|
 Pastoral
work in our communities will suffer if we lose the sense
of our basic vocation of being called into existence by
God. John Armitage, who is parish priest of St Margaret’s,
Canning Town, London, draws on his experience of working
in the East End to show ‘how pastoral work for vocations
is the vocation of pastoral work today’.
‘Pastoral work for vocations is the vocation of pastoral
work today.’ This sentence sums up for me the challenge
of pastoral care today.
I have been Vocations Director for the past ten years in
my diocese, and parish priest for most of this period. There
seems to be a loss of vocational confidence in the Church,
but further examination seems to show that we are not alone.
A few years ago I was asked to carry out some research on
vocations. The intake into the seminaries was at an all-time
low, some religious orders had not had a novice enter for
years, and there was serious reflection that suggested that
a significant number of religious orders would cease to
exist within the foreseeable future. What was happening?
In the course of this research I found some remarkable parallels
with secular agencies, which seem to be struggling in a
similar fashion to the Church. Nursing, medicine, teaching,
social work, youth work, all professions with a vocational
element in their basic self-understanding. Two separate
reports on nursing and teaching stated that the shortage
of recruits would not be solved simply by throwing more
money at people.
‘Nursing’s collapse is a cultural and spiritual
one, a failure of the notion of charity and compassion,
not the result of failed pay bargaining rounds.’ (Come
back, Miss Nightingale: trends in professions today , by
D. Anderson, London: Social Affairs Unit, 1998.) The heart
of these professions was understood as vocational, where
gifted people had a strong sense of service and a self-understanding
that the individual nurse or teacher had something of themselves
to offer. Even the Army was suffering. A remarkable article,
quoting a recruitment officer, stated: ‘We have got
to try to educate our young recruits out of their selfish
lifestyle’, reflecting that teamwork will only operate
effectively where individual members feel that they have
something to offer others in the group.
Not just a ‘churchy’ issue
The vocational problem that faces us today is not an isolated
‘churchy’ issue that will be solved by ‘churchy’
answers. The vocational crisis is a part of a wider social
picture that displays the heart of our modern society; simply
put it is a sense of ‘man and woman with no vocation’.
A vocational culture recognises the worth of each individual,
and creates ways for that worth to grow and to become central
in the life of each person, thus building communities with
a strong ‘heart’. Our vocation is linked to our
very existence. God first calls us into being and this ‘divine
thought’ encompasses our whole life. We are unique,
our fingerprints, DNA, footprints, are completely one off.
Our vocation is our ‘Spiritual DNA’. It is the
realisation that people have something to find in life,
something that is uniquely theirs. This message lies at
the heart of the Christian community
.
Our story
The place of our story is of vital importance in understanding
our vocation. The telling of stories educates and strengthens
our sense of belonging. But all stories need guides to help
us understand them. These guides are my faith, my family,
and my community. If you want to understand the parts of
my story about the sea and why I sail on the Tall Ships
you have to know that my father and grandfather were seamen,
who sent me to sea when I was fourteen. To know why I speak
with a London accent, you have to know that my family settled
in Wapping in 1846 and have been in the East End ever since.
If you want to know why I am a priest you have to know that
I am a Roman Catholic. If you want to know how I dealt with
my father’s tragic death when I was seventeen you have
to know about my faith, my family and my friends. My story
is no stranger to me, because I have the faith, the family
and the community, which help me to understand it.
Can there be a more distressing state in life than to know
your story and not to understand it? To have no faith, history
or community, to help you interpret what is happening to
you? When people come for confession or counsel they often
speak about being lost; they have no sense of who they are.
In the midst of such a great quantity and diversity of information,
but with so little formation, they appear lost with few
points of reference. Accordingly they are afraid of their
future; they experience anxiety in the face of definite
commitment. (In Verbo Tuo: new vocations for a new Europe
Vatican, 1997, 11c.)
Pastoral care in any community is about helping a person
discover the uniqueness of their being through their relationship
with God in worship and prayer, through their relationship
with others by service and community, and through their
relationship with themselves through belonging and recognition
of their own self-worth.
Our pastoral care today, as always, is to help a person
find their unique identity in the person of Jesus, for Jesus
is the answer to a question. The question? ‘Where is
God?’ This question arises in people’s lives in
a thousand ways and experiences. Death, life, failure, success,
every question in life that tries to find an answer to the
everyday events that face us in the end is a seeking for
the answer to this most fundamental of questions: Where
is God? Whether or not we recognise what is at the heart
of these questions, we are most certainly trying to find
answers. The mission of the Church and all Christian communities
lies in helping people find the answers to their questions
in the person of Jesus.
People who don’t attend church often look upon churchgoers
as hypocrites, and of course they are right. As the ‘Hypocrite
in Charge’ of this parish I am constantly struggling
to reconcile ‘the bad that comes so easily and the
good that seems so hard’, and this gives us a clue
as to why people come to church. We are a community of strugglers
recognising our frailty and need of God.
I see so many people coming to Mass in the midst of tragedy,
depression, confusion, chaos, they come to find strength
and meaning. Some find it and stay, others go away and come
back, others go away and we never see them again. Many of
the ones who stay are those who are engaged in the struggle,
for in the end all holiness and goodness is born of this
conflict. This is what we celebrate each Sunday. We find
in the death and resurrection of Jesus an echo of our own
experience. Our worship helps us to celebrate our life in
all of its vast range of emotions.
One East End parish
St Margaret’s Church, Canning Town, is in London’s
East End. It was built in the 1850s to serve the mainly
Irish immigrants who were arriving to build the new Royal
Docks and then to work in them. The East End has always
been a point of arrival for people from all over the world.
One old parish priest I knew would say, ‘You know where
trouble spots of the world are, by the men standing at the
back of the church at the evening Mass.’ This has not
changed. At the last Racial Justice Sunday we put up a map
and asked people to put a pin in their country of origin.
At the end of Sunday there were sixty-one pins in the map!
This gives the parish an amazing range of experience from
its people. So many of our inner-city parishes reflect the
Catholic, universal nature of the Church. The work of any
parish in an area like this is holding together the diverse
nature of its people. A while ago one of my young parishioners
came and told me that she wanted to start attending a black-led
church along the road. She asked what I thought. She wanted
to go to this church because she identified with the music
and the culture of the people. I tried to explain to her
that St Margaret’s could never be a black church or
a white church or a Filipino church, it could only be Catholic.
Multicultural vs. Cultural
The universality of our inner-city parishes creates great
opportunities and great tensions. To be part of a community
of sixty-one different nationalities is not easy. Old-established
parishioners want it to be as it was in the ‘old days’,
new arrivals want it to be like the churches that they have
just come from, some young people who are second-generation
sometimes try to find an identity in churches that reflect
their mother culture. The Catholic parish has to try and
hold all this together. The term multicultural is much used
today, it can mean large groups of people of a particular
ethnic origin, living in a certain area who might have few
points of integration with other cultures. 
|
