Thursday 30 October 2008

The Catholic in me (5)

There is no longer any real struggle within me over conscience and belief in connection with the teachings of the Church.
I take more interest now in what the Church teaches than at any earlier stage of my life’s journey, but my interest is not accompanied by any overwhelming sense that I must believe what I am told to believe, and must do what the Church tells me to do. I do have a lingering feeling that I ought to do as I am told, and ought to believe according to whatever the Church says, but I interpret this as an echo of the unquestioning fear that kept so many returning to their church pews in past years.
It is easier and safer to go along with routines and rules, whether written or unwritten, than to risk any action or expression of doubt or disbelief which would draw attention to oneself; attention that could result in anything from merely being frowned upon by some, and somewhat distanced from the fellowship previously enjoyed (if indeed there was any fellowship as opposed to secular friendship), to being shunned and completely ostracized by one’s fellow ‘Christians’. And heaven forbid that, once begun, this process should continue to the point where we may be confronted with the likelihood of excommunication from the Church. However remote this possibility may in fact be, the barely understood reality of such a separation and its possible causes hovers in the mind’s recesses in such a way that it plays its part in keeping the mouths of those who doubt firmly closed.

The fear experienced has not been a trembling in the face of imagined consequences so much as an underlying unease, among those around us as well as within ourselves, that someone might rock the boat by expressing a doubt or disagreement with which we are already burdened. As long as everyone maintains the outwardly peaceful status quo by remaining willing to bury their heads in the sand as often as may be necessary, we will all get along fine in everything from ecumenism to Eucharist and from love to liturgy; from riches to reconciliation and from poverty to prayer; this harmony may extend to encompass all parishioners and priests. We will rest easy in the knowledge that our own church – the one each of us believes to be how we imagine it to be – is the same today as it was yesterday, and if nothing draws attention to its instability, that it will still be the same tomorrow. If it has remained unchanged for many years, then surely it must be a rock upon which we can safely continue to stand.

In much of Europe today, Britain included, there are more people searching for a spiritual home than there are those who believe they already have one. Leaving aside those who are already part of a faith community, how can an active seeker after spiritual sustenance find reasons to think of joining a church if all they appear to offer is a house of cards, held together by a strangely peaceful combination of intellectual laziness, rugged individualism and spiritual numbness that makes their members ideally suited to being part of a flock? Jesus knew well what people were like; He knew that most of those who followed Him would never complete their spiritual journeys on their own: left to themselves they would drift and fall away; and He knows that we are still the same today.
“Feed my sheep.” (John 21:17 ) He told Peter. We are His sheep, and we need constant feeding and shepherding even to maintain our present position as part of a community of believers. To advance both our faith and our fellowship we need to be fed well, by today’s Peter and by the Bishops and priests whose task it is to bring the reality of God to life in the Holy Spirit led Church which exists for every one of us, but we particularly need to be fed by each other. Our individual relationships, our belonging and functioning as part of a parish or local community, our commitment to truth and justice and the need for all denominations to meet and draw closer together: an underlying commitment to the longing for the unity of all Christians; all these are both food and journey. Our own experiences form part of our journey, while our awareness of and involvement in the journeys of others provides food for our own, just as their sharing in our journey provides them with food for theirs.

In so many of life’s encounters outside the parish community, or away from our small groups of spiritual friends, we should be asking, ‘What would Jesus do?’ ‘What would Jesus say?’ If we can find the right answers to those questions, and act accordingly, we truly are Christians. Those answers will come through the guidance of the Holy Spirit; that is what He is here for, and in seeking that guidance we are striving for all that is truth. When we do this collectively, even if only two at a time, we are being the Church: we are proclaiming and advancing God’s Kingdom in Christ’s presence.

“For where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20)

Immediately before saying (in ‘Shaping our Future’), that ‘the church today’ is still ‘constituted by and utterly dependent upon the Holy Spirit’, J.S.Freeman wrote, ‘The church itself is ... not a sacred trust given to one generation to be handed on to the next, or a human institution to be carefully guarded or even carefully reformed for human purposes...’ (Quoted by Alan Abernethy in ‘Fulfilment and Frustration'.) The Church was instituted by Jesus for God’s purposes and for the benefit of mankind, not for mankind’s purposes and, if it should happen to coincide, for God’s benefit. Still less was it devised and instituted by mankind.

In his encyclical, On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World, Pope John Paul II wrote of Baptism, ‘... the life-giving power of the Sacrament which brings about sharing in the life of the Triune God, for it gives sanctifying grace as a supernatural gift to man. Through grace, man is called and made "capable" of sharing in the inscrutable life of God.’ (Dominum et vivificantem 9.)
Does baptism have any value? Does it matter to us whether or not a baby is baptized?
Having spent time thinking about that young mother and her baby, I find myself longing for the baptism to take place. Yes, it does matter. Being ‘made capable’ of receiving all that God offers is not something any man or woman should knowingly deny to another.
Those of us who are baptized have been blessed with this capability, and it lives within us whether we are churchgoers or not. As adults, it is up to us to realize our blessings. Even those of us who give no more thought to God than to ‘religiously’ attend a weekly church service, blindly marking time in our pews and making sure we do not rock the boat, particularly for ourselves, are in touch with the reality of Christ’s Church. But being in touch with it is not enough; we must allow ourselves to be touched by it, to be fed by it, to be sheltered and healed by it if we are to become Christians in more than name. Then, as the Spirit lives in us, so shall we live in the Spirit. For those who are searching, we, individually and as a community, shall then become their reason to approach Christ’s Church.

I enjoy every contact I have with other churches and shall never regard any supposed differences between us as being anything other than what they are: entirely man made, and therefore completely within our own control. The complete unity of all Christians into one living whole – the Church as it is meant to be – is for us to aim for and to achieve. We already have the answer to all possible doubts, disbeliefs, divisions and protestations: the Holy Spirit. And if God is with us, and if we believe, why should we still fear a little unsteadiness? Why do we imagine everything turning into a storm? And if the storm does come, the only thing truly fearful about it is our own doubt.

‘... as they sailed He fell asleep ... they went to rouse Him saying, “Master! Master! We are lost!” (Luke 8:23, 24).

If we still allow ourselves to be ruled by doubt we have yet to embrace the change from being in touch with the Church to being touched by it. It is the touch that will bring both ourselves and the Church to life. It is the touch that makes us the Church.

The food is here in abundance. I have quoted above from one of Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals, and every such document is a powerful expression of a truth which awakens more deeply within the reader. I increasingly find such writings helpful as information and interpretation, both in their own right and in connection with my own directions and levels of belief, but more noticeably, and more relevantly, without quite understanding what it is they stir within me, these documents repeatedly confirm to me not only that I am a member of Christ’s Church, but a member of the Roman Catholic Church: the Church from which the various other churches and denominations have moved away.
I am learning over and over again that I am fortunate: that I am truly blessed to know that I am already home.

Sunday 26 October 2008

Small beginnings


With so many people distanced from any form of organized religion yet still searching and spiritually aware, any approach towards God needs to be accompanied by a search for whatever God may already be doing in people’s lives.
This can be a rewarding start-point for any of us, wherever we may be on our journey, but for a person who is setting out on the spiritual path for the first time, or who is only giving a first thought to the possibility, this may bear particular fruit through the blessings received as a result of that inner search. To examine one’s life looking for previously unnoticed touches or influences of God is to acknowledge not only His existence but His presence in the world and in one’s own life. That acknowledgement, however unintentional, is an expression of a desire that may have been buried for years, and is the beginning of a communication that has the power to transform our lives. For those who already live, or try to live, in God’s presence, that same search (but in another’s life) is essential whenever their paths are crossed by someone outside the church: someone who may have had no contact at all with Christianity. In such situations I believe we should simply be asking ourselves, ‘What would Jesus do?’ ‘What would Jesus say?’ There will always be those who insist that the start point should be, ‘What does the Church teach? ‘What does the Church say we should do?’ and by Church they will mean their own particular denomination or group: their own church.

The Holy Spirit has been given to us as guide and teacher, an unwavering presence whose reason for being with us is to inspire, build and empower the Church, spreading knowledge and truth among its members. We cannot separate the two: the Holy Spirit is the powerhouse of Christ’s Church, and no man or woman can claim the authority to stand, proclaim, teach or lead within it without His gifts and His guidance.
‘... The church today, as much as at the church at Pentecost, is constituted by and utterly dependent upon the Holy Spirit.” (Shaping our Future. J.S.Freeman. (Quoted in Fulfilment and Frustration. Alan Abernethy.))

In the past I have had an ongoing discomfort with anything causing me to even think of questioning what others within my own church say should be done. It was a part of the overlong extension of my perceived spiritual immaturity: what I had taken as being a lengthy period of preparation and learning prior to any advance along my path. How blind I had been. When I became aware that it was time to move along, my view of myself and of my place in the world altered as though rousing from a half sleep. I awoke to find myself in unknown territory somewhere further along the road on which I had set out. I had been travelling all the time but my lack of confidence – my lack of trust – had held my perception back; I had not been prepared to take any form of risk: to risk thinking that I might be ready for anything other than requiring support from others. I had clung to my own felt needs without recognizing that they had evaporated, leaving a calm and non-threatening understanding that I was now in a position to begin reaching out to others.
As I write about it now, it sounds and seems so simple: a quick and easy transition from needy vulnerability to a potentially fruitful resilience and self-belief. That is not how it usually is, and that is not how it was for me. Between the two was a long period of comfortable self-absorption during which any felt need for support from others faded away in step with their increasing absence. Whether this was cause and effect (whichever side of the situation may have been the cause), or whether it was a mutual but unplanned withdrawal in response to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I may never know; but I do know that it is in the past and is of no consequence now, apart from having taught how easily valuable time can be lost.

I have recently been told of a young woman who had approached her local church because she wanted her baby to be baptised. She does not go to church, but becoming a mother had changed her whole outlook on life. Having her child baptised suddenly became very important to her, but it seems that it will not happen. The vicar had told her that she would have to come regularly to the church for three months before the baptism could take place, and this she was not prepared to do.
I can understand some of the thinking behind this situation, from both the mother’s and the vicar’s points of view, but it leaves me with a real feeling of sadness that this young person’s recognition of something, and what may have been the start of her tentative spiritual search has been brushed away by a man-made suppression of spontaneity and a corresponding need for conformity and adherence to rules. Does it matter to anyone else apart from the mother whether the baby is baptized? Does it matter to us? What would Jesus have said to her? These questions only have meaning if we believe baptism to have any value. Is it something of real worth and therefore of importance, or is it one of the many parts of church life and organized religion which are conjured up, encouraged and then virtually set in stone without any requirement or instruction from God? If the former, somebody should run after that young mother and her child, spend time listening and finding out about them, and then find a way of discussing the question of baptism without creating a gulf between us and them: without turning them away from the possibility of future contact. If the latter, it is time to look closely at what we are doing and what we believe. Are we in any way even in touch with the reality of Christ’s Church? Are we Christians in anything but name?

That same young mother, perhaps unknowingly longing for the gift of the Holy Spirit, not only for her child but for herself, could so easily have been present in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. She could have been in the crowds that listened to Peter as he said,
“You must repent, and every one of you must be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38).
As a stranger to the country and its religion, she would have heard him go on to say, “The promise that was made is for you and your children (the Jews), and for all those who are far away (the gentiles), for all those whom the Lord our God is calling to himself.” (Acts 2:39)

I picture her walking home in the quiet of evening, smiling at her baby, with heart filled to bursting and with tears of joy on her cheeks; she has found her Lord and is wrapped in the safety of an awareness of His having found her. They are inseparable: they are the Holy Spirit and Christ’s Church portrayed at the level of a single human life. What a mother she will be for her child.
God’s plan for mankind is echoed in her newfound sense of wonder as she is anonymously included in the words of Acts 2:41.
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‘That very day about three thousand were added to their number.’
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Thursday 23 October 2008

We are saints

Each person we think of as embodying a life lived for God, and each name we recognize as belonging among those instantly thought of as synonymous with faith in God, reveals to us a fruit born of perseverance: a gift unwrapped in the light of unfailing trust in the worth of the journey.
Even for these seemingly exceptional men and women, nothing has been achieved without a series of forks, junctions and crossroads having presented themselves during life’s progress towards fulfilment. Nobody becomes a saint - be that understood as a person canonised by the Catholic Church, or as a person unrecognised in that formal way but seen as having led a holy life - without the twists and turns, struggles and trials of their own journey. Hidden these may be, but they are at least as real as any hurdle or hardship experienced by anyone else. Within saintly exteriors there may well be saints, but within the saints there are men as we are men, and women as we are women. This has always seemed improbable to many of us, but of even greater difficulty has been an acceptance that within each one of us there rests, not only the image, but the reality of a saint. Saints are what we are called to be; the road to holiness and sainthood runs parallel to the one we follow in our growth towards becoming the persons we are meant to be.

I have mentioned the name Francesco Bernadone, and the effect it had on me when found on an otherwise blank page. St Francis was already there: he was wrapped within the developing heart and mind of a boy who was actually named Giovanni not Francesco. Francis is believed to have been given first as a form of nickname, and it was as Francis that the world came to know him.
It continues to astonish me how important the smallest of things can be to us as individuals. For example, one could say that the name on that page should more correctly have been Giovanni Bernadone, but if that had been the case I believe it would not have struck me in the same way, and I would not have learned from it as I did; the initial extra step required to make the connections may have been lost on me, and I would not have been fed by the experience through these last years.

We all have moments, words, glimpses and touches that affect us deeply while the rest of the world carries on oblivious to our plight, our sorrow, our joy, our ecstasy: unaware of our emptiness or desolation, our fullness and our overflowing. Of similar importance in our journey of faith are the availability and attention we receive from others in response to, not only our doubts and fears, but our newfound strengths and increasing realization of our own giftedness. The affirmation we desire and the confirmation we need when first venturing along our spiritual path, seeking and daring to ask our first tentative questions, are both essential to our progress. The right person crossing our path at the right time is a gift from God: God’s provision for us in that moment, however fleeting their presence may be.

That first moment of wondering could become the key to our own sainthood, and as we mature it can be an unnerving experience to suddenly find ourselves called to act as a support for someone else. It is far easier to continue in our belief that we are the ones who need someone to lean on, but just as the person who steadies us at the start of our journey can be essential to our remaining on the right track, so the one who needs support from us can bless us by making us aware that we have to move: that we must take our place further along the path. It is frequently only through such eye-opening moments of need in the lives of others that we are roused from our immobility and pushed out from our comfort zones.

Every move forward in our journey is accompanied by increased responsibility, but it can take a long time for both our awareness and our acceptance of that responsibility to catch up with our focus upon ourselves. We can only begin to believe that we are stepping towards maturity and wisdom when our sense of responsibility finally walks in time with our continued seeking.
To recognise the responsibility immediately, even when the blessing is not through another person’s need but through the experience of God’s presence takes real maturity. Jesus walked with me to bring me to life, not to hold me back while I bathed in the pleasure of His company. In my immaturity it took me far too long to understand that, though in truth I still find myself rationalizing the delay with a belief that I had to wait until the time was right. Perhaps I would never have known when it was time; but Jesus knew. He knows the time for every one of us.
What are believed to be Saint Francis of Assisi’s last words are relevant here: "I have done what is mine to do; may Christ teach you what you are to do."

Alan Abernethy, in his book, Fulfilment and Frustration, gives an example of what I regard as his own maturity: - “I have just experienced (Jesus’) presence in a very moving and inspiring act of worship in the Abbey on Iona. There is a danger I do not want the present to become the past. This was a mountain top experience and, like Saint Peter, I want to stay here for a while. However, I cannot, these moments must become part of my past to encourage me to go forward. ... It is good to be here but I cannot stay here.”
The author has responded to his vocation and has struggled with aspects of it throughout his ministry. The book portrays an example of the perseverance required if we are to discover and strengthen the saint within us, and his willingness to reach out to all denominations in his own search for peace and truth speaks to me, not of division and lack of commitment, but of Christ’s Church.

Is this not what every Christian minister should be doing? Is this not what every minister should be encouraging every one of us to do?
Not ‘What does my church say?’ but ‘What does Jesus say?’
Based purely on the portrayal in his book, I know that he is a man, a minister in whom I would place my trust and with whom I would be ready to walk and to learn. The more often we are able to say that about individuals outside our own churches and beyond the reaches of Christianity the better.
What he has described as ‘a mountain top experience’ is one of the unpredictable outcomes of spending time alone with our God. It is why I take every opportunity to step away from the highways of life, to approach and to linger, whenever I can, at the very edge.
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‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.’
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Saturday 18 October 2008

Questioning

A few nights ago our world was gently illuminated by the full moon. It is not only for those young enough to still regard it as a new or unusual experience that it is an amazing sight: rather, it remains an astonishing presence in the sky for even the oldest of us; at least, I cannot imagine it being any other way.
As a small child I would have looked on it with an innocent and uneducated wonder, but I see it now with the background knowledge of what it actually is, how large, how distant, how its phases result from its orbiting around our world, and, in comparison with even the nearest planet, how relatively close to us it is. A single moment’s pause and the sight of it becomes an open gateway to the stars and to the apparently boundless immensity of the universe. There are no words to describe the fleeting combination of our own insignificance and this vastness, but that does not mean that the two superficially irreconcilable areas of awareness cannot merge into one. It is a real merging, a blending of the two into a new and greater awareness of our belonging; it is only our lack of understanding that makes the awareness an uncomfortable, disconcerting or even frightening experience. It is not like a meeting of matter and antimatter with their mutual annihilation, but a fleeting unity: a oneness with not only our Earth and everything it contains, but with the whole of creation. It is a profound beauty in the form of expanded senses of place and significance: non-specific, but more rather than less profound for that. And is this capacity for going beyond ourselves available from simply pausing to consider the ‘everyday’ in a deeper and more distant way? -From simply disconnecting our usual trains of thought and mental processes while looking at the moon? Yes, it is.

The answer is like the quiet smile on the face of a grandparent when hearing a little child’s question: the truth and the reality are too far beyond the questioner’s mind but, in time, will become a part of the adult’s life and greater awareness. As St Paul has said, ‘When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and see things as a child does, and think like a child; but now that I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways.’ (1 Corinthians 13:11)
The answer is ‘yes’, and in asking the question the child has reminded the listener of his or her own transition from one level of understanding to another, and then to another; and if the moments (of which standing face-to-face with the moon is an example) have been received when offered, there is no limit to the potential for our advance.

The brief tightening of the throat and inexplicable verging on tears that sometimes accompany these thoughts and feelings, were added to recently, as it struck me how well the lunar cycle portrays every possible degree of faith, of belief, of trust and of experience of the presence of God in our world and in our lives. At times the moon is plain to see, and even on a cloudy night the full moon can give light enough to filter dimly through to the ground on which we live; but it can still go unnoticed by those without the eyes to see. When even the final sliver of moon has waned into darkness, or when it is not in our portion of the sky when night has fallen, those who appreciate, who know and who believe, remain fully aware that the moon is still there; it does not have to be visibly obvious, and does not have to be seen for them to continue in their belief. Its presence, and its ability to lead us into a deeper thought and search beyond the easily recognized and the readily understood, makes it almost impossible to override the process which then leads from the far fringes of physical matter to the inner workings of creation, interconnectivity and unity. These workings include the minute detail of the physical vastness but go beyond it to the ungraspable simplicity of the eternal Greatness we call God.

Whatever we believe to be the ultimate nature of all we find out there beyond the stars, of all we see around us, and of all that goes to make the physical, intellectual and emotional beings that we are, we are here; we are in it, we are of it. We belong to it and it belongs to us; we are inseparable. Our journey must continue if we are to approach an understanding, but we are already home. We never left, but without our going away we could never return to comprehend it; and that is part of what we have been born for.
Our spiritual journeying and our seeking are embedded in our existence; they are the brightening of the inner light with which we were born: the stages of our journey are the germination, the growth and the flowering of the seed sown within our fertile ground. Our perseverance will culminate in the bearing of the fruit with which God has already graced us: we shall become the persons we were made to be.
Jesus has clearly told us, ‘So I say to you: Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; everyone who searches finds; everyone who knocks will have the door opened.’ (Luke 11:9,10)

If we believe that God exists our belief in His presence is effortless. We find no reason to believe otherwise, and have no need to pursue any search for reasons not to believe. Our belief generates an equilibrium that is dispersed through every aspect of our lives; not physically separating us from the world but, as it were, edging an inviolable membrane between us and our environment that allows us to continue living within it without being at the constant beck and call of instincts and without being slaves to our imperfect nature. It is in this way that we ‘do not belong to the world’. (John 17:16)
However we sense Him, imagine Him or believe Him to be: whether we do in fact think of God as ‘Him’, or as Her, or as It, or as something beyond any such form of classification, beyond words, and beyond identity as we understand it, the word ‘God’ is effectively the only expression available to us for the specifying of that one eternal Greatness in which we find it impossible to disbelieve.
Those who do not believe in the existence of such an entity have conjured for themselves an impermeable membrane, within which they enclose not only their entire experience of human existence, but their whole world, and every interaction between the two. They become cocooned in the undisturbed calm of the empty fortress they inhabit, insulated from what they would experience as the cold draughts of doubt and wondering, but which would include the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing into and through their lives.
‘Intellectually they are in the dark, and they are estranged from the life of God, because of the ignorance which is the consequence of closed minds.’ (Ephesians 4:18)

Even the smallest beginning of a spiritually enquiring mind, that first momentary wondering – perhaps while looking upwards to the night sky – gives access to all that made the great spiritual names of the past the men and women they became: the persons they were made to be. And that led them ultimately to the place where we all long to be.

‘Now we see only reflections in a mirror, mere riddles, but then we shall be seeing face to face. Now, I can know only imperfectly; but then I shall know just as fully as I am myself known.’ (1 Corinthians 13:12)


Sunday 5 October 2008

Freedom


‘Freedom’. Such an evocative word, even when only read or thought; but when spoken aloud it becomes so much more: it is a truly powerful word. And I am surely wrong to say ‘when only thought’; the thinking is the source of the utterance, and has the potential to breed far stronger feelings that may otherwise be relieved by venting into speech. And yet, in the hands, in the mind and on the tongue of the capable speaker who couples eloquence to the truth and the needs of his hearers, it becomes a belt, a breastplate, shoes, a shield, a helmet and a sword. That one word becomes a manifestation of ‘the full armour of God.’ (Ephesians 6:11)
Our use of language was born within the overlapping layers of generations gradually building on their understanding within this worldly existence. The rise of mankind has been possible because long ago an awakening awareness brought with it the desire to communicate more fully with others around us, not only in the naming of objects and the passing on of knowledge and skills, but in the formulating and sharing of questions. It was the beginning of what amounted to the same all-encompassing questions that we are still asking today. What is it all about? What is this life? What is life? How and why are we here?

Freedom is such a phenomenal concept; such an awe inspiring idea that mankind is still only working towards a full realization of just what it does mean, what it actually does involve, and the necessity to balance individual freedom with the requirements of a peaceful, just and free community, wider society and worldwide family of mankind.
That mankind ever progressed far enough to have need of such a word is proof that we have come a very long way, and with every language generating the word from within, the wider horizons it helped to reveal brought the inevitable increase in awareness of its opposite. Safety cannot exist without a consciousness of danger; cold cannot be known without a knowledge of heat; freedom cannot be understood without some experience of being restricted, confined, trapped, enslaved, immobilized.

For most of us who are able to read or write, as I am now, freedom is what we take for granted every day of our lives, and because we believe we are already in possession of it, we do not think to stop long enough to weigh up our situation in such terms. But that remains a far from universal truth. The cry for freedom still reaches out to the comfortable lives of people like you and me. It is not something that has been dealt with in the past and can now be forgotten; somewhere among the many parts of the world where freedom does not reign, the sights and sounds of my youth are as real and as meaningful as ever they were. At this moment someone, somewhere, is uttering the heartfelt cry that still anchors the collective idea of mankind in 2008 firmly to the 1960s, from where some of my own clear memories come.
Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech for example (
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gZLvSnr6s50 ), and Joan Baez singing ‘Oh Freedom’ ( http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EcNN5SEb-Kg ); and further back, not only to William Wilberforce’s long campaign to abolish the slave trade, but to the attitudes of those who made slavery their own, and back through the history of mankind.
In subtle and not so subtle ways the slave trade continues to thrive today. It remains as one of the evils against which St Paul urges us to put on the full armour of God.
He goes on: - ‘...pray for me to be given an opportunity to open my mouth and fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel ... pray that in proclaiming it I may speak as fearlessly as I ought to.’ (Ephesians 6:19,20)

It is through our own fearless proclamation that, regardless of our worldly circumstances, we attain the freedom to be truly free; to recognize no man as our master beyond that recognition required for a peaceful, just and truly civilized functioning of community, society and its culture, yet always knowing there is One who is Master of all.

As Carl Yung had carved above his own door, and as is inscribed upon his tombstone: - ‘Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit’. (Desiderius Erasmus)
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‘Bidden or not bidden God is present’.
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About Me

Who I am should be, and should remain, of little consequence to you. Who you are is what matters; who you are meant to be is what should matter most to you. In coming closer to my own true self, I have gradually been filled with the near inexpressible: I have simply become "brim full", and my words to you are drawn from those uttered within myself, as part of an undeniable overflowing that brings a smile to my every dusk, and to my every new dawn.
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