5th Annual St. Oliver Plunkett Lecture
by Kathy Sinnott , MEP
St. Oliver Plunkett Church, Glenveagh Drive, Lenadoon,
Sunday, 10 August 2007, at 7:00pm
Photos from the evening
Kathy Sinnott MEP
Bishop Donal McKeown, Kathy Sinnott, MEP and Gerry Adams MLA
Bishop Donal McKeown, Councillor Tim Attwood
and the Lord Mayor of Belfast Tom Hartley
Glen Phillips, Chairperson of the Pastoral Council, Kathy Sinnott MEP
and Father Martin Magill, Prish Priest at St Oliver Plunkett Parish
Guests enjoying the Lecture on a very sucessful evening
"God's Eternal Truth - Modern Secret"
5th Annual St. Oliver Plunkett Lecture
by Kathy Sinnott , MEP
Thank you for inviting me to give the Oliver Plunkett lecture today. It is a great privilege and blessing.
I would like to introduce myself. I am a mother of nine. This number has expanded to 16 with the death of my younger sister. For over a year now I have also been thoroughly enjoying being a grandmother.
In Ireland, I am the founder and chair of the Hope Project which has been running a disability helpline for 12 years now and is currently leading The European Autism Information System project and the Irish section of two European projects on Rescuing Persons with Disabilities in Emergencies and Disasters.
I am a Member of the European Parliament. I represent Munster, the other end of the island. In the parliament, I am president of the Democracy group which is committed to EU reform, This group is part of the Independence/Democracy group.
I am vice president of the Petitions Committee, and a member on 7 others including committee on environment, health, social affairs, fisheries, human rights and climate change. I am vice president on three parliamentary intergroups: The Intergroup for Disability, for Family and Child Protection and for Bioethics.
Of my other activities in the parliament, I will just mention one more and that is founding and chairing the Special Interest Group on Cares and Caring.
I mention some of my activities to make the point that with this wide variety of activities, I am privileged to work on what I think are some of the most challenging issues facing legislators today. And more importantly, I am privileged to work with people across Ireland on some of the most challenging issues facing them.
Part of a legislators work is to look for solutions, but many times we can't find them because the solution is being sought in the same place and from the same sources that produced the problem. We think that greater competitiveness is the solution, when our commitment to competition at all costs may be part of the problem. In governance, we are told that we need bigger and more controlling unions to tackle problems of global dimensions. But maybe, just maybe, global problems are an accumulation of all the small ones. Maybe the millions of small problems have something to do with the loss of personal responsibility. that comes from a loss of local, human scale self-governance.
And more than anything we seek solutions apart from God when so often man's separation from God is the problem and working in union with God is the solution.
I would like to tell you a story I have told my children hundreds of times, the story of Little Bear.
One winter morning, Little Bear wanted to go out to play. His mother opened the front door kissed him and closed the door against the cold. Two minutes later, there was a knock. When she open the door, there was Little Bear, “I'm cold, I need a hat.” Mother Bear made Little Bear a hat. “Now I won't be cold”
But two minutes later bear was back . “I'm cold, I need a coat to keep me warm.” So Mother Bear made Little Bear a coat. Little Bear was delighted and went eagerly out to play. But only minutes later, Little Bear was at the door again shivering. “Mother I am cold. I need leggings.”
Mother again dropped everything and made her Little Bear legging. They were warm and fit perfectly. Little Bear hugged Mother Bear and went out happily to play. But again Mother Bear heard the urgent knocking. Little Bear rushed in, “I am cold I need a scarf” Mother Bear knit Little Bear a scarf.
All bundled up Little Bear again headed out to play. But again Little Bear was cold. Mother Bear said, “My Little Bear, you have a coat, a hat, a scarf and legging. Do you need a fur coat?” “Yes Mother, Yes, a fur coat will surely keep me warm.” So Mother Bear took off Little Bear's scarf, coat, hat and leggings and sent him out in his fur coat. Little Bear was warm and played outside all day until Mother Bear called him in for bed.
Like Little Bear, so often the solutions we seek become encumbrances. The answer to this is easy, shed them and discover that we already have the answer and the answer is God who made us , who loves us and who at every moment in every way wants and is ready to give us every grace to use that freedom well and who has made Himself immediately available at every moment through His only son Jesus.
I am going to use the privilege of your time to look at what I feel is the most relevant question for Christians today: Where is Jesus in our lives?
As I thought about this question, I realised that it would have been crazy for me to try to come up with an answer to this when Jesus who is the very truth has already given us the answer and it remains only for us to understand and apply His answer. Where is Jesus? Jesus is where He has always been and where He told us He would be. Jesus is in our neighbour.
So who is our neighbour? We ask this just as the apostles did and we get the same answer... the Good Samaritan.
Jesus explains what neighoubour means for us in the parable of the Good Samaratan. It was a simple story, and it is my story.
Some days, I, by the grace of God, am the Good Samaritan, the one who bends over the injured man or at least I want to be. Some days I’m the Levite or the priest who hurries by and, yes, sometimes I can be the robber who ambushes the unfortunate man.
But most of the time I’m the man lying in the road, in need of help and in need of mercy. I began life completely helpless, and I think so did all of you, lying in the path. For me, in that very early helpless condition, the neighbour who carried me was my mother with the help of my father. Even before they could see me, they responded to my utter helplessness, with a welcome. My parents, then living in an attic apartment in Korean War America with four children under the age of five, gave this welcome wholeheartedly. And be asssured, welcome is a very important start to being neighbour.
The Samaritan didn’t walk by, feel guilty, and reluctantly come back. He rushed to the man and he bent over him. He welcomed the man in the path into his life and he accepted the responsibility that welcoming an injured man entails. Do you remember, the Samaratan brought the man to an inn, though he was probably weary from traveling, and he paid for the injured man, he took care of him all through the night, and paid for the man's continued care in the morning.
Like the man in the path, there are times in our lives when our very survival depends on someone being neighbour. We need someone to carry us in their womb and when we are finally born someone to feed us, to dress us, to shelter us.
I was one of 14 children and one of the great advantages of a big family is that while children are still growing up, and still in need of being neighboured themselves, they have many opportunities to neighbour. I was the fifth child and I thought I could carry, dress and feed the seventh, although my Mother wasn’t quite so convinced. But by child nine, I was well able to make a real contribution to my brother's care.
When I was 11 years old, my sister Meghan was born. Now Meghan had Down Syndrome, she also had a congenital neck problem which eventually caused her death.
But in the 16 years that she graced our lives, she showed us who is neighbour. Despite her very significant needs, it was our needs she saw to. Meghan loved us.
Now as a child, I loved my family, but I loved them, as most children do, as an extension of myself. I loved my activities, I loved my possessions. I was always rushing from one thing to the next. But Meghan loved in a different way; she just loved us, she gave away the toy she was playing with to the first child who was crying, and she’d no plans of her own. Whatever we wanted to do, she was happy once she was with us. For her everything was right now with the person she was with and her favourite brother or sister was whoever was most in need, whoever was in trouble at that moment and in the doghouse. Meghan knew who her neighbour was.
In her last years, Meghan became more and more physically disabled and she had to do simple exercises which for her were really, really hard. The only way we could get her to do them was to name someone who needed prayers. I can still see her, face absolutely distorted with effort lifting her trembling emaciated legs, and offering it up for old Canon Murphy who was in hospital or for the safe delivery of Gail's baby.
I think it was only after Meghan’s death that we began to realise that she was not just the weak and wounded member of our family, very dependant on our help. She was the person who in her disability and in her illness gave us the opportunity to be the Samaritan, to be the neighbour. The opportunity to love without seeking anything in return, the way we usually love. Meghan was very easy to love, so she made the lesson in becoming neighbour very easy.
As Christians, we know that everyone is our neighbour, and that we can and should neighbour everyone. We do this by our prayers when we pray for the whole world, and we do it by our sacrifices and our good works. Every good thing we do in someway helps everyone. But we’re human and we’re limited to time and space and the needs of very big suffering world are great: and on the one hand you have God’s plan that every person is to truly love and to be loved and on the other hand we have our limitations. So how do we pick and chose who to clothe, who to feed, who to counsel.
We need to be willing to serve God by serving neighbour, and Jesus in him or her, but how do we know who that will be and what service will be required at a given moment. We can struggle to discern, make guidelines for ourselves and set out boundaries or we can make a much more basic choice; the choice to just love God and to do His Will and to follow the path as He shows it to us moment by moment. And this is the importance of the path in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The neighbour who we must tend is the person lying in our path, the person we are given to love and assist in whatever way, right here, right now.
I was listening to a lady on local radio a couple of summers ago. She was fundraising for the victims of the famine in Niger. Now the lady had never done anything like this before. Over the years, she had seen the images from other famines and disasters Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and had made a dutiful donation, but one evening that summer, she was watching the news of Niger and from that moment the people of Niger were hers; her name was on their suffering; they were in her path.
Sometimes the who of neighbouring is obvious, the people in your family, the unborn baby tucked beneath your heart, the elderly lady struggling with the heavy door in a shop. The implications of neighbouring may be lifelong, like raising your child, or they can be momentary like holding the door for that elderly lady. All that is important is to recognise Christ and your call to be neighbour and to bring the required love to the neighbouring.
And as always Jesus made it simple in telling us what the required love is. We’re to love our neighbour as ourself and further to love one another as He has loved us. And he showed us what that means; He showed us in his public ministry, He showed us on the cross and in the Eucharist. The image we have normally of what it is to be neighbour is most tied to the example of His public life; healing, sharing, feeding the crowd, teaching, comforting. We have the great list in the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy. In this model, Christ’s response to blindness, lameness, and suffering, was to heal, to alleviate the suffering, to take it away. Now that’s beautiful, but He also calls us to a more intense neighbouring. On the cross, he allows himself to be rendered helpless. He does not alleviate our suffering but He enters it, He shares it and He sanctifies it.
You may know of the writer Christopher Nolan, who has quadriplegia. The main character in one of his novel is similarly paralysied, the character demands to be brought to church and then to be brought before the large Cross. He really struggles position himself to spit but once he gets his target into focus, he suddenly stops because he sees for the first time, despite a lifetime of Sunday practice, that Jesus, like himself, is helpless with his head hanging with no control over his hands and feet.
In my family, we have my 30 year old son, Jamie, and Jamie is profoundly intellectually impaired, he’s physically disabled, he’s epileptic, and he has profound autistism. He’s as dependant on us for his life as the man lying in the road is on the Good Samaritan. He’s our beloved son, he’s also our permanent neighbour. Jamie must be fed, must be put to bed at night he has to be gotten out of bed and bathed in the morning. He relies for survival on our love an on our willingness to accept him as neighbour.
Now this is the key; we are most neighbour when we’re most in need of neighbouring, and when we’re most in need of neighbouring is when we’re most vulnerable when we’re at our weakest, our smallest and lowest, when we’re lying in the path and when our innate sense of self preservation isn’t enough to save us.
We’re also most neighbour when we give that neighbouring, that love as Christ loved, that sacrificial, total love. And we’re most in need of giving the neighbouring when we’re healthy, strong, independent, energetic and successful because when our natural and acquired blessings are not put to service they can lead to pride and selfishness and if this happens then our blessings can actually destroy us. Gifts like youth and strength are good and like all good things they come from God, but hoarded they dehumanise us and they become burdens and it’s only love that makes these gifts both safe and fruitful. It’s love that humanises them and humanises us and it’s Christ in our path that gives us the opportunity to use these gifts and render them valuable. Jamie in his need gives us the opportunitites. He humanises the members of my family.
I remember being summoned to speak with the teacher of one of my other sons which, because I had reluctant scholars at home, was always kind of a traumatic event for me. The teacher gave me the bad academic news first, but then she said that I should never worry about him because he had something that she had rarely seen in her long career as a teacher, something that she had struggled to give a name and had decided that she could best describe as compassion.
Now Jamie teaches us, who neighbour him, what is means to be human, not beautiful and human like in the advertisements, or clever and human like the Leaving Cert and the A levels rate us, or able and human like the Olympics, but just human, truly simply human. Jamie clears up the confusion that comes from living in a culture that reduces people to the roles of producers, consumers, and products. Jamie’s none of these, and yet he has the power to transform the lives of everyone who finds him in their paths and bend to him.
Now we as Christians look at the crucified Christ and we should have no difficulty understanding the dignity of every human person, that amazing dignity, that God-endowed dignity that He defended with His Son’s life. But in the Eucharist, we as Catholics should go a step further, and infinite leap further in our understanding of the dignity of the person, of the truth of who is our neighbour, because it is in the hidden invisible God in the little frail white flake of the host that the fullest love the most complete neighbouring this side of heaven is given.
The Eucharist is the complete gift of self that the crucifix and the public ministry only point to. So consider the Eucharistic Host. Christ in the little round host is completely helpless; he doesn’t even have the visual spectacle of nailed and bleeding hands, crown of thorns and pierced side to gain our sympathy. In the Eucharist, Christ is completely invisible. He is by choice, totally victim and completely at our mercy. In the Eucharist, he doesn’t come simply to heal, teach, feed the hungry, nor does he come to take our sin and suffering alone. In the Eucharist, God comes to be completely consumed, to implant, to live in us and to become one with us.
It is no wonder that the Eucharist is the source of faith the measure of faith and the ultimate reality that defines our Catholic faith,. It is no wonder that the Eucharist is the wall that separates us from the world while being the glue that binds us to it. And in the world it’s the Eucharist that Christ the perfect neighbour is most neighbour to us and where he most perfects our neighbouring.
And so it not surprising that today the greatest challenge to love, to neighbouring, to faith and to the future of the world is the human person in his or her most hidden, most dependant and unprotected, most Eucharistic state.
So it is in the embryonic and feotal human person before birth, the very least of of our brethern and therefore the person in whom Jesus is most served that lies in our path as legislators and serving them and their mothers is an urgent starting point to our neighbouring. And if we neighbour these smallest one we will not fail: children, the diabled, the lonely, the sick, the elderly, the refugee, the immigrant, the friend and family member, the stranger, business associate, classmate, constituent, customer or anyone else that God puts in our path and we will in neighbouring experience the answer to the most important of questions: Where is Christ in our lives today?
