Noreen Christian
Kathleen Fitzsimons
First Sunday of Lent
March 9th, 2025
Noreen Christian and I sat down in the community room in the Dominican Convent in Falls Road yesterday. Together we read over the Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent which recounts the temptations of Jesus in the desert. After a period of reflective silence we began to share our thoughts.
‘Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was moved by the spirit.’
We lingered at this idea of being led by the spirit and wondered together what this response to the movement of the spirit entails. How can we know that we have the right disposition to being led. One translation of the psalm gives us a good idea about what is required of us
‘Because they cling to me, I will deliver them;
I will set them on high because they acknowledges my name.
They shall call upon me, and I will answer them;
I will be with them in their distress;
I will deliver them and glorify them.’
So if we cling to the Godhead, being grounded in scripture perhaps with all that that entails, we may be able to challenge systems that prioritise greed, coercion and self-interest.
But hold on! How can we do this? Grounded in scripture is the easy bit. How are we going to challenge systems?
We mused over this for a while and decided to sleep on it.
We meet again today Monday.
We return to the seemingly impossible task of challenging systems. They are too big. We are too small. Daunting! Then I shared with Noreen the bit of inspiration that I enjoyed when I was least expecting it. On Sunday morning I was pottering around in my room with BBC Radio 4 in the background. From the music I knew it was an episode of The Archers a radio drama set in rural England. I picked up my ears when I heard the storyline. It was a conversation with a Muslim woman about the challenges of catering for her family’s needs in trying to prepare meals during the day so that they could eat them during the hours of darkness in the Holy Month of Ramadan. The penny dropped!
Now thousands of radio listeners know something about the life of a Muslim family that they might never otherwise have known. The story writer had included a sometimes excluded community in a radio play.
While applauding the vision of the scriptwriter we happily concluded that you don’t have to be the writer of a radio drama to include the excluded. This helped us to feel less challenged and to wonder how we too could include….