Thanks be to God…. Elizabeth Hartley writes

 

It took me a long time to find a theme for our June magazine, and I have borrowed a lot from Ronald Blyth’s book “Talking to the Neighbours”.  (He writes a weekly piece on the back page of the Church Times, and it is always worth reading.  He lives in East Anglia in a very rural area and he is close to the earth and the patterns of nature and the seasons)

 

One of the special days of the Church’s year is “Corpus Christi” which is celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday / Pentecost.  It was established through the efforts of Juliana the Mother superior of a convent near Liege in Belgium in the 1200s.  The church authorities, and presumably her nuns, found her so trying that they forced her to leave the convent after her first celebration of the feast day - the thanksgiving for the Holy Communion.  She was exiled from her community till her death - but some years later the feast was officially sanctioned by the church.  It is a special opportunity to thank God for the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, the Mass, our opportunity to share in the last supper which Jesus shared with his friends, and know what he did for them and us.

 

But Ronald Blyth is reminded on this day of another woman - whose name he did not catch – who spoke on “Prayer for Today” on the radio on May 30^th 2000, and is an Australian aborigine.  Of these two women he says “One taught the church to say thank you to Christ for instituting a service of communion between us for all time via the simple essential of a meal; the other taught me how grateful I should be for the gospel.  Each of these teachers of gratitude stirred up what thankfulness I had in me and reminded me of all those times I had not said “thank you” – at least not with conviction”.  This second woman and her race had been treated abominably. Ronald Blyth had first seen aborigines in a New South Wales timber town, a group of unemployed young men sitting beside a dusty hot road drinking beer from cans.  But later he had seen a “dreaming place” where over hundreds of years the native people of Australia would rest and contemplate and discover their spiritual strength.  There were stone-age like carvings and hollows in the rock, a huge sky and arum lilies growing like weeds.  When Jesus spent a month - 40 days - in the wilderness it was a nightmare, lonely, cold, hungry, uneasy.  For aborigines, their month of dreaming is a kind of first step to paradise.  Nature heals them, the earth restores them; they become whole or holy.

 

This woman was the outcome of a white man’s rape of an aborigine woman, and had been taken with her brothers and sisters into state care to be brought up “civilised”.  But now she can use the site of her mother’s house as a kind of dream place where she thanks God for plants and trees, animals and birds and also for the Gospel which the white man had given her. 

 

Ronald Blyth finishes by saying “the feast days of the church serve to jog our memory and play up our imagination.  Julian from Liege and the lady from Australia would each have been reassured by St John when he wrote;

“But we belong to God…..Dear friends let us love one another, because love is from God.  Everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God” (1 John 4. 6-7 NEB)

Added: 14th July 2010 || Submitted by: Elizabeth Hartley.

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