Madonna - May/June 2007

Beauty in every face - Chris Gleeson SJ

In May this year I was sharing in a celebration of the Eucharist led by Jesuit Bishop Greg O’Kelly. When it came to the homily, Greg apologised for the fact that he had been given no time to prepare and moved into characteristic anecdotal mode. How often the Spirit moves us when we are caught without a script! God appears so frequently to speak to us at the margins, in the detours.

Greg shared with us his experience over the years of visiting prisons at Easter and Christmas. This year was no exception. On Holy Thursday he travelled to Murray Bridge where he offered the washing and kissing of feet to the prisoners there. Some fifteen inmates accepted his invitation, among them murderers and rapists. I was moved to hear Greg share his feelings about washing and kissing the feet of some hardened criminals. It is the challenge all of us face—to see the world through the eyes of Christ.

About this time last year I was driving out to my office at St Paul’s Theological College in Banyo and listening to the Reverend Graham Long, Pastor at the Wayside Chapel in Sydney, being interviewed on the radio. In talking about his life and his ministry, he described himself at one point as a lapsed atheist, adding that in his brief time as a ‘postie’ he had learnt the valuable skill of riding a motorcycle down stairs.

Graham also talked about his life as a prison chaplain, and I was really moved by his attitude to the hundreds of people who come to the Wayside Chapel each day. He said his challenge was to see the beauty in every face, even when the owner of that face had long given up on it. Surely, that is to love others as Jesus did—Jesus the One who never gives up on us.

Timothy Radcliffe, the former General of the Dominicans, has a beautiful phrase for this unconditional love of God for us. He refers to God as the One for whom ‘no one is on the edge because God’s centre is everywhere and his circumference is nowhere. It is in the spaciousness of God that we will be completely at home because everyone will be’. Cardinal Basil Hume put it another way: God can’t count—everybody is number one.

If we are to love as Jesus loved, we need to be forgiving people. Forgiving people are bridge-builders and reconcilers On this theme of forgiveness and bridge-building, of loving as Jesus loved, Mary McAleese, President of the Irish Republic, has written beautifully about the remarkable reaction of one man, Gordon Wilson, to the brutal killing of his daughter:

‘It is a rare person who arrives at that state of perfect spiritual serenity. I suppose they are saints of sorts, not necessarily beatified and canonised saints but the kind of people in whose presence we intuit the nearness of God because they bring their best friend everywhere with them. God does not accompany them as a bodyguard or go in front of them like a Soviet tank. He accompanies them like a soprano’s pure voice accompanies a song, like a dewdrop sits on a rose.

‘One such was Gordon Wilson. He was a man so practised in the discipline of love that when his beautiful daughter Marie died, hard and cruelly, at the slaughter that was the Enniskillen bombing, her hand in his as she slipped away, the words of love and forgiveness sprang as naturally to his lips as a child’s eyes are drawn to its mother. His words shamed us, caught us off guard. They sounded so different from what we expected and what we were used to. They brought stillness with them. They carried a sense of the transcendent into a place so ugly we could hardly bear to watch.’

The Christian Brothers have a wonderful saying: ‘What we do with our hearts affects the whole universe’. It is so true. Readers might remember the tragic incident in 2006 of Amish school children being slaughtered by a mad gunman in America. The Amish are a very strict religious sect, whose austere way of life was captured in the exciting film Witness. Their response to that horrific tragedy, when their own sons and daughters were murdered, was nothing short of extraordinary. They publicly forgave the murderer and even attended his funeral to give his family support. Their forgiving attitude deeply touched the whole world.

In his latest book on the meaning of being a Christian, Timothy Radcliffe has a chapter entitled ‘I am because we are’ which comes from a Zulu saying that means ‘A person becomes a person because of people’. He reflects on the importance of connecting my personal story with a bigger story without being swamped by it.

Radcliffe writes: ‘How can I discover my identity within the community, in relationship, without being swallowed up and oppressed? What story can be told of the group, ‘our story’, that leaves space for the story that I might tell of myself? Communism and Nazism show what can happen if the self becomes absorbed by the tribe.’

One of the great stories of our time, surely, is that of Blessed Mary MacKillop, soon, we trust, to be Saint Mary. With her feast day to be celebrated in early August, may we continue to appreciate and love her story as one pathway to the God for whom ‘no one is on the edge because God’s centre is everywhere and his circumference is nowhere. It is in the spaciousness of God that we will be completely at home because everyone will be’.