Dear Anima Sisters and Friends,
Welcome to Spring 2019. We hope our newest blog reflections will, like Spring, bring you some green shoots of faith and hope!
Our Anima contributions are aimed at nurturing the soul – despite hearing from each other how dispiriting the year has been.
There is serious drought in some parts of our land, and a raft of legislative attempts to open further doors to medicalised killing and to exile religious faith.
In Australia and around the world we hear of the increasing incidence of anxiety, depression and mental health crises especially amongst the young.
We hear that millions of Christians are violently persecuted throughout the world. Then there is the shattering pain and crisis within the Church – in some ways this is the most undermining of all.
It might be called a type of “faith-grief”- a loss of faith in many of the realities upon which lives have been founded.
Then there is a type of exhaustion that comes with sorrow and disappointment.
It is important to keep before us – through faith we know that God is still with us- perhaps more intimately than ever. God is with us in the real and warm things of Creation and in those who love us and those we love. God is with us through sacramental presence and grace. God is close to those who mourn.
Our Blog series for September and October is mindful of these experiences. We also remind ourselves that our faith offers us the powerful and empathetic presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ and the Mother of the Church. We will travel the traditional path with her in what is known as her Seven Sorrows.
Her experience of life was not remote or doily-frilly, but very much in solidarity with us. Her faith is a starting point for our recovery of hope.
Fr Gerald Vann OP was a popular writer (in the 1930-1960s), Dominican priest, philosopher and headmaster. He was a great communicator and had a deep compassion for people who experience failure and feel lost in the tear-laden experiences of life. He had a great insight into loss of all layers of faith in the contemporary world, “and the meaninglessness produces a sense of loneliness and a sense of fear- fear of life, of the present and of the future precisely because they are lacking in meaning.”
His touching 1950s book “The Seven Swords” opens up the paradox of the Virgin Mary’s faith, and how it is a model of the paradox of our faith. She opened her heart to the deepest experiences of the hopeful young woman and the sorrowing mother. In each of her experiences she was hit by both fear and trust.
Part of our grief is the fear that nothing again will be true or beautiful. Fr Vann says with great insight: “.. These fears can make us gloomy and uncreative, robbing us of our energy; Can make us despair forgetting God… For despair invites it, being the will-to-death…”
Maybe this is what afflicts our society today?
We cannot escape fear or grief; they are to “be faced and understood, and transformed. And in all our sorrows; so in all our fears we learn from Mary’s fear” (G. Vann Seven Swords p. 18)
We invite you to join some of our thoughtful women in this learning.
Anna Krohn
Anima Women’s Network.