Lent is a time to renew our prayer life. In the gospel reading chosen for the first Sunday in Lent, Mark tells us that Jesus retired to the desert for forty days before he began his public ministry. A fuller account in Matthew tells us that, led by the Spirit, he fasted and prayed. We can imagine that after such a length of time Jesus must have been feeling extremely weak in body. But the story makes it clear that a willingness to listen to the Spirit and to act in accordance with God’s will gives him the strength to resist temptations. And in the first reading for the Second Sunday of Lent, Abraham is put to the test in Genesis chapter 22. In a conversation with God, Abraham is told to sacrifice his own beloved son. This can’t possibly be a macabre joke on the part of God. It is a lesson about listening to what God asks of us and then trying to join our will to his.
I had been thinking about the first of these passages when I read two recent news articles. The first was by David Pilling and Andres Schipani. (FT February 20). The headline proclaims: Tanzania shuns vaccines and turns to God. The authors compare the Tanzanian Health Minister’s press briefing to a cooking show when, brandishing a blender, she claimed that a vegetable smoothie would ward off coronavirus. President John Magufuli, a devout Catholic, denies the seriousness of coronavirus in Tanzania. He claims that God will provide the necessary protection and is encouraging people to attend places of worship as well as going about their ordinary work. Numbers of deaths have not been announced since last May. I hear from a Tanzanian friend, who is not prone to exaggeration and whose nuanced English is impeccable, that “several” of her relatives have died. The bishops in Tanzania, in no doubt that the threat is serious, have offered exposition of the Blessed Sacrament encouraging people to pray. They don’t hesitate to call out their government and tell all who will listen to wear masks, to keep distance and to wash hands.
The other story ricocheting around the press at that time was about the events surrounding the plan to remove the body of a nun, the Venerable Mother Cornelia Connelly, from her resting place in the chapel at Mayfield School in Sussex to take a part of her remains across the Atlantic to her birthplace in America. The plan must have seemed reasonable when first mooted. The website of the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia explained that veneration of the nineteenth century foundress would help the cause of her beatification. Perhaps it seemed logical, from a distance, to suppose that taking Cornelia Connelly to the heart of a vibrant Catholic community would benefit her cause.
Girls have been educated at Mayfield School since its founding by Cornelia Connelly in 1865. She also founded the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, which had set the exhumation plans in motion. Old Girls are known as Old Cornelians. Sue Gaisford, in her excellent article (The Tablet, 27 February), gives something of the flavour of the devotion to their Mother Foundress generated at Mayfield.
She initiated an innovative curriculum at a time when girls’ learning was mostly centred on presumed house-wifely virtues, and her advice to girls encouraged them to become women with minds of their own. Her enigmatic motto “Be yourself but make that self what God wants you to be” exhorts pupils today to stand up for their beliefs as it has for over 150 years. And so it was that Old Cornelians banded together with architects, engineers and local residents to oppose the plans.
The Sisters of the SHCJ, immediately and with grace, revoked the request as soon as they understood that Cornelia Connelly mattered enough to provoke hundreds of letters to Catholic Historic Churches, voicing concern about the potential physical damage to a beautiful Grade 1 listed building and distress at the possible loss.
Another lesson learned. Prayer must precede and accompany action. We have to agree to work with God, to listen to his voice, to discern his meaning and act according to his will.
The effort of writing letters was necessary at the human level but it surely also prayer will have contributed to changing hearts.
I join with so many Tanzanian friends in praying that the Tanzanian government may have a change of heart before more damage is done.
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