16 Sunday Ordinary Time, 17 July 2011, Matthew 13:24-43

Darnel

During Easter week, as some of you know, I was in Lourdes with the IHCPT – the Irish Pilgrimage Trust, which brings children and young people with special needs to Lourdes each year for a "Pilgrimage – Holiday". Many of you here will know Mary Clancy who is very involved with the IHCPT, and is now a trustee in the organisation as well as being leader of group 164.

This year I travelled as the chaplain with group 306. Our group leader was a lady called Patricia Galvin, who comes from nearby Carraroe, and the deputy leader was a man called Ruairi McAteer who hails from Castlederg in Co. Tyrone. Ruairi is a young man of 24 years of age, and he entertained us for hours with his tomfoolery. While there, he told me all about his sister Maura, who recently joined the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in New York. He invited me to come to Castlederg to meet his sister during the summer when she was home for a family wedding.

About a month ago, we journeyed to Castlederg to meet Ruairi, his parents, and his sister, Sr Bernadette.
What happened around the dinner table that evening was nothing short of incredible. Sr Bernadette told me all about her life, and why she had become a Nun. She exuded joy into the room with her radiant smile, and we connected over a mutual acquaintance, an Austrian sister called Sr Christina whom I had met in the Holy Land in 1998, and who has been working in Letterkenny for many years. Then Sr Bernadette really astounded me when she talked about a core experience in her vocation journey at a Festival of Prayer for young people that happened in St Angela's College here in Sligo almost ten years ago. She shared about a particular priest who had helped her, through his preaching, to offer her life to God willingly. For her, this festival of prayer, and her encounter with God there, had helped her to answer the call of religious consecration.

The amazing thing for me was that I had been involved with the organisation and execution of that festival of prayer. I had spoken in Churches and encouraged young people to come along and try it out. The St Michael's Youth Prayer Group, of which I was an active member, had been instrumental in organising the event. Sr Bernadette went on to amaze me by producing an album of photographs from the festival itself!

I couldn't believe it! I think what I couldn't believe most of all was that something so good could have happened through that festival of prayer. That it could have been the catalyst moment in Sr Bernadette's vocation story really amazed me. In short, I was amazed that something so good could have happened.

Like most people, I am culturally conditioned by the negative. We cope with negativity, with bad news almost every day of the week. This week has been exceptionally negative for us who are attempting to answer God's call to ministry. It has been a shameful week, a week when the Church is forced to accept it's corporate wrongdoing in the face of immensely evil acts.

In short, we find it very difficult to see the good amidst what can seem like a sea of bad. The gospel today calls us to give time to the process of discovering the good and the bad, the saints and the sinners. We have to try to take time to give a correct perspective to all that has happened, not ignoring the bad and the sinful, but not allowing it to define all that the Church is.

Perhaps it is time that we could be amazed by a good news story – a story of the good in the midst of all the bad.