I sat down at the bus stop and fell into conversation with the man who was there before me. We found out quite a bit about one another in the few minutes that we had together. He suffers from arthritis and has to take tablets four times a day. I told him I was widowed and looking after myself now. He asked about my wife and how long it was since she died. Then he told me that he had lost a son, a boy, his eldest, aged 13. The child had gone out to play on some swings and had caught his neck in the swing and with no one there, to help him he had died. ‘I know what it is to lose someone,’ were the quiet words he said to me. It was just a bus stop conversation.
I came home thinking again how true it is that everyone in this world has something that they have to cope with. No one gets through life without some grief or some pain. My mind wandered back to remember an old lady I visited years ago in a house in Manchester. She was all alone in life. On her wall and on her side table I saw two photographs. One was of her husband in soldier’s uniform and the other was of her son, also in uniform. Both had been killed in the war, leaving her all by herself.
I remember too my own grandmother, my father’s mother who lost two of her brothers in the Great War, and then lost one of her children who died aged 7. Loss leaves great emptiness in life and many people carry these secret sorrows in their heart. Awareness of life’s sorrows should make us gentle in our approach to one another, since it is certain that everyone meets with heartache in their life.
Yet we have to remember that we are dealing here not only with sickness and death but also with the darkness of sin, of wilful wrongdoing, of the hurt and harm that people do to one another. Saint Peter instructs here how suffering injustice at the hands of another is not only a noble endurance. It positively helps to cure the world of evil, by absorbing the hurt that is inflicted and not responding to it by doing hurt of our own.
This is the work of patience, which literally means to endure, to undergo the hurt, to suffer others rather than make them suffer. It is the great lesson that Peter himself had to learn and which he did learn very well. In the midst of terrible persecution in Rome the first leader of the Church preached this way of Christ in his letter and then in the manner of his death. Taking on suffering our selves helps to rid the world of its violence.
A story of suffering has arisen again as I write. It is the discovery of a mass grave of little children in Tuam, County Galway in Ireland. A Mother and Baby home once occupied the site from 1920 to 1961. These little children probably died from whooping cough and other illnesses that babies and young children are prone to and for which there was no safeguards at the time.
The story has triggered another surge of anger against the Church and to take one example, the writer, Eimear McBride, writing in the Guardian for 7 March 2017, lets loose a tirade of bile against the Church which she clearly hates. Her language is loose and extreme and wild. It is a rant and is clearly aimed at hurting a Church that she believes deserves to be hurt in retaliation for all the hurt that the Church itself has done to people down the years.
Eimear writes powerfully, if not always with accuracy, from a woman’s point of view, and this brings me to consider something else that I saw today.
I saw pictures of the Pope’s Lenten retreat group in the hills outside Rome. In the picture all I could see were men. Lots and lots of men, priest and religious, members of the Vatican service who were there to make the retreat along with the Holy Father. It reminded me so powerfully of the world in which I spent most of my life – seminary, monastery, presbytery – all male residences.
When I came to Stirling and found work here in Family Mediation I spent the next twelve years completely in the company of women, my ‘fellow’ mediators. I found this to be excellent and very educational company. It was a case of being ‘blessed among women’.
The sufferings of women, the injustices done to them in a male world and in a highly sexualised world, are a tract for our times. We have so much to do, in society and in the Church, to rearrange our relationships and our systems in order to treat women with the equality and the justice that is their right.
In the face of Eimear McBride’s outburst, with which I could disagree on many of the wild statements she makes, perhaps it is better to allow this anger to pour out and instead of arguing against her, to pay attention to the overriding issue itself, which is to act with justice for women and children.
The photograph that I looked at today of Pope Francis, whom I greatly admire, surrounded by all these men, brings home to me more powerfully than any words can say how male dominated our Church truly is, and how unbalanced therefore it is. That picture paints a thousand words. Where are the women: The women who always accompanied Jesus on his journeys?
Where are they?
2017
Erris Poetry 