December 2013
A longing for people to be able to pray and sing praise to God in their own language has been one of the greatest discoveries from a consultation/conversation with parishioners at St Anne’s Newtown.
Lay pastoral leader Karen Holland told a workshop on stewardship on Saturday 2 November that the removal of a banner with ‘welcome’ in the different languages represented in the community drew a surprising protest. The plan had been to move it from the back wall of the sanctuary into the foyer but the flimsy material on which the words were affixed disintegrated.
Karen, who spoke on hospitality to each other, said it became clear that simply greeting people as they arrived for Sunday Mass was not enough.
The parish community set out to find out who each person really is and to ask people what they wanted from the parish.
A decision that the parish didn’t play together enough led to a regular parish picnic and an annual Christmas social which were popular with people coming in cultural dress and dancing and singing and sharing their culture.
‘We needed to know how different groups wanted and needed to be consulted. This was when we discovered something horrific … only a small proportion of our community was active, was involved in leadership, was seen or heard.’
The parish used ‘any excuse to come together and share ideas’.
The dynamics in the parish were exposed when discussions about demolishing the presbytery and moving the parish office arose and these issues needed to be treated with a great deal of sensitivity.
Karen said she was glad of the anger at the moving of the ‘welcome’ banner because she discovered that ‘people with English as a second language wanted visible signs of their culture in art, music and prayer’.
‘When you walk into someone’s home, there are photos, artifacts and other symbols of their culture which help you to connect with those people.’
But she said refusing to allow anything in the church to be changed, as some people did, was like buying a house that someone had built and decorated some years before and wanting it to stay exactly as the previous owners left it.
After the church was renovated, the various cultural communities were invited to contribute a piece of fabric from their culture and these were mounted behind each depiction of a station of the cross. Pamphlets with prayers and reflections explain the story behind the cloth. Through this process, ‘people felt cherished, loved and accepted by the community.’
Dedicated cabinets in the foyer display the Treaty of Waitangi and the treasures of the school children. The parish also has a korowai to wrap around those being baptised.
The leadership team has developed guidelines for increasing diversity in its makeup to better reflect the community.
People with disability are encouraged to participate in liturgies and the parish works hard to understand the best way to consult with different cultural groups.
Reminding people of the four pillars of stewardship with which Archbishop John Dew had introduced the workshop – service, hospitality, prayer and formation – and highlighting the key stewardship elements of time, talent and treasure Sr Elizabeth Julian said the scriptures were God’s greatest gift to us.
Before Vatican II people were not encouraged to read the Bible because they might misinterpret it.
One of the two dogmatic constitutions of Vatican II was Dei Verbum in which the council fathers spelt out, after much discussion and argument, that the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Eucharist were of equal importance.
‘The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since, especially in the sacred liturgy, she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life from the table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body’ (Dei Verbum #21).
Sr Elizabeth introduced an Ignatian method of imaginative praying with scripture. Using the story of Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10), she invited people to use their senses to imagine themselves into the scene.
‘What can I see, smell, hear, feel, taste. What kind of day is it? It could be hot and sticky. Perhaps there’s a breeze blowing. What time is it? Morning, afternoon, evening. What are the buildings like – old, new, big.
What else is part of the setting? Perhaps there’s a dog lying in the shade, children chasing a ball, some teenagers laughing together. As you look round, who else is there – perhaps someone you’re trying to avoid or someone you haven’t seen for a long time and you want to catch up. Perhaps there’s a conversation taking place nearby and you wonder if you can join in.
‘After a while you leave the group and move towards a larger crowd. What sort of mood can you sense – excitement, anticipation, fear? Suddenly that nasty little man Zacchaeus rushes past you and literally runs up the tree. Then you see Jesus stop under the tree and call out to him. Zacchaeus comes down really quickly but you lose sight of him because he’s so short. Then you can hear Zacchaeus making some very extravagant promises in a loud voice. Then Zacchaeus rushes off to start meal preparation and Jesus is left standing alone. Suddenly you find yourself right before him. He says your name. Just begin a conversation with Jesus. It may take the form of gratitude, praise, asking for something or saying sorry. Just spend some time in conversation with Jesus.’
The scriptures are behind so much art particularly the great masters of the Renaissance. The Bible informed classical music such as Handel’s The Messiah parts of which are based on Isaiah and the Book of Revelation and popular songs, Boney M’s ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ which comes from Psalm 137.
She i
nvited people to ask themselves what steps they could take in their lives to nourish and deepen their love and understanding of scripture. She said that there are many useful websites such as one that has a dramatisation of Mark’s gospel. And there are many free biblical apps for iPads and tablets.
Finally she challenged people: ‘Get yourself with Zacchaeus at the top of that tree – look out at your new parish boundary, see who’s there. See who’s not there. Why are they not there? What are you going to do to make the new parish boundaries work?
The Māori concept of hospitality expressed as manaakitanga means to build up the mana of the other person and in so doing, your own mana is increased. This idea captures the essence of hospitality to the stranger, Mgr Gerard Burns told the Stewardship workshop on 2 November.
People who greet others at the church door seem proud to do so because it boosts their mana – their dignity and self-worth.
Hospitality to the stranger was about welcoming the Other. It was an important topic central to our living of the faith. ‘The word “Other” has been taken to mean someone who is different from you in some way. Also, God is seen as “Other”.’
‘Welcoming the stranger has a dimension of welcoming God. We are given that in a special way – in that great text from Matthew 25 about what the nations will be judged on, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”.’
We need to work out who the stranger is and what the term ‘stranger’ might mean. Perhaps it applies to someone who could act differently from us, but we then need to ask to whom the ‘us’ applies. Who are we and who are we uncomfortable with? Who do we avoid? That is the stranger.
There are many subtle ways in which we can block people out.
‘How many of us have heard, “All these new people have arrived in our parish and they want to sing different hymns. We don’t do that here.” Who’s the “we”? We have to balance a healthy sense of identity with having an open circle to bring people in – an openness to God [In introducing the workshop, Archbishop John talked about the closed and open circle].’
It is important to have a sense of who we are as parish, but it can become a closed sense of who we are, Mgr Gerard said.
In reflecting on how someone is different, we are being invited to recognise the stranger within ourselves. ‘Sometimes we are putting out there parts of ourselves that we don’t want to go near either. Because we are afraid of going there in ourselves, we project those fears onto others – “those (fearful) people over there”. Talking about people different from us as “those people” makes the chasm between us wider.’
Alluding to the parts of us that we don’t like to look at, acknowledge or that we are afraid of, Mgr Gerard said that to be fully rounded human beings, we need to get both sides of ourselves talking to each other. ‘The growth of the shadow side of us makes us become whole and the integration of that helps the people in our community whom we are rejecting become whole.’
This recognition of our ‘shadow side’ can also be applied to the nation’s adoption of the Treaty of Waitangi as an agreement between two peoples. Twenty years after the treaty was signed, it was declared a ‘nullity’ and was ignored until the 1970s. The process of the past 30 years of recognition from the non-Māori side has gone some way to creating a wholeness in our nation. ‘If we are going to be a whole nation, we need to recognise and welcome the treaty as part of our nation. This could be an example of the importance of what we see as the other side.’
The stranger is not always the person who comes from outside. ‘It might be someone among us or within us. To be truly welcoming, we must know ourselves and our story – what is your history as a parish, a person? When have you felt like a stranger?