Being uprooted and then replanted.

Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday, 2^nd Sunday of Easter

16^th April 2023

As a child, my parents moved quite a bit. My dad was a gardener working for various Lords and Ladies. Because of the moves, it seemed to me as a child that we were being uprooted and then replanted into a new community. We would be introduced to a new school, a new group of children and a new parish. I first became aware of our local church when I was around four or five. Mum would take us to the end of the street in the village we lived in and we would going into the location Anglican church. An early recollection was discovering that behind the thick dark red curtain there were a group of people pulling the ropes to the bells. Not long after, the family moved and we didn’t visit the church often in the several villages we lived in. Then we moved to Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire, a small village on the main road between the county town and Bedford.

Mum took us again to church. As we were in the area for quite some time, I attended Sunday School, and eventually got to be a member of the local campanologists. We didn’t hang out in tents but learnt to ring the bells. So much of my understanding of Christianity came from those days. Learning about the Bible, then discovering that Matthew didn’t have the story of the annunciation because that is told in Luke’s Gospel. There was so much to learn. I was confirmed but was worried I couldn’t remember the Creed. Yet within me, I was being reassured that I would get it right the next time. Next time, you only get confirmed once. Still, I trusted. I belonged to a community. We still moved. This time from Yardley Hasting to Castle Ashby a couple of miles away, then a year or so later back to Yardley Hastings. Thankfully, I did not lose the connections with secondary school friends as I still went to the same school in Wollaston.

When we return to Yardley Hastings and a chance to go back to St Andrew’s Church, I felt as though I had come home. Why had I been so long away. I felt at peace. At sixteen I went to art college in Northampton. There I would go to breaks in to a cellar coffee shop with an atheist friend and we would talk about faith. What always surprised us was how when we left we could hear 50 other students sipping their coffee discussing God and Christianity. We experimented a few times to see if this would happen again, and each time we witnessed to same reaction. Jesus was with us and inspiring the conversation.

At 18, I went to film school in Bournemouth and again a lot of conversations were about faith. I only realised afterwards that many were Catholic. I became aware of a female presence, along with Jesus. I asked the vicar from Yardley Hastings who this might be, but he couldn’t tell me. On my 19^th birthday I travelled back to St Andrew’s in Yardley Hastings and during that service an inner voices asked me to become a priest. That’s okay, I though, as an Anglican Priest I can get married. But the inner voice said, actually, I want you to become a Catholic. I was a bit taken aback by this. Four years later, I found myself in Belfast being pulled into St Malachi’s Church and one of the readings said one amongst you is not of this people but had to be treat as one of their own. Before long, I found myself in Clonard Monastery talking to Fr. Hugh Arthurs about my experiences and I recognised Our Lady as the female presence I was aware of in Bournemouth. That was 38 years ago. On 16^th May 1985, I was accepted into the Catholic Church, exactly a year later on 16^th May 1986 I was confirmed, yes, a second time, with my future father-in-law as my sponsor. I felt as though I had finally come home to a community of people who accepted me for who I am and who cared for me.

As a community, by sharing in the gifts we have been given, similarly to the early church depicted in Acts, our communities will grow, but we have to stick together and spend time with one another. We are the people Peter talked about who have not seen Christ, but we love him. We want him to be at the centre of our lives. Like the disciples in the Gospel of John, we have been filled with the Holy Spirit and we should trust in the Lord that as long as we repent of our sins we are forgiven but if we do not they stick with us, driving a wedge between ourselves and Our Lord. None of us want that.

Thomas wanted to see Jesus’s wounds before he would believe, he was lucky that he had the opportunity to see him in the flesh. We do not, but we do believe and can feel his presence allowing us to trust in him. What is important is that we become part of our community, part of the Body of Christ, which makes us a church. It is not the building that surrounds us that is our church but the people who are in it. We are the temple of God, each one of us. Together, we can see the many signs of Jesus’s work and by believing we will all have life through his name, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

 

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