From the Regional Director of Oceania
Pope Francis says a lot of surprising things. He has been wonderful in Laudato Si' where he talks of the interconnectedness of all things in God. Then the following week, he will do something that may disturb us. In a speech to the European Parliament in 2014, he said, “In my view, one of the most common diseases in Europe today is the loneliness typical of those who have no connection with others”.
I find this a challenging statement. He goes on to talk about the loneliness of the elderly, the young and the poor. In thinking about these people, it is easy enough to think of them as being lonely. However, many claim loneliness is a particular characteristic of our modern Western culture. That people in countries like Australia and New Zealand are very individualistic is commonly recognised. We have, through recent centuries, come to recognise the importance of every individual. We rightly emphasise the importance of human rights for each person. When we look at the spectrum from individual cultures to communal cultures, it becomes obvious that Western cultures are very individualistic. So there seems to be a danger that, along with our emphasis on the individual, we run the risk of becoming lonely.
Loneliness is the result of the loosening of bonds of closeness and lasting affections. Pope Francis talks of this level of loneliness as spiritual orphanhood. We do not feel connected.
One of the famous images used by the Pope is that ideally, the Church is like a field hospital. Field hospitals are to be found close to the front lines of a battle. One can think of those temporary hospitals that were put together to fight the coronavirus epidemic. They are not big solid structures with years of tradition behind them. They have been built in an emergency to meet unexpected needs.
In our current Church language, the “front-line workers” in these field hospitals of the Church are called “missionary disciples”. This description of members of the Church came to us from Latin America. The Church leaders in those countries saw that not only do we have to be disciples of Christ, we are to be missionaries also. We have to move out of our comfort zone to meet people from other sectors of society, from other parts of our country, even from our own countries.
Why do we have to do this? Because this is the human thing to do. Jesus came to teach us how to live a deeper, fuller human life. He came to show us that by living the way he did, we would also learn to live more fully. We would be better human beings. We would be living as God intended us to be.
I remember one of my philosophy teachers saying that the purpose of our lives was to live more consciously the relationships that we are born into. This sounds simple, but as we think about it, we start to realise how profound an agenda this is for our lives. It is great advice for living.
We are interconnected to all human beings, to the whole of creation and God. If we learn how to live these relationships, we have learnt a lot. We have first to become aware of these relationships. People may tell us that we have these connections, but we cannot live these consciously until we grow into a personal awareness of us being a sister or a brother to all humankind and to every living thing. Likewise, we can come to a personal awareness that we are a son or a daughter of God.
So, what does a missionary disciple do in the modern secular western world? Each of us can develop our mission priorities given our own circumstances. I know of someone in Brisbane who came to recognise how many lonely people there were in his own neighbourhood, and so, he has set up a group of people who are focusing on loneliness as their mission. I do not know how each of them would answer the question of what motivates them to do this work. However, I know that the Jesus that we follow invites all of us to move out of our own comfortable circle of friends and to walk with, to befriend, those in our part of the world who are lonely. As we reach out, we know that Christ himself accompanies us. We are not alone in this work. This is the joy of the missionary disciple today.
Fr Trevor Trotter
Regional Director of Oceania
rdoceania@columban.org.au
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban eBulletin
