are really important; people like to wear pictures of Saints. The rosary is a very popular prayer said while walking, touching the beads as each prayer passes. In churches it is not uncommon to see people stood before (often very ugly) statues seemingly deep in prayer. Frequent processions and vigils form an important part of the regular liturgical routine.

It is not surprising that this is the reality here; our experience of the education system makes it very clear that a religious faith based on books would be unsustainable just as was the case for medieval Europe.

The advantage of such a religious culture is its accessibility; there is no need to study, to struggle with deep ideas or sign up to lots of abstract dogmas. Perhaps there is a lot that we Europeans can relearn about the need for religion to be accessible and close to reality. Maybe we need to reconsider the ways in which the physical and the spiritual can be closer connected?

The disadvantage, of course, is that these popular forms of devotion can very easily become forms of superstition which are performed so as to earn blessings and favours. In such a climate there is a great risk that belief in the unconditional love of God gets forgotten.

The Scapular promise is a good example of these kinds of distortions. Another example is the rosary, when people speak about why they say the rosary often they will mention ideas such as that Mary will send us special spiritual blessings or that we can earn special graces from Mary. The same sentiments are voiced about all sorts of spiritual practises, to our European ears the spirituality of ‘Salvation by spiritual works’ is never far away.

And yet perhaps such a quick judgement is unfair, the human psyche is rarely so simply summed up. The well educated European Church knows that we pray, not to convince God to love us, but as a response to the fact that God already loves us.  But the reality is that we don’t actually pray that much, suggesting that we aren’t all that convinced by what we think we believe. What we claim to believe intellectually is not borne out by our practise.

Here maybe the opposite is true. The words which are spoken suggest a spirituality of constantly attempting to earn God’s love, but the fervour of their spiritual life suggest that on a deeper level they are already convinced of the reality of that love.

Every morning our students attend mass and every evening they pray the rosary together, I don’t believe they are doing so because they think they will be punished if they don’t, they don't exhibit the angst to which such a spirituality would give birth. To some extent they pray out of habit but only partly. Most deeply I think they pray because they know how much they are already blessed; they know how much they are already fully alive. They might not be able to articulate it but they are living it.