Follow Me!

Yesterday we were asked to put a special emphasis on what it means to be called by Christ to live fully.  That doesn’t mean what many people think it does, for example, what we sometimes call ‘living it up’ – having a good time while the money lasts, having as much fun as we can.  At least what we call fun until the headache kicks in! 

What Jesus meant was to live a meaningful Christian life, allowing the Holy Spirit to guide our choices in life, being in touch with ourselves through prayer and the sacraments, reaching out to the poor and the disenfranchised, taking each day as a gift rather than a burden to be endured.  That was how he himself lived.

Remember the Gospel passages when the first disciples met Jesus?  They are so simple, and yet so inspiring.  Let’s look at John Chapter 1 v. 29 - -34

The next day, seeing Jesus coming towards him, John said: ”Look, there is the lamb of God.”  Hearing this, the two disciples followed Jesus.  Jesus turned round, saw them following, and said “What do you want?”  They answered “Rabbi” – which means teacher – “ where do you live?” “Come and see”! he replied.  So they went and saw where he lived, and stayed with him the rest of that day.

So begins the story of the calling of the first two apostles. What did they do?  They spent time with Jesus, got to know him a little, loved it and immediately told their friends about it.  One of them was called Andrew and we know that he rushed out and told his brother Simon Peter, not in words we might have expected him to use like “We stayed with that preacher called Jesus – you remember him – he comes from Nazareth – and it was great. He really has something!”  but simply “we have found the Messiah”.  Then he took his big brother to meet Jesus.  The rest of the story is history....

See yourself watching that scene – the early morning sun shining down on the sea of Galilee, the fishing nets drying on the shore nearby, the small fishing boats dotted around, John the Baptist pointing out Jesus as he passed and the two disciples following him to where he was living at the time...   See Jesus turn and smile at you, including you in that invitation, “Come and see!” You follow him, perhaps a little hesitatingly, and he encourages you, asking you to tell him about yourself.  He seems so interested as if you were the only one in the world, not just a number but a person whom he loves and who matters to him.  Feel your own eagerness to talk to him and to tell him what you have been doing with your life and what your hopes and dreams are, and see his smile of encouragement.  Receive his blessing before you part company, and then realise that he is with you on the way back home, he is with you always even though you can no longer see him.

Ask yourself: “What does Jesus really want me to do with my life?”  After all you only have one life, so it is a serious matter how you spend it. Perhaps he wants you to marry and bring up a family – perhaps he wants you to find him in your work, by staying unmarried so that you can witness through your single status to what St. Paul  calls “ an undivided attention to the Lord’s affairs.”

Perhaps Jesus is calling you to be a priest or a Sister – that could be as he always calls us  in different ways to serve the Church and to build it up in love.  Pray earnestly that you find out your particular path and then, when you have an idea of what it might be, follow it up by asking the right people about it, by “coming and seeing” as Jesus put it.  It may turn out to be what he wants of you, or it may not.  You’ll never know if you ignore it, or try to follow what you want and not what he wants for you.  They are two different things!!

Let’s resolve to pray not only for ourselves but for others that the Church may be “one whole Christ loving the Father.”   That was Jesus’ dream.  It comes at a cost. 

Meditate on this wonderful hymn and see if you can answer the questions he asks.

Here are the words of The Summons (Will You Come and Follow Me) :

WILL YOU COME AND FOLLOW ME

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known
Will you let my life be grown in you, and you in me?

Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer in you, and you in me?

 Will you let the blinded see if I but call your name?

Will you set the prisoners free and never be the same?

Will you kiss the leper clean, and do such as this unseen

and admit to what I mean in you, and you in me?

Will you love the “you” you hide if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside, and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you’ve found to re-shape the world around
through my sight and touch and sound in you, and you in me?

Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you, and you in me!
John Bell and Graham Maule.

God bless each of you. We will remember you in our prayers.

The Call of Christ - Vocations Sunday

"Thank God for the blessings of your callling, and let it become more and more precious to you each day."

Mother Magdalen

We are all called by Christ to follow him.  Let us ponder on the way that Christ is leading us even though we each have a unique path they all have the same destination - to Christ.

God will lead us. Pray that we will respond to God's call in our own lives.  Lord, wherever you go I am willing to follow. 

"God is calling all of us to follow him, and to do our best in his service.  The kingdom of God is so close, it is within us. Let us give him a heart wholly his."

Mother Magdalen

For today Pope Benedict XVI has written a letter on vocations:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/vocations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20111018_xlix-vocations_en.html

"Every specific vocation is in fact born of the initiative of God; it is a gift of the Love of God! He is the One who takes the “first step”, and not because he has found something good in us, but because of the presence of his own love “poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5)."

PP Benedict XVI

Take a leap of faith. Dive in! Let us allow ourselves to be swept away by the grace of God.

Listen to Steven Curtis Chapman song "Dive" on letting go and jumping in with a leap of faith.

Let us conclude with a prayer:

God created me to do Him some definite service.

He has committed some work to me,

which He has not committed to another.

I have a mission.

I am a link in a chain,

a bond of connection between persons.

Therefore I will trust Him.

Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.

If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him;

if I am perplexed, my perplexity may serve Him;

if I am in joy, my joy may serve Him;

if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him.

He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about.

Amen.

 (Prayer of Blessed John Henry Newman on Life's Vocations)

Lord Jesus, we entrust to you the young women and men of the world, with all their hopes and aspirations.  Fill them with a love and desire to follow you with a generosity and readiness to respond to the call.

Jesus is beckoning... will you go?  Will you leave "the nets" and follow him?

Lord, give us the courage to say Yes to follow you

and to renew that Yes every day!

The end of our 140th year is a celebration of thanksgiving!



This is the official end of the year-long celebrations to mark the 140^th year of our foundation.  On Saturday we are celebrating a special Mass to gather together the riches of the year. 

Frances Taylor
(Mother Magdalen)

Mother Magdalen made her Vows for life on February 12^th, 1872, and so we became a recognised Religious Congregation in the Church.  Soho was one of the places that we started in.  The Sisters used to visit the poor there, especially the women, many of whom were prostitutes.  It was then a violent place, where few ventured out alone, especially after dark.  Even the police went in threes, and the doctor, frequently called out to the dens and crumbling tenements of the area, also made sure that he never went alone.  Only the Sisters were allowed the freedom of going about without escort, as they were respected for the work they did among the poor, and were generally received with friendliness. 

Every Saturday night, Mother Magdalen assembled as many of her Sisters from around London as she could to pray for the people in Soho, especially for those who were violent and abusive.  Outside, as these young women prayed, they could hear the shouts, the ribald comments, the screams and fights that were commonplace especially on Saturday nights, the effects of drunkenness and obscenity. This is what they offered to the Lord for his forgiveness and blessing.  It became a custom to have a Holy Hour there amid such scenes of hopelessness and depravity, and it is in some way,  still carried on today. 

On Saturday, we will have a special Mass in which we shall remember everyone.  As there is limited room, we cannot have an open invitation, and places are already booked. But please pray with us and for us from 2 o’clock onwards on Saturday, 11^th February.  We will tell you all about it in our next blog, so watch this space!  Thank you for taking the time to read this. Let's say a short prayer together:

Father, we thank you for the wonderful blessings you have given to us since our foundation in 1872.  Today, we ask that our prayer may reach out to all those who are lonely, unhealed, frightened, abused.  May they find friends who will help them in the same way as those who sought healing and wholeness in this place so long ago, found support, friendship and love.  May your peace come down on this celebration, to bind all of us, those present, and those who are part of our large family of friends, supporters and  co-workers, in a circle of love which no one can break.  We ask Mary, our Mother and our best friend to protect us, console us, heal us and make us better people.  We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.

Bless you all, and again, thank you for the great strength of your prayers and friendship.  We appreciate it more than you can imagine.

I leave you with some inspirational words from Mother Magdalen. Click on the picture for more animations every 12 seconds.

Birthday of a Victorian Lady

Today, 20^th January, is the 180^th birthday of Frances Taylor, the Foundress of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God.  She was born in 1832, a special year in many ways in the history of this country.  It was then that people began to realise that the slave trade mightn’t be a good thing, that reforms were needed in the law, the army, the way people were treated.  It is often called the year of change.  Of course as you know, change takes place slowly, and it took many years before any of these proposals which came before the Parliament of the time, were looked at, still less changed.  Yet it was interesting that matters of justice and the way we treat one another were brought to the public arena at that time. I say this because Frances Taylor seemed to be imbued with a passion for justice and a conviction that the way we treat one another has far-reaching consequences, not only for ourselves, but for the world. 

She was born in a vicarage in a small village in Lincolnshire called Stoke Rochford.  Her father, Henry Taylor, was the Rector of three parishes in the district, and was known as a very prayerful and upright man, while his wife, Maria, was a woman who seemed to radiate love and compassion, especially for those who were sick, lonely or old.  Frances was the youngest of ten children, and spent an ideal childhood having no school to go to, as it wasn’t then compulsory to attend one of those rather forbidding institutions which were all that was available at the time.  She was taught at home by her parents and by her older sisters, but she herself said in later years “I wasn’t over-burdened with lessons!”   She had plenty of freedom to roam about the lanes surrounding her home, and a chance to poke into those interesting hedgerows and woodlands as well as to try her hand at fishing in the local stream.  As well as that, she made up stories of adventure which she told to the village children, weaving a piece of string in and out of her fingers as she unwound the plot for them.  No wonder she became a writer in later years!

She went with her mother to visit all the parishioners who were sick, lonely or unable to get about, and she told them stories too, making them laugh as she took out of her basket the goodies provided by her mother, freshly-baked bread from the big kitchen in the Rectory, fruit and vegetable from their own gardens and things like that.  It was a lesson that Frances learned early on – that life isn’t always rosy, and that many people are poor and lonely.  She remembered this when many years later she founded her own Congregation of Sisters. She was to say when in old age herself, “I never forgot the lessons my mother taught me in childhood”.  That’s nice isn’t it?  I suppose most of us can say that now that we have learned some wisdom!

When she was ten, her father died, and of course the family had to move away as the house went with the job as they say. So they went to relatives in London, feeling very lonely and heart-broken after their Father’s death.   But the years in London were good.  You’ll know what Victorian London was like if you have read any of Charles Dicken’s books, and of course you have read them all!  It was noisy, dirty, exciting, dangerous and like no other place on earth!  But Frances noticed the poor, and the contrasts between the haves and have-nots.   In a way, she was already forging her future.

When she was 22 she went to the Crimea and worked in Scutari Hospital under Florence Nightingale.  This was to be a life-changing experience for her.  “No one” she was to say later, "could have prepared me for the horror of war !”  The Crimean War has gone down in history as the most mis-managed, the most tragic, the most inhumane of recent times,  yet it brought Frances many blessings.  Looking at the sufferings of these young men, many of them not much more than teenagers, brought out in her the most profound compassion.  The faith of the Irish soldiers, in particular, and their courage in dying a pain-filled and unjust death was to be the spur which made her look calmly and dispassionately at her own faith.  They were never to know it, but their example was to change her life.  She  became a Catholic in the Easter of 1855, having been instructed by Fr. Woollet who was staying in Koulali where she was working, while he was waiting to be called to the Front.  To leave the Church of England, and to ‘go over to Rome’ as they put it then, was a risky thing to do.  There was a lot of prejudice around, and she was to find out how lonely life could be for a newly converted Catholic when she returned to London later that year.

 But she was fortunate in getting to know Fr.Manning. Many years later, as Cardinal Manning of Westminster, he was to become one of her chief supporters in her work as the Foundress of a new Congregation. He was then parish priest of St. Mary’s Bayswater, where  she went to Mass.  He too was a convert from Anglicanism, and he understood how Frances felt.  There were people who really thought that if you converted to Catholicism you were damned, as you were unfaithful to the religion in which you were born.  That was very hard to take as she loved the Anglican Church in which she had been brought up, but she knew God had called her into the Catholic Church for reasons of his own.  But it was a lonely place to be.

Fr. Manning showed Frances the other side of the great, glittering, successful city of London –  he took her to the places where the poor lived or rather, existed.  Dirty, fetid, unhealthy rooms  where rats scurried about, and children died of terrible diseases.  He showed her the workhouses of Marylebone and St. Pancras, where she visited twice a week, giving those poor fragmented people hope because she bothered to listen to them and to speak for them, instead of merely giving them a little help, then departing to shrug off their problems in the enjoyment of her own busy life.

Soon she realised that she couldn’t do all this alone, so she gathered around her like-minded women and that was the beginning of our story.  We started in a small room in Tower Hill in 1869 with four women including herself.  We became a recognised Religious Congregation when Frances made her vows for life in February 1872. She called us Servants, people who listen, people who are willing to go about the miserable, mean streets and alleyways of our big cities, and bring to the poor  whatever comfort they could.  One of our first missions was in Soho. The Sisters worked in the red-light district with the prostitutes, and eventually Frances, who was now called Mother Magdalen, invited those who wished to train for employment which would provide an income without having recourse to prostitution. She provided buildings which were attractive, with rooms full of light and colour and warmth.  Here she taught these poor women new skills:  boot making, lace-making, laundry work, and printing. In fact,  anything that she could think of that would be useful and help to put food on the table.

She  wanted us to be a voice for those who could not speak for themselves, so that they would get justice, she hoped that we would, like her, reverence each human person, give them the dignity they deserved as children of God, and, like Therese of Lisieux, try to be the ones who put love into the world we live in.

 Are you glad a person like that was born?  As we say ‘Happy birthday’ today, we pray for all those who never have a birthday to remember, who never experience love.  Have a good day, and pray to Mother Magdalen won’t you?  She will help you, especially on her birthday.  Who wouldn’t do that, if asked?  

Bless you. And thank you for taking the time to read this! See our websites and Facebook links on the right panel for more information.

Happy birthday, too, for all those whose birthday it is today.  May you have a happy, fulfilled, useful life as she did, and may she be your special friend from now on.

A Fish Out Of Water

This is not a lesson on the vagaries of the English language. That would take more than a blog.  It is, however, a look at what we mean when we use well-known expressions.  They tell us something about ourselves!! 

Let's take this one.  “A fish out of water.”  Have you ever seen a stranded fish?  It struggles, flips its tail about, looks desperately for help, which, sadly, is usually not forthcoming.  This is because of course a fish out of its element will soon die.  It cannot breathe, ingest or move about. It is imprisoned, afraid and eventually just one of a crowd in the net;  unnoticed, non-functioning, paralysed;  just another fish preparing to have its life and vitality choked out of it in order to be displayed on a marble slab for the greedy, the curious and the indifferent. 

In English-speaking countries, we use these expressions which we call idioms, to say something about the way we feel.  It is usually a picturesque way of describing our situation.  We find ourselves, for instance in a country which is unfamiliar to us;  the people speak a language we do not understand, the food is different, the customs are strange, the weather is either too hot, too wet, or too cold, depending on what we are used to.  We feel different, alien, out of our element.  That is a bit exaggerated of course - we may love new experiences, we may be able to slough off our old skins as easily as we divest ourselves of extra clothing in the warmer weather, but nonetheless, we have all experienced at times the feeling of being out of our depth, not at home with ourselves, as the saying is.  It isn't the most comfortable place to be.  I remember, some years ago now, being with a group of people who were what we then called the computer literate. They used a language that was, to say the least, unintelligible, at least to people like me, who found it difficult to manage the keyboard let alone the intricacies of the mighty chip! They talked endlessly of cyberspace and bytes and blogs until I began to think that I was born much too early on to master it. I felt like a fish out of water!!!

 That was a while ago, but I have always thought how awful it is to feel like a has-been, an anachronism, the ghost of Christmas past when in a situation like that. I felt some sympathy for the lovely, gleaming, darting fish that was caught, and held in an element completely foreign to it.  Part of life, of course, and necessary for the food chain to function efficiently, but, all the same a pity, at least for the fish! A fish out of water – what is that element like for the fish?  Flowing, life-giving, supporting, creative, thirst-slaking, cool, clean, regenerating, healing, safe.  Well at times...

Water and fish come into the Gospels a lot, don't they? Jesus knew the Sea of Galilee well as his first disciples were most of them fishermen.  Their old, much - mended nets were always around, drying in the morning sun after a hard night's fishing.  Their boats, equally old and in need of constant patching up, were used by him to preach his first homilies, to gather the people around the lapping water as they sat on the sandy beach around him.  He walked on that water one dark night towards the incoming fishing fleet, to the consternation of Peter and co.  That is, until the young teenager John shouted out: "It is the Lord!" Then there was fun! Peter sinking and being rescued by Jesus when he tried to imitate his Master, the lovely smell of cooking fish on the brazier by the shore which Jesus was using, the talk and laughter and fun, the falling asleep on the sand after a wonderful breakfast in the open air.  Then there was what we call the miraculous draught of fish! Hundreds of them which they had only caught by taking Jesus' advice and putting down their nets on the 'wrong' side of the boat.... 

And what about the time Jesus fell fast asleep in the boat in the middle of a storm?  What a lot of bustling about then!  "We're drowning and he's fast asleep!" they yelled to each other over the noise of the thunder and howling wind.  "Wake him up, Peter!" But of course he didn't.  He knew he would get a telling-off which he did anyway.  "Where is your faith?" Jesus asked him sternly. "Didn't you know you'd be safe?" Of course he didn't - these men knew the treachery of those waters. But Jesus wanted something more from them, just as he does from us today.  "Where is your faith?"  "Don't you know I am always with you, especially when you feel just like one of those gasping fish in the net?"  And he reaches out to us as he did to those long-ago fishermen to reassure us that no matter how bad our situation seems to be, we are never alone.  Never!

He offers us too the living water of the Spirit to allay our thirst. "Come to me, all you who are thirsty and drink!" he urges us.  Just as he assured the Samaritan woman at the well that the water he would give her would be life-giving and eternal, so that she would not thirst again, he tells us gently to come close to him, to ask for the living waters of the Spirit to refresh us, particularly when we are tired, dispirited, lonely or feeling like that lovely silver fish pulled out of its natural element and looking about desperately for a rescuer.  He is our rescuer, our friend.  And he too knows what it is like to be a fish out of water.  After all, he left the glories of Heaven to come to our cold, dark, inhospitable, alien world. Just for love.  To rescue other fishes darting about in dangerous waters or having their life half-choked out of them because they couldn't find a way to change things.  He can!  And he does! 

Have a good mid-January!  And when you think you are out of the water, jump in again! Even if, like me, you can't swim.  Take care.



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