By Isaac Withers
Day 4 of The Mercy Tour and I was flagging. It turns out that man was not made to travel
every day. Add to this, what I like to call World Youth Day flu (much like
freshers flu, lots of sweaty young people in the same place: a serious bug’s
dream scenario). Suffice to say I was not feeling at my best.
The way we’re aiming to spend
our days, is to turn up, set up in the new church, do some street mission,
spreading the news about the night and talking with people, and then praising
in the evening. However, this day, I was really not feeling the street.
The days before I’d prayed for
energy and it had worked. This day, I just felt bad. I managed an hour on the street with my friend Maria, and had
some good conversations, but then we just had to wander, and we ended up in
Chichester Cathedral. And there, I sat, and felt exhausted, but also felt a
genuine kinda shame that I had bailed on street mission. And so I then felt
rubbish on two fronts. After a bit of prayer, we left again, and headed for St.
Richard’s, where we were holding the reconciliation evening. Maria said that maybe God would
still send someone our way on the way back, but, tbh, I really doubted and didn’t
really want that to happen. Frankly, I wasn’t feeling up to hospitality.
As we approached, Therese from
the team had made a sign to put outside the church, and left it with me and
Maria. As we stood with it, I became really aware there was a guy behind us.
Then I became aware that we were definitely
going to have to talk to this guy. Great.
And so Maria started talking to
him, told him about the night, 7-9, prayer, chill, music, everyone’s welcome
ect. At that point, most people usually nod, say thanks, and head. But this guy
kept the conversation going. Let’s say he was called Dan. He said he was 56, he’d
gone to mass all his life, but he had fallen out with some people at the parish,
and for that reason he felt he couldn’t come that night. Yep, this had been his church. Which meant he was Catholic.
So we asked if we could pray with him. We prayed over the destructive power of
grudges, how we let human things take God out of our life. Then, we invited him
again, shook his hand, and we went into the church. Honestly, I didn’t expect
to see Dan again.
As we had dinner, Maria and I
reflected. We talked about how we almost project onto everyone, an assumed
aggression towards faith, or a disinterest in it. We never expected someone we
would bump into out there, to be Catholic too, especially from that very parish.
I realised that my heart was
preconditioned to expect little. I had a block, it was like the opposite of
World Youth Day, where you know everyone is with you, and so you feel totally
open. At home, I was assuming that no one would have a history with the church.
Anyway, fast forward to the
night. A packed church and a congregation who were clearly expectant. At one
point, from where I was at the front, I looked across to the prayer ministry
and saw Dan. I looked over ten minutes later, and he was still there. Later
again, and the woman with him had stopped praying with him, and he was just sat
listening to the praise.
When the team re-grouped at the
end of the night, we were all on a high, and a friend told me that she had
spoken to Dan outside. He had turned up, and told her everything he had told
me, how he felt he couldn’t come in, how he had problems with the parish. She told
him that that was fine, and that he could see Jesus from there, through the
open door, a clear view to the Blessed Sacrament. A while later, he went in.
Then Maria told me that she had
seen him in the praise later, during a song that had the lyrics, ‘spirit break out, break our walls down’.
We moved on to the next town,
and I’m not sure where Dan’s going to end up, but I was made acutely aware of
two things through this.
1) God can work with my worst mood and greatest
tiredness. He could use a blunt tool, and man was I being a bit of a blunt tool
that day.
2) The people walking our streets aren’t
completely distant from the faith. They’re lapsed or frustrated or no one’s
ever invited them, but the vast majority aren’t aggressive towards faith.
The real
surprise of the trip so far has been meeting Catholics on the streets. And not
just Catholics, people with links to the parishes we’d be at that night. Not
the point of street mission, but it’s been amazing anyway. In Shoreham, a guy
who thought what we were doing was ‘a bit Mormon’ who went to the parish we were in that night. In Chichester,
another guy who had had his son baptised there and when we said we’d pray for
him, said ‘it’s been ages since anyone did that’. In Bath, one of us got
talking to two young guys, one of which became super awkward, because his dad
was the organist, at the church we were
at that night. The organist.
When you
look at an average UK street, the last thing you think you are seeing is
Catholics, let alone parishioners. But a fair chunk of the people we’ve been
speaking to have had histories with these churches, and it’s been
such a beautiful surprise.
An us
against the world mentality can really drive your faith into retreat, draw you
into yourself. But it’s just not the reality, it isn’t a versus, or a
competition for the beliefs of the world and the mainstream, it’s just the children
of God out there. In the clubs at university, on the streets of my home town,
in those who have fallen away from parishes, children of God. There are so many who have had
experiences of church and who just need an invite, someone to say, ‘hey,
are you free tonight? We’re opening up that church, and it’s beautiful in
there.'
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