Why?

A number of years ago, while living in London, I purchased  a copy of a Catholic directory. It listed the Roman Catholic chuches in the Southwark diocese along with mass times and other pertinent information. New to the city and knowing very few people, I would chose a new church every Sunday, working out how to get there by bus. I never took the tube if I could avoid it…there was far too much to see to spend all that time underground.

I soon began to notice things that probably wouldn’t have been so obvious had I attended the same church all the time. Congregations varied in age depending on which part of the city I was in. The tone of the masses ranged from young and popular to old and staid, depending on the music, the ethnicity and the time of day. Subconsciously, I found myself ranking each one by the sermon the priest had delivered. Some I went back to again and again; others I visited only once. Mass, as a ceremony, is the same the world over, regardless of the language in which it is delivered. What makes it resonate is the message we take away from it each Sunday. A message that should set us up for the week. A thought, a reflection, something for us to dwell on, to work towards. Something that is relevant to our lives.

The world is changing. Multimedia has opened many new doors and created many new opportunities. It has also shortened our attention spans and made us more impatient. We are slowly losing the ability to think and reason for ourselves. We are drip-fed so much information that it’s practically impossible to know what or whom to believe. Perhaps it’s time to go back to basics.

Every Sunday, priests, vicars, clergymen the world over stand in front of a captive audience. They have a priceless opportunity to influence people’s lives. To reach out and touch their souls. To sow a seed in their minds that will germinate over the week ahead and bring them back next Sunday to hear more. I’m not talking about entertainment; I’m talking about relevance; about spiritual sustenance.  They have the opportunity to make the Church relevant. We’re all trying to find our way; a way to make sense of our lives. We do this differently and some of us do it in Church.  In looking to religion, we find the glue that holds it all together for us. Three minutes of wisdom imparted on Sunday in a way that reaches our hearts and our minds will do more for the world than any number of laws or legislation. 

I was born and raised an Irish Catholic.  Over the years, I have sat through many wasted opportunities, more often called ‘sermons’. Regularly disappointed by the lacklustre delivery of 10-minute rhetorics that serve little other purpose than to showcase the priest’s knowledge of the Bible,  I found myself composing short, three-minute sermons of my own; the sermons I would have given were I allowed to be a priest. My religion doesn’t allow women priests, but that’s another subject entirely. This minor detail doesn’t prevent me from interpreting the Gospels and making them relevant to my life. It does, however,  prevent me from delivering those sermons from a pulpit. But hey, this is the twenty-first century. I can build my own pulpit and share my message with anyone who chooses to listen.

Over the next liturgical year, my plan is to write and deliver a three-minute sermon each week. One that is relevant to my life and to the times in which we live. I don’t profess to have any great knowledge of theology or any in-depth insights into the Catholic religion. Far from it. But what I do have is a passionate belief that if the Catholic Church is to succeed in being a pastor for her people, she needs to take it back to basics…to reconnect with her people and to reacquaint herself with their lives.