Nuala O’LoanWe need to make time in our busy lives to follow the way of Christ, writes Nuala O’Loan
When you talk to people nowadays they all seem very busy. Life moves at a much more rapid pace than it did even thirty years ago. Possibly the major cause of this is the very rapid development in communications which has enabled so much of what we do. It allows mothers to be in contact with their children constantly.
It even allows them to track where their children are at any time, if they have the right technology. It allows children to talk endlessly to their friends. It allows businesses to communicate across the globe, and across time zones, enabling rapid responses to important questions. It informs and enables the emergency response to crises.
Yet it has its drawbacks. It has disabled to some degree our ability to be reflective, calm even. Our minds can be constantly in response mode, reacting to the latest Facebook, Twitter, email, news flash, leaving little space for us to be proactive in our thoughts.
The downside of modern communication is now beginning to be understood. Perhaps its starkest consequence is seen as we watch others moving through their lives: couples in a restaurant both intent on their screens rather than each other, people walking down the street engaged in telephone calls, people listening to music on headphones, people looking up information, all largely oblivious to and detached from what is happening around them.
We see children endlessly wanting to play games on screens where they are competing with other children (or adults) engrossed in the complicated visual realities with which they are engaged, unwilling to switch off.
Cyberbullying
We know, too, that children are experiencing what they call cyberbullying. Bullying seems to have always been a part of school life, but children were previously able to escape when from it they went home. Now they may experience incessant online attack. It can be relentless, leaving children with nowhere to go to escape the bullies, and contributing at least in some cases to children taking their own lives.
There is a downside for adults too. Whilst I rejoice that I can speak to my sisters in Canada, my children wherever they are in the world, that I can watch the next generation growing up in the photographs which their proud parents post on Facebook, in the videos showing their growing talents, whilst I am reassured by my ability to be in contact with those with whom I work seven days a week, I know too that my life is now so full of incoming information, that I have less time to process it, less time to take stock and to work out what it all means and how it should be best used.
Used effectively this rapid wide-ranging set of communication tools can change our views and our habits. That is what advertisers do. We decide what to buy, where to go, how to holiday, where to live, even what to think on the basis of the millions of messages we receive during our lifetime, some of them subliminal.
The more money which is available to use internet based communication, the more effective the campaign. The most effective messages are the most simple. We saw that in the recent referendum. Love and equality, after all, have to appeal to everyone. What could one possibly object to in this simple aspiration?
The problem is that rapid constant communication like this, does not permit of the deeper analysis and the thinking through of issues in the structured way which enables a more profound response. Some issues really do require very deep thought, sometimes over a prolonged period to enable us to come to a reasoned informed view of an issue.
Faith issues can be very much like that. The application of what may seem very simple can in fact be quite challenging. Even simple things like the words of the priest concluding the celebration of the Mass to “go spread the Gospel” can turn out to be more complex that we thought.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, responding to the recent referendum result said we need a reality check, that “there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the Church”.
The challenge is not just to priests, but to all of us, parents, teachers, aunties, uncles, grandparents and to parish communities.
Beliefs
How we live our faith as individuals and communities will affect the extent to which others embrace our beliefs. At its simplest, if somebody comes to our church to attend Mass and nobody speaks to them, nobody welcomes them, and after Mass we all scurry away without really encountering anyone else, or gather in our own little huddles exchanging news, the newcomer will not feel part of a vibrant warm worshipping community. They may even feel excluded.
That is why it is so good to see the new initiative to provide welcoming committees to ensure that people are know that it really are wanted, and can ask any questions they want to ask, can engage in any way they want to engage, but most of all that they know that people coming out of Mass live the Faith they hold. That is how the first conversions occurred.
That is how we will continue to build the kingdom of God in the world.
Of course when you do that kind of work you realise that you want to know more, so as to be able to do it even more effectively. Adult religious formation has not been widely available in Ireland until recently. Theology was for the clergy!
The past 10 years or so have seen a quiet but dramatic change. Change such as that which has occurred in North Antrim and the Drumalis Retreat Centre where, on Saturday last, I launched a Diploma in Pastoral Theology offered in Larne and verified by the Pontifical University in Maynooth.
For years now, Drumalis has been offering courses: the Pathways course, the Certificate in Christian Thought, the Certificate in Lectio Divina and the Certificate in Spiritual Direction, all enjoyed by ordinary people from ordinary parishes who just want to know God more and to discern what, as individuals, they are called to. The diploma is the most recent development offering an opportunity to study and reflect on Christian life and ministry and the way ordained and lay ministry complement each other, doing so in the company of others so that each individual spiritual journey is enriched by the journey of others.
It is in embracing initiatives such as these and the many others which are emerging, that each of us can come to a deeper, more profound understanding of what it means to say that we are loved, were loved even before we were formed, that Jesus Christ is our Redeemer, and that we are called to follow the way of Christ in all its richness and complexity all the days of our life.
We just have to make the time and space to do it!