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Connecting Generations

25/11/2018

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I’ve just returned from Evensong in the local Episcopal Church. The congregation was saying goodbye to one of the priests who had spent much of his time involved in interreligious dialogue. The Church was full and present were people from other denomination s and from other faiths.  There was an atmosphere of openness and inclusiveness  in spite of it being a Christian service.  What a difference from times past.  Not only were the congregation open and welcoming but it was obvious how at home those of other faiths felt.  This, I think is a good outcome of the work of interreligious dialogue – to be able to visit one another’s places of worship and to feel at home and welcomed even when not participating in the service.  All places of worship are the House of God and as such are holy and I must say I always feel that as a place where people pray and come with their hopes, fears, worries and joys there is a tangible energy in those I visit.
 
There will have been quite a few visits to places of worship in this last fortnight. In Britain it’s been Interfaith Week with interfaith events across the country. There’s been a great sense of energy within what some people call the interfaith community. It’s been good to realise just how much effort people put into bringing faith communities together, something that doesn’t often reach the press. I was part of a visit to one of our Synagogues with the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Archbishop Philip Tartaglia, the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow. We were, as you would expect, warmly welcomed, told something about the Synagogue and the community before gathering for tea and coffee where there was a real sharing of common concerns. A young journalist joined us and he was quite bowled over by the sight of these religious leaders being so at home with one another.  He couldn’t believe this kind of thing happened – and yet it does all the time.
 
Unlike England we in Scotland have a theme for the week.  This year it was Connecting Generations which became one of the topics discussed at the annual Interfaith Summit with the First Minister.  I was asked to introduce the discussion on Connecting Generations from an elder’s point of view. What I wanted to show was that faith communities do this naturally. So often I go to interfaith events when specially funded project are highlighted. They need a director, often premises, staff, and if funding ends so does the project.  It’s almost as though faith communities are only seen as valuable if they can mount projects for the wider community. This is not possible for all faith communities with limited numbers and resources. But there’s a lot of connecting generations going on. I happened to go to the local Hindu Temple recently and immediately there was a sense of activity – children learning Hindi, a cultural dance class going on, women preparing the food for the community meal after the service and a variety of generations in the prayer hall.
 
With the breakdown of the extended family in the west there are not many places where intergenerational living happens.  Each week, and perhaps more often, faith communities gather and often share a meal together.  At the heart of their life together is celebration – the annual celebrations of festivals which remind the community of their foundational stories and often festivals such as Purim and Christmas have ways of drawing in children and making them enjoyable. But there’s also the regular celebration of life cycle rite so that both young and old participate in births, deaths, marriages, coming of age rituals. It’s healthy to be aware of the pattern of living and ageing and dying as part of the human journey.
 It’s important to the older generation to pass on the traditions that have been precious to them and so education is part of community life. Their desire is to give the younger generation a clear sense of identity, not in the sense of indoctrinating them but in the sense of giving them a foundation from which to reflect and engage with others. There’s been some recent research into Catholic Schools which shows that a clear sense of identity helps young people appreciate, live with, value different faiths. The clearer our own identity, the happier we are with diversity.  
 
A happy, dynamic community is a valuable asset for society at large but of course faith communities do fail. From the press we’re aware of the dark side of religion. Shedding light on this is good and a challenge to communities to reform but even in the normal run of events young people as they leave home and begin study or work often opt out of the community. Sometimes the charge is that the elders speak a language that is irrelevant.  We elders need to be challenged on this. We need to be questioned by young people about what we believe, we need to listen to how young people see and understand the world, we need to assure them of our acceptance as they struggle to make sense of life, we need to seek together for a common language. Young people have a gift for our communities and we and our communities will be the poorer if we don’t listen to them.  

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A Time to Remember

11/11/2018

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Today is Remembrance Sunday, the annual remembrance of all those who have died in the two World and subsequent Wars.  The date is that of Armistice Day, the day that brought to an end the First World War when at the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month 1918 hostilities between Britain and Germany ceased. It had lasted four years and millions had died in the most appalling circumstances.  It’s celebrated every year but this year, remembering as it does the centenary of the cessation of war, it seems to be everywhere. I find it a bit overwhelming. We’ve been celebrating the First World War for four years with numerous television programmes about the war and memorials of every major battle. The wearing of a poppy on this day is traditional but four years ago Paul Cummins and Tom Piper designed a poppy installation at the Tower of London and this seems to have given inspiration to cities, towns, villages, churches to design their own installations.  This year the poppies have been everywhere and I for one find it a bit overpowering.
 
That‘s a very hard thing to say and sounds ungrateful and I am puzzled by my own reaction. Why should I feel uneasy when it’s about thousands of young men who gave up their lives or were conscripted into a war that historians tell us was pointless?  I don’t feel uneasy about them and the personal stories of those who have died are very moving and heart-breaking. There will have been hardly a family in the land that was not affected by the war or lost a family member.
 
My own family was not affected because during both world wars my father and grandfather were employed in reserved occupations.  Nor did the Catholic Church make a lot of remembrance Sunday when I was growing up.  On the whole we don’t have war memorials in Catholic Churches in the way that Presbyterian and Anglican Churches have them.  I wonder why, because Catholics will have died in those wars. Perhaps it’s because Catholics were on the margins of civic society.  It’s not that we didn’t remember because in the Catholic Church November is a month of remembering. It begins with the feast of All Saints and then All Souls when Catholics remember all who have died. There is a tradition in parishes that people are able to write down, perhaps on sheets of paper or in a book of remembrance, the names of all their loved ones who have died and they are all remembered every day at the Eucharist. Among these names there will have been service men and women.
 
In this centenary year there has been an attempt to make the war personal. People have been encouraged to bring photographs of relatives who fought in the war. At the Albert Hall's Festival of Remembrance the most poignant moment was when the families of those  who had lost a family member in military conflict processed on to the central area while  everyone in the Hall, which holds 5,000 people, held before them a photograph of someone who had died in the war. So too at the Cenotaph in London, family members holding photographs of their loved ones marched with military personnel.  This made all the celebrations/ festivals/ memorials/ truly personal. There’s a sense that with time memories of the war will fade and recede into history.  Perhaps this will be the last of such memorials.  It’s important, however, that the personal be not lost.  Literature, film and poetry can help us appreciate the reality but it’s the personal stories that touch the heart.
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This is the case with memorials of the Holocaust. I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington with the passport of a young woman killed at Auschwitz and have on my wall information of Albert Bulka who perished at Auschwitz aged 4 years old, given out at a Holocaust Service.
 
Remembering is good. It’s not so much keeping alive the past but it makes ever present a reality that is part of our civic life and history. It’s important to remember. We don’t want to  forget the sacrifice of so many nor the horror of war. The refrain is ‘never again’. But it has happened again – over and over again.
 
 So what discomfits me about it?  Well one thing – all the services are predominantly Christian though I notice the prayers omit ‘through Jesus Christ Our Lord’.  But men and women of all faiths were involved in the war effort. Could we not make the services more multicultural and multifaith?
 
There’s also a tinge of glorification in it all - a sense of victory, of conquest. There’s  an acknowledgment that there was a terrible loss of life on both sides of the conflict and prayers for peace but not a rejection of war itself or a commitment to the ways of peace that recognises the need for community, dialogue, negotiation. The European community brought together enemies of old but now it’s breaking down. What we need is a commitment to the human community that seeks the common rather than the national good. We need to be serious about peace but how can we do that when the production and selling of arms is so central to our economy? It makes a mockery of much of the remembering. 

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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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