Dear All,
We hope this last month has been a good one for you but probably most of us have found some days challenging in terms of heat! Hopefully it will stimulate us all to play a little part in trying to lessen the speed of climate change. Some will have spent time away and we hope that has been good & relaxing for you.
As the academic year begins we are focused on children & young people. We hear constantly of the struggles of being a young person in today’s world. We have chosen a couple of pieces that perhaps speak of some of these struggles, although scars are things we all can witness to whatever our age!
We have an Irish blessing this week – one from Sacred Weave. May it bring us all a sense of peace within ourselves and let us pray that it is found by many of our young people as they begin their academic year.
With love each of you, Margaret & Moira.
Information: there won’t be any zoomed Evening Prayer in this coming week – ie tomorrow, Sunday 6th, Mon 7th, Thurs 10th or Frid 11th (community only). Likewise this coming week there is no EP in the Blessed Sacrament Church on Tuesday 8th or Wednesday 9th.
One of the saddest aspects of the lives of many students is that they always feel pressured. . . . The word ‘school’, which comes from schola (meaning “free time”), reminds us that schools were originally meant to interrupt a busy existence and create some space to contemplate the mysteries of life. Today they have become the arena for a hectic race to accomplish as much as possible, and to acquire in a short period the necessary things to survive the great battle of human life. Books written to be savored slowly are read hastily to fulfill a requirement, paintings made to be seen with a contemplative eye are taken in as part of a necessary art appreciation course, and music composed to be enjoyed at leisure is listened to in order to identify a period or style. Thus, colleges and universities meant to be places for quiet learning have become places of fierce competition, in which the rewards go to those who produce the most and the best.
Nouwen
Scars
while they do not show on my wrists
are there just the same.
They are on my heart
and in my head-
My soul…broken, and battered, and bruised-
Beaten down, beyond recognition.
Tormented by your indifference.
Darkness thrown upon me against my will
My pleas unheard, unheeded…or ignored.
Thrashed, castigated, scourged
until I am nothing
but an empty shell.
And what of me now,
this vacant being?
What becomes of the thing
you so easily cast out of
your life
with no thought of hers?
The life that was
and now…
isn’t.
My body remembers the scars.
Scars that I don’t even know how I got
Scars that were painful but expected.
Scars that have marked me deeper than the ocean , the unexpected ones.
The ones that make you question your worth, your identity and your place in this world.
And yet , there are deeper scars that mark my body
So profoundly and more frequently,
the self inflicted scars.
The ones that only numb to forget the pain.
Those are the ones I’m trying to heal.
Nelly Aran
Thoughts from Pope Francis on Education
In the context of education, Pope Francis speaks of the dignity of the person and their ability to affect the heart of society.
He encourages us to make the person the centre of every educational program and encourage full participation of girls and young women & to listen to children and the youth when it comes to their needs.
This model should be based on an integral and circular economy where, through education, we accept our vulnerable members. Pope Francis reminds us that that family is the first and essential place of education where, apart from first encounter with the Gospel, children learn that “education is above all a matter of love and responsibility handed down from one generation to another “.
He suggests that education can become a creator of fraternity, peace, and justice.
Young people as not, as they are often called, ‘a lost race’ – they are a race that never yet has been discovered. And the whole secret, power and knowledge of their own discovery is locked within them – they know it, feel it, have the whole thing in them – and they cannot utter it.
Thomas Wolfe.
……. People smile at the ‘enthusiasm of youth’ – that enthusiasm which they themselves secretly look back at with a sigh, perhaps unconscious that it is partly their own fault that they ever lost it….. Do not fear being considered an enthusiast. What matter? No matter what age you are.
Charles Kingsley.
The increase in youth unemployment has disrupted the normal progression from home to school to job, and the time during which a young person is dependent on home and family. The prolonging of financial dependency creates problems for parents and for their children, who live in a youth culture which relies on an adequate income. But above all, it has removed one of the main ways a young person has of valuing themselves. Many young people are extremely resilient and seem able to transcend their environment with hope in their hearts. But people also speak of the hurt of watching young people grow through adolescence and beyond, and as they do so experiencing a transformation from the normal expectancy and hope of the young, through apparent resignation to the inner pain and anger of a life seemingly without hope.
Faith in the City. Church of England publication.