Are we Loud and Clear?
Good News for the South West
Can I communicate what matters to me, so that it begins to matter to someone else? According to the writer Fr Jim Gallagher, this is not a new question. He cites the decision of the early Church to present the Gospels in Greek and not in the native tongue of Jesus as a courageous decision based on the need to communicate. In every age then, we should be asking whether we have the language we need if we are to communicate what matters. The very words Catechesis and Evangelisation require translation, and we often discuss what these words mean before we realise that our lives are already an expression of these traditions.
In conversations with our neighbouring dioceses Plymouth and Portsmouth, the issue of how we reveal the Good News seems to be of the moment. The time may be right for us to reconsider what message we send and whether to some we look like yesterday's Good News. Bishop Declan Lang said, “We can come over as a little dull”. It reminded me of a saying in Liam Kelly’s book “Sacraments Revisited”, when he lamented, “We have participated in the celebration (Mass) and walked out as if no-one told our faces”. In July the three dioceses will gather with our Bishops to reconsider how we might reveal God’s Word in a language people use. Consideration will not be confined then, to how we use words, so much as how we relate to the culture and in turn what is communicated.
Canadian Oblate to help lead
To guide us will be Ronald Rolheiser, a priest and Oblate of Mary who has done a great deal of work on the relationship between faith and culture. Writing from his native Canada, for many years his books and articles have helped many to understand the relationship between our deeper spiritual yearning and the material, physical lives we lead. His articles feature regularly on the back of the Catholic Herald, and have won acclaim from publishers around the world. His profound and thorough presentations have done much to encourage a greater understanding of the challenge to live Christian lives in western post-modern societies. He is a teacher of his time.
A diverse experience
Along with Ronald, the event will include forty workshops on various aspects of the way we communicate the hope we profess. With workshop leaders from our three dioceses and across the country, there will be a diverse menu enabling people to concentrate practically on the issues and skills which particularly interest them. The variety of themes will be an expression of the diverse ways God uses us to communicate His Love.
Workshop themes will take us from places of extreme poverty and abandonment to the conversations we face across our meal tables, from speaking out to listening properly, from preaching to storytelling, from mourning to dancing.
Unity in gathering
The gathering will enable us to share beyond the confines of our traditional borders. Loud and Clear? serves a region, which extends from Reading in the East, to Gloucester in the North and to the coast of Cornwall in the West. Although we are many, our unity will be expressed in the gathering liturgies, as one body. By celebrating together we hope to renew our own sense of Church in the world and build up our confidence to proclaim the Good News. The liturgy will be the summit of the whole experience and a source of life.
Based in Exeter University, the large gathering will take place in the Great Hall. As an expression of unity between the three dioceses and to ensure equality, the conference is residential, recognising that meals and social time is part of the learning experience. There is a commitment to ensure the full inclusion and equality of opportunity for those with special needs.
“Never talk religion or politics”
Fr Ian Petit, the marvellous and much missed teacher once said “Catholics talk about their faith like it is an operation they have just had on their waterworks”. Pointing towards his naval he whispered the first lines of the creed as if he was conveying the intimate details of a recent surgeon's incision. He was alluding to a problem he was having in preparing a talk on evangelisation. “You see” he said, “our faith is so personal to us, it has become private, and that bodes badly for the future”. Couple this privacy with a contemporary desire for individual, internally focused spirituality, and there becomes little if any need to proclaim anything.
Let’s face it; most of us struggle with talking religion, “never discuss religion and politics”. Sunday lunch has been disrupted by generations warring against each other over religious intolerance or of the Church losing its way. Conflict continues through pudding (yes pudding not dessert), until we finish more frustrated than animated. Sometimes it seems, those closest to us are the hardest to communicate with.
So Loud and Clear? is about our lives, about what is happening to us, and about how we as Catholic Christian adults, express the deeper aspirations of our hearts. In sharing the tension we face between faith and life, we may find confidence; not only in the answers we seek, but also in the questions we ask and in this way we can hope to avoid the trap of becoming yesterday’s news or “a bit dull”! This is not an assembly, or a synod, or a process towards defining a statement. It is simply an opportunity to gather, celebrate who we are, learn what we might become and go home renewed in the knowledge that we have the message of eternal life, and that it’s not a secret!
David Wells
Loud & Clear? takes place at Exeter Univeristy from Monday 19 July to Thursday 22 July.
Further details from Father Michael McAndrew at the Department for Adult Education & Evangelisation.
Tel: 0117 902 5595
Email: adult.education@cliftondiocese.com
Useful URL : http://www.ex.ac.uk/
Can I communicate what matters to me, so that it begins to matter to someone else? According to the writer Fr Jim Gallagher, this is not a new question. He cites the decision of the early Church to present the Gospels in Greek and not in the native tongue of Jesus as a courageous decision based on the need to communicate. In every age then, we should be asking whether we have the language we need if we are to communicate what matters. The very words Catechesis and Evangelisation require translation, and we often discuss what these words mean before we realise that our lives are already an expression of these traditions.
In conversations with our neighbouring dioceses Plymouth and Portsmouth, the issue of how we reveal the Good News seems to be of the moment. The time may be right for us to reconsider what message we send and whether to some we look like yesterday's Good News. Bishop Declan Lang said, “We can come over as a little dull”. It reminded me of a saying in Liam Kelly’s book “Sacraments Revisited”, when he lamented, “We have participated in the celebration (Mass) and walked out as if no-one told our faces”. In July the three dioceses will gather with our Bishops to reconsider how we might reveal God’s Word in a language people use. Consideration will not be confined then, to how we use words, so much as how we relate to the culture and in turn what is communicated.
Canadian Oblate to help lead
To guide us will be Ronald Rolheiser, a priest and Oblate of Mary who has done a great deal of work on the relationship between faith and culture. Writing from his native Canada, for many years his books and articles have helped many to understand the relationship between our deeper spiritual yearning and the material, physical lives we lead. His articles feature regularly on the back of the Catholic Herald, and have won acclaim from publishers around the world. His profound and thorough presentations have done much to encourage a greater understanding of the challenge to live Christian lives in western post-modern societies. He is a teacher of his time.
A diverse experience
Along with Ronald, the event will include forty workshops on various aspects of the way we communicate the hope we profess. With workshop leaders from our three dioceses and across the country, there will be a diverse menu enabling people to concentrate practically on the issues and skills which particularly interest them. The variety of themes will be an expression of the diverse ways God uses us to communicate His Love.
Workshop themes will take us from places of extreme poverty and abandonment to the conversations we face across our meal tables, from speaking out to listening properly, from preaching to storytelling, from mourning to dancing.
Unity in gathering
The gathering will enable us to share beyond the confines of our traditional borders. Loud and Clear? serves a region, which extends from Reading in the East, to Gloucester in the North and to the coast of Cornwall in the West. Although we are many, our unity will be expressed in the gathering liturgies, as one body. By celebrating together we hope to renew our own sense of Church in the world and build up our confidence to proclaim the Good News. The liturgy will be the summit of the whole experience and a source of life.
Based in Exeter University, the large gathering will take place in the Great Hall. As an expression of unity between the three dioceses and to ensure equality, the conference is residential, recognising that meals and social time is part of the learning experience. There is a commitment to ensure the full inclusion and equality of opportunity for those with special needs.
“Never talk religion or politics”
Fr Ian Petit, the marvellous and much missed teacher once said “Catholics talk about their faith like it is an operation they have just had on their waterworks”. Pointing towards his naval he whispered the first lines of the creed as if he was conveying the intimate details of a recent surgeon's incision. He was alluding to a problem he was having in preparing a talk on evangelisation. “You see” he said, “our faith is so personal to us, it has become private, and that bodes badly for the future”. Couple this privacy with a contemporary desire for individual, internally focused spirituality, and there becomes little if any need to proclaim anything.
Let’s face it; most of us struggle with talking religion, “never discuss religion and politics”. Sunday lunch has been disrupted by generations warring against each other over religious intolerance or of the Church losing its way. Conflict continues through pudding (yes pudding not dessert), until we finish more frustrated than animated. Sometimes it seems, those closest to us are the hardest to communicate with.
So Loud and Clear? is about our lives, about what is happening to us, and about how we as Catholic Christian adults, express the deeper aspirations of our hearts. In sharing the tension we face between faith and life, we may find confidence; not only in the answers we seek, but also in the questions we ask and in this way we can hope to avoid the trap of becoming yesterday’s news or “a bit dull”! This is not an assembly, or a synod, or a process towards defining a statement. It is simply an opportunity to gather, celebrate who we are, learn what we might become and go home renewed in the knowledge that we have the message of eternal life, and that it’s not a secret!
David Wells
Loud & Clear? takes place at Exeter Univeristy from Monday 19 July to Thursday 22 July.
Further details from Father Michael McAndrew at the Department for Adult Education & Evangelisation.
Tel: 0117 902 5595
Email: adult.education@cliftondiocese.com
Useful URL : http://www.ex.ac.uk/
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