Sunday Reflections

Have you ever thought it strange how many different ways there are in which we mark the passing of time – the days, the weeks, the months and the years? In the civil calendar, New Year was the first day of January. In the tax year it is 6 April. In the Liturgical year, the calendar of the Church, the first day of the new year is always a Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent. No matter how we mark its passing, time does inexorably fly by – as the saying goes, too slowly for the infant waiting for Christmas, too quickly for the adult with plenty to do , or as the author Bill Bryson put it: ‘Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.’ These past two years seem to have gone on for ever – and certainly here at the Beda College we find ourselves saying that something happened last year, when in fact we find that it was in 2018 or 2019, before the world had ever heard of a pandemic called Covid! It is as if we have ‘lost’ two years and yet the lessons of the past years of sadness and suffering have all so soon been overtaken by news of armed conflict in Ukraine, famine and flood and earthquake in various parts of the world and dire financial, economic and human hardships all too close to home. Time flies, the world changes rapidly and we need to change and adapt and cope with such a shifting reality. And yet there is a constant, an unchanging reality, which we have so recently proclaimed at Christmastide: ‘When the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject to the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law so that we might receive adoption as sons and daughters’ (Galatians 4:4). Saint Paul, whose conversion we celebrate on the 25th of this month, writes not only to the Church in Galatia but also to you and to me in this Year of Our Lord 2023, inviting us to reflect upon our redemption and that close bond of love with the Father which we know and experience as our adoption as His sons and daughters. That is a work for this and every new year. 20 – C.M.B. – 23 May the Lord bless our homes, this year as in every year

Sunday thoughts Mgr John Devine OBE

We welcomed a new priest to the Isle of Man recently. Father Peter Otuonkpaikhian CSSp is a member of the Spiritan Congregation, sometimes known as the Holy Ghost Fathers. He is on a two-year sabbatical from his parish in Nigeria. Fr Peter joins two other Spiritan priests on the island. Fr Brian O’Mahony is parish priest at Our Lady Star of the Sea and St Maughold in Ramsey, and St Patrick’s in Peel. Fr Joseph Kiganda is parish priest at St Mary’s, Castletown, and St Columba’s, Port Erin. Fr Peter will live in community with Fr Joseph in Castletown and has been assigned to serve as assistant priest at St Mary of the Isle, Douglas, and St Anthony, Onchan. The Spiritan congregation have been generous to the Archdiocese. Other Spiritan fathers are working in Newton-le-Willows and Warrington.

The formal agreement between the Spiritan congregation and the Archdiocese requires a period of orientation for Fr Peter. When I served in Peru with the LAMP project, a similar period of orientation was required. In one sense the Church is the same throughout the world. The main differences between churches are cultural rather than doctrinal. But every local church is different.

Even within our own Archdiocese parishes differ. The Isle of Man is not Warrington. Nor is Warrington the Isle of Man. The expectations of parishioners vary from parish to parish. Archbishop Worlock once described culture as ‘the way we do things round here’. Fr Peter has been shadowing me for several weeks. Many things are new to him, just as they were for me when I first went to Peru. The liturgy in Nigeria is vibrant. There is dancing as well as singing. Mass here is subdued by comparison. Sunday Mass takes longer in Nigeria. The congregation on the Isle of Man gets restless if Mass lasts longer than 50 minutes on a Sunday, and much less during the week.

In Peru I learned to drive on the righthand side of the road. On the Isle of Man Fr Peter is learning to drive on the left. Ministering abroad taught me to respect different ways of doing things. I came home with more than I gave. My hope is that Fr Peter will find his time with us as enriching as I did when I went to Peru.

God of the new beginnings

Here we are at the start of a new year, a time that always fills me with new hope. What will this year bring? Where will I meet God?

Many years ago I met a young guy called John. John had lived a pretty tough life. Virtually on the streets from a young age, he had learned how to survive. He had been in prison and when I met him he was due to go down again for fraud. I remember saying to him, ‘John, ask God to help you.’ He looked at me with a tear in his eye and said, ‘I am too bad for your God’. I watched this young man, whose life was such a mess, break down and weep. He was unable to hear the call he was being given to trust God with the mess of his life. He felt too bad about himself and that was the biggest barrier to opening up to love which could transform him.

There is nothing in our lives that is a barrier to keeping God away unless you allow things to be a barrier. God is simply waiting for us to open ourselves to the power of love and to stop pushing God away. God is waiting for us to realise that He never gives up on us. There is always another chance. That is the Good news. Jesus has shown us the heart of God – compassion, mercy, love flowing out towards us, made flesh in the body of Jesus so that we can look and say, ‘That is who you are, you are the God who transforms the messiness of human life through the power of love.’ All it takes is that we trust and believe in it.

Sadly, we think it is about what we do and how good we are. But in reality, it is all about the goodness of God and not about our pathetic attempts to be worthy. The 12-step processes understand it. It is faith in God that makes real God’s saving power in our lives. The challenge is never to wait until you have got it all together before you let God in but simply to know that, in your mess and with your mess, God can do anything. So the kingdom is about life in the here and now. It exists in so far as we are willing to allow a revolution to take place within us. It exists in so far as we are prepared to stop being religious people, with our temptation towards self-righteousness and intolerance, and become like Jesus, prepared to give everything away for the sake of others. It exists when we know in the depth of our being that God is the God of the new beginnings, the second chance, the allembracing forgiveness that knows no end. Father Chris Thomas

from the archives Changing the world at once

by Neil Sayer, Archdiocesan Archivist

Pic cartoonist, Bernard Atherton, reflecting on New Year 1975 Bishop Gray (centre) at the 150th anniversary of St Bede’s, Clayton Green, in September 1974

The New Year message from our Auxiliary Bishop makes for stark reading. ‘We have little ground for rejoicing’, he says. ‘Gloomy forecasts are made which predict mass unemployment, a lowering of our living standards, and a general depression on a scale equivalent to that experienced in the immediate post war period

It might surprise you to find that these words were not written by either of our Bishops Tom about the coming year of 2023; they came from the pen of Bishop Joseph Gray and they form part of his New Year message for 1975.

Bishop Gray was born in Ireland and trained for the priesthood at St Mary’s College, Oscott, spending his first years of ministry in the Archdiocese of Birmingham. He came to Liverpool in 1968, at the age of 49. Archbishop Beck was not in the best of health at that time and had requested the assistance of a second auxiliary to help in the administration of the country’s largest diocese. Bishop Augustine Harris, auxiliary since 1966, may have become worn down by his exertions connected with the opening of the Cathedral in 1967. In any case, another Auxiliary was deemed necessary, and Canon Gray of Birmingham was nominated for the role. On 16 February 1969 he became the first Bishop ordained in the new Cathedral. Given responsibility for the pastoral care of the five deaneries in the east of the Archdiocese, he lived in Wigan and undertook many parish visitations and confirmations, serving also as Vicar General. He was vastly interested in people, always willing to listen and possessed of a firm handshake and a great memory for names and faces. It seems the warmth was reciprocated: when asked about his arrival in Liverpool, he said that ‘I could not have asked for a warmer reception from priests and people’. He continued to assist Archbishop Worlock after Archbishop Beck’s retirement, until in 1980 he was appointed to his own diocese when he became Bishop of Shrewsbury.

In his New Year message published in the Catholic Pictorial in January 1975 Bishop Gray was in fact trying to paint a positive picture. The previous year had certainly been challenging. Following the global oil crisis of 1973, the British government introduced a three-day working week to conserve fuel supplies. For the darkest two months of 1974, as electricity blackouts took effect, the country worked largely by candlelight and huddled under blankets for warmth. In the middle of a deep recession, inflation was into double figures and youth unemployment was rising. It took two general elections that year to establish a workable government. Meanwhile American politics had been tainted by the Watergate scandal, which had forced Richard Nixon to resign as President, and Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus was one of many international flashpoints.

Bishop Gray attempted to put things into perspective. ‘Modern discoveries in science and technology have made the world a small place. Not only can we travel to any part of the earth at almost the speed of sound and receive instantaneous news coverage of events from any part of the globe, but man is also able to move outside the earth and view this planet from space’. And our place in that world is very fortunate. If ‘the energy crisis is forcing many people to be satisfied with less’, then maybe restraint isn’t such a bad thing: ‘It is a very effective way of learning the lesson that we have been living too well in this part of the world and times have caught up with us. We have forgotten that while we have enjoyed a comparatively high standard of living, two thirds of the world has not had subsistence standards.’

With time to reflect, according to the Bishop, we need to remind ourselves ‘that we are all members of one great family, and that we can no longer continue to ignore the plight of our brethren in need’. Bishop Gray’s New Year’s resolution is to make ‘a genuine re-appraisal of my life and my relationship with God and my fellow-men’. Responding to this call, he feels, can lead to ‘a renewal from within’. Hope, confidence, ‘rejoicing’, all will follow, despite the reservations with which he began his address. ‘We will not change the whole world at once, but we will have begun in the place where we can have the greatest influence – our own lives’. Happy New Year.

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Alice returns to Malawi

To mark the 10th anniversary of Network for a Better World (N4BW), its founder, Alice Davidson, OBE aged 85 years, a parishioner from Old Swan in Liverpool, took a visit to Malawi to reflect on the work undertaken and to plan for future projects. During her stay in Sitima in July, she visited Kachere School to view the near completion of a new classroom block, the eighth school block built by N4BW. She then went to Mikundi School to plan the construction of three new classrooms there. Schools work involves a lot of ongoing teacher training and during Alice’s recent stay the focus was on assessment, using different tools and applying a range of methods to monitor the progress of the learners. Latterly disability awareness training has been delivered to teachers along with supplying necessary resources for children. Much of the training provided by N4BW with both teachers and pupils, explores ways of mitigating the effects of climate change. An example was seen at Namisunju School where the vegetable gardens have developed, both as a learning project and to provide extra nutrition in the form of vegetables for the children. Alice revisited the adult literacy group where the newest initiative the women have engaged in is a sewing project and they were very happy to show Alice the blouses and skirts they had made. One of the ladies who has recently learned to read proudly told Alice how she can now read stories to her grandchildren Lots of conversations took place between Alice and local community groups to consider ways in which N4BW can support the community during the next 10 years. Education remains high on the agenda along with projects that aid self-sufficiency.

Alice says, ‘The idea for the charity might have been mine in the first place but its success is due to the imagination, enthusiasm and hard work of those people who support N4BW both in UK and in Malawi. Those people come from all walks of life and kindly give in many ways, from acting as trustees, volunteering in Malawi and donating money.’ To find out more about the work of N4BW visit www.n4bw.org.uk or email: enquiries@n4bw.org.uk