Letter from Clare
It’s funny how some things stick in the memory and others totally disappear! After I’d finished 6th Form I had a gap year and went on a scholarship to the States. I spent Easter with a religious community, the Franciscans, the Anglican variety, and spent most of my time with the Sisters in San Francisco, working in the city, doing Meals on Wheels with recovering drug addicts, meeting Vietnamese refugees off airplanes, and a whole host of other things. For a time they sent me up to the Brothers house, supposedly for a few days retreat, in the Sonoma- Napa Valley area, they introduced me to wine, which I’d not encountered before and from which I have never looked back, and they introduced me to the writings of Dom Helder Camera, the RC Archbishop of Recife in Brazil. He used one image when talking about prayer that has always stayed with me, which is that of a coin, and the simple analysis that a coin has two sides, and that likewise prayer has two sides, action and reflection. This time with both the brothers and sisters impressed upon me the balance between reflection and action, both the brothers and sisters were involved in the work of healing, but in very different spheres, actively in downtown San Francisco and in retreat from the pressures of the world in the Sonoma- Napa Valley.
George MacLeod writes:
“Healing is a central obligation of the Church. Christ came neither to save souls nor to save bodies. He came to save people. Thus our whole ministry is one of healing: making the crooked places straight in international issues, in class issues, in issues of sex. In Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female. He is the At-one-ment.”
The mystery of the incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas, is the mystery of God becoming human, the earthly is caught up in the divine, all life is taken up into God. Candlemas, which we celebrate on February 1st, reminds us Simeon’s words when introduced to the baby Jesus, “He is a light to reveal you to the nations”. Christ upon whose life we reflect, calls us to put his life into action through our lives. We are called to be balanced people of reflection and action.
Clare