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All Saints Day

30/11/2014

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 Somehow November always seems a rather solemn month in spite of interfaith weeks and Scotland's national day. That's because in the Catholic Church the month is given over to remembering the dead and continuing to pray for them - a tradition other Christian denominations don't all share though Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said " nothing can make up for the absence of someone we love. It is nonsense to say God fills the gaps; God doesn't fill it but keeps it empty and so helps to keep alive our former communion". Remembering our ancestors has a long history in religion and connects us with that flow of life of which we are part. Those who have gone before us live within us and have contributed to who we are and who we've become. And in a sense they continue to live in us and will not be forgotten while we hold them in our minds and hearts. 
 
All religions have a deep intuition that death is not the end though what exactly that kind of life will be is a mystery.  And most religions have a sense of growth and development after death so why not pray for the dead who are surely still connected to us through love.  We know from science that all human beings are interconnected and this interconnection cannot end with death. Those who have gone before us are our spiritual ancestors and we are connected to them in a deep and profound way and we can call upon their strength and courage at any time.  Michel Quoist once wrote a prayer in which he said ‘I am not alone, I can never be alone, I am a crowd Lord for people live within me. I have met them, they have come in, they have settled down’. If this is true for the people we have met in life it is even more true for all those who have gone before us, known and unknown. They are part of us and we are part of them.  

The month begins with the feasts of All Souls and All Saints.  I like the feast of All Saints because it recognises the holiness and sanctity of ordinary people, people whose goodness and holiness is hidden in their ordinariness and their commitment to their families, people whose struggles and heroism is known only to God.  For me some of  the most heroic and saintly people are parents of  children with disabilities whose unconditional love is a life long commitment. 

But of course there are also significant figures who offer us inspiration and courage, even if they've not been recognised officially as such. Some of these have been the Jesuits highlighted in the calendar of the British Jesuits this year. December's Jesuit is Walter Ciszek (1904-1984) who secretly entered Russia in 1940 (disguised as a Polish logger) but was quickly arrested and charged with espionage and tortured in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.   He then spent fifteen years in hard-labour in a number of Stalinist gulags, and survived a further eight years as a mechanic working under strict living and working conditions in Siberia. He was deported without any warning in 1963, part of a prisoner exchange for two Soviet agents and  returned to New York where he taught in the Centre For Eastern Christian Studies at Fordham University.  

And tonight on Scottish television there was a documentary about Jane Haining, a farner's daughter from Dumfrieshire who worked as a matron in a Church of Scotland school in Budapest in the 1940s which had a large number of Jewish boarders. Past pupils of the school spoke of Jane Haining's motherly concern for her pupils and how integrated the Jewish pupils were.  Religious education was provided for them and apart from that it was impossible to know who was Jewsih and who Christian. All this changed with the Nazi invasion of Hungary and Jane cried as she sewed yellow stars on the Jewish children's clothes. She refused to leave her post in spite of many requests by the Church of Scotland to come home for safety. She was more concerned for the safety of her pupils. She was arrested by the Nazis and sent to hard labour in Aushwitz but died there after only two months. Today she is recognised at Yad Vashem as on of the Righteous Among the Nations. 

People like Walter Ciszek and Jane Haining are surely saints. They are part of our human family and we have a deep connection to them. We can draw upon their courage  and example. But this is also the case for  'ordinary' people, whose lives are unkown to the world at large but known to those who loved them.  They heroically faced each day and coped with what life brought  them as many saints in the making are doing day in and day out.  I'm glad we take time out  to remember them. 

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Interfaith Journeys

24/11/2014

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Scottish Interfaith week began with a bang yesterday at a celebration in Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. It was the first of a series of events taking place all over Scotland.  The theme 'Journeys of Faith' was taken from the theme for this year's Holocaust Memorial Day and allowed for some very moving testimonies of people's journeys faith. 

One man, reminiscing about his childhood when he had been told to retaliate first before someone else got him, spoke of his conversion to the Bahai Faith because of a gentle man he had met at work, a man by the name of Andy McCafferty. I knew Andy when he was a member of Glasgow Sharing of Faiths many years ago. He was a gentle man who spoke wisdom with sincerity and authority.  Andy sadly died at a young age but his memory was rekindled for me yesterday and I realised how alive his influence still is. No matter what one believes about life after death it is certainly true that people's goodness lives on.

The story that most moved me was from two  women, one Christian the other Muslim,  who belong to a long established women's interfaith group. Together this group had travelled to Iona and their account reminded me of John Dunne's belief that the spiritual adventure of our time is to pass over to the faith of another and return to one's own challenged and changed.  Of course they had adventures like missing the ferry and the weather being awful but it was the spiritual impact that stayed with them.

After attending the Christian prayer of compline that completes the day the group had recited Psalm 97 with the verse "Shame on those who worship images, who take pride in their idols". A Muslim woman asked how the Christians reconciled that verse with the images and ikons around in the chapel and why they did not listen to God's word!  A direct question and one that led to a good discussion about the meaning of images in Christianity. Many  a one would have hesitated about asking such a question but it says a lot about the depth and bonds of friendship that allowed the question with no offense taken.  Often people say that interfaith has no teeth and is only about tea and cake but without the rituals of friendship hard questions can't be asked. 

The Muslim woman talked of her pilgrimage to Mecca which to her mind was one of the holiest places on earth. She had often imagined the hills and desert where the Prophet Abraham's wife, Hagar, had run from one hill to another in search of water.  But there were no hills or desert when she got there, only marble halls and chandeliers as people walked round the Kabah.  On Iona there were plenty of hills and describing her visit to the House of Prayer she said " Walking back from there I could see the hills. It was like the missing piece of the jigsaw. I felt so spiritual. Some jigsaw pieces are here and some are there. God Almighty is everywhere"

 May many more people experience this reality during this interfaith week.

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Zest for Life

16/11/2014

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I've just spent two days with a number of young people from 18 Catholic Schools in Scotland.  The youngsters (I shouldn't really call them that as they were remarkably mature for 13) were spending a day at the Conforti Institute  to reflect on interfaith issues and plan how they would celebrate Scottish Interfaith Week in their schools.  Their interest, creativity and energy were catching. They came up with great ideas. One was  to have a non-uniform day during that week. Instead they would have a colour day with students wearing colours appropriate to different religions and inviting speakers from these religions. Not only would this be a wonderful visual display of the diversity of religions, it would also encourage discussion between the pupils about different religions. I hope they carry it out and send us some photographs so we can advertise it.  A good idea is worth sharing!  Another group suggested an interfaith team in their school and they said ' we can be it!" I have no doubt they will be 'it' and will do a good job. The ideas went on and on.

Sometimes Catholic schools get a bad press in Scotland - not from educationalists who recognise their academic achievements, nor from people of other religions, many of whom like to send their children to Catholic Schools because of the values they uphold. Rather it comes from the secular lobby who want to see religion taken out of the public sphere.  They claim catholic schools are divisive, about indoctrination, inward looking etc. Well. I think they might change their minds if they could meet some of the students I met this week.  Catholic schools, on the whole, are not monolithic establishments. They are multicultural and multifaith communities, particularly in urban areas.  One of them had 40 + languages.  And all the schools that participated in our programme wanted to celebrate this and extend it by embracing Interfaith Week at the end of November. This was a different kind of Catholic school from the one  I was brought up in.  Then my horizons didn't much extend beyond the Christian community but that's just not possible for students today.  And since interreligious dialogue is now so much part of Church teaching, it's not possible to teach Catholicism or Christianity without mentioning this or other issues of justice and peace. 

I felt very enthused by meeting these wonderful young people and satisfied that they would become champions of interfaith within their schools.  They were a great example of the 'zest for life', an approach to life that the Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin tried to encourage among his friends.  I've been reading about it recently. Teilhard believes It was the zest for life that would take the human family and indeed the whole of creation further on its evolutionary journey. And what is this zest for life?  Ursula King describes it as " a drive that keeps us alive, engaged, committed to be involved in what is going on around us. It relates to an awakening to the fullness of life with all its joys and pains, its growth and diminishments and sufferings" It is to live and love life to the full and to encourage its flourishing in others, in communities, in the environment. It would seem to me that this is what religion should be all about. There's no doubt there's good religion and bad religion and how do we judge between them?  The zest for life must surely come into it - a zest for life that encourages diversity. A diversity that brings colour into our lives  must surely be a  criteria for good religion. It's interesting that totalitarian ideologies do away with colour and encourage drabness in life and dress. - more at home with death and conformity than with life and creativity. Any of these ideologies that associate themselves with religion are for me an example of bad religion and not to be encouraged.

Not so the young people I met this week. They were surely examples of good religion.  

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Tempus Fugit

5/11/2014

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There seems to have been so much interfaith activity recently that there's not been much time for blogging. Somehow October has disappeared in a flurry of greetings to the Hindu and Sikh communities, conversations in faith with a friend from the Hindu community, contact with the Shia community, a conference on unity and peace, a visit of Shia clerics to the Catholic Cathedral in Glasgow, an interfaith reception and the AGM of Interfaith Scotland.  For anyone interested in finding our more www. interreligiousdialogue.org is worth looking at. 

I haven't even changed my calendar to November and have nearly missed out on the Jesuit highlighted in the British Province Calendar for October.  This was
Miguel Pro (1891-1927) who was a Mexican Jesuit, arrested and executed simply for being a priest.  What struck me was that that the President of Mexico invited many diplomats and journalists to witness his execution by firing squad, hoping to put others off breaking the anti-clerical laws but the publication of the  images of his  execution around the world drew wide-spread condemnation of the regime.  Now - a - days such executions are put on social media and within seconds have traversed the globe.  But they don't inspire and lead to the condemnation of the groups that perpetrate them. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to matter to such terrorists what others think, focussing as they do only on their own ends and pitting themselves against anyone who thinks differently.

At one of our recent interfaith conferences Archbishop Conti spoke out strongly against this, acknowledging  the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East in which Christians have been caught up, as well as their neighbours, Muslims, Kurds or minority groups of other religions.  This he said is a great blasphemy on the part of those who claim to act in God's name and who justify their barbarous acts as the just deserts of those who do not share their faith or their cause.  "It is incumbent  on all of us to call on our co-religionists to desist from actions, however, motivated, which offend not only against human dignity but also against the holiness of God" - a call repeated by the Prince of Wales this week

 November's Jesuit is a German, Rupert Mayer (1876-1945) who was  army chaplain working courageously in the trenches from where he used to crawl out into no-man’s-land moving among the wounded administering the sacraments; “My life is in God’s hands,” he used to say as he did this. Perhaps it was this experience that gave Fr Mayer a loathing of any ideology of hate.   As Adolf Hitler rose to power he became a fearless and outspoken critic of fascism and  was banned by the Gestapo from public speaking.  He was  finally arrested and imprisoned in 1940 because  he continued to preach in Church against the activities of the Nazi party.  Fr Mayer died on 1st November 1945.

Again this echoes the words of Archbishop Conti and both Jesuits give us courage to stand up against evil ideologies in our own way.  For those in public life their words may be heeded. For those of us who live a quieter, more hidden life we can open our hearts in compassion to the evils perpetrated in the name of religion, pray for peace and work for it in our own small way, refusing to be caught up in ideologies and rejecting others because they are different. Fr Pro and Fr Mayer are heroes of the faith whose courage we can draw on when we become faint hearted in this task.

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    I am  a Catholic nun, involved in interfaith relations for many decades.  For me this has been an exciting and sacred journey which I would like to share with others.

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