health and holiness and the daily mirror

Yesterday the Daily Mirror listed twenty five secrets of a long life. A few weeks before The +Daily Mirror ran a similar article on a longer life. Tucked away in the listing were references to faith. In the December article people were encouraged to "believe..in something" and in the January article they were encouraged to "go to church" in order to live a longer life. These items were not commented upon especially and seemed to sit uncomfortably alongside other advice to have regular sex and eat three walnuts a day.




The persistence of the spiritual and religious dimension in popular culture can be surprising and perhaps seen as evidence of a nostalgia for a simpler and more certain culture. But that view would ignore the evidence that faith does matter. The evidence for that comes in research time and time again that believing and attending a church does make a difference. Take this piece for example:





"Again, the health benefits of religion and spirituality do not stem solely from healthy lifestyles. Many researchers believe that certain beliefs, attitudes, and practices associated with being a spiritual person influence health. In a recent study of people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), those who had faith in God, compassion toward others, a sense of inner peace, and were religious had a better chance of surviving for a long time than those who did not live with such belief systems. Qualities like faith, hope, and forgiveness, and the use of social support and prayer seem to have a noticeable effect on health and healing". link






This type of research-based evidence underlines that we are spiritual beings and that to be fully human meas to be engaged spiritually with life, with others and with ourselves. We are more alive, more engaged, more healthy and better connected when we believe. That means that faith and spirituality confer an evolutionary advantage on believers.Emile Durkheim, to many the father of sociology, said that the person who has met their God does not just seem stronger or heathier, they are stronger and healthier. Faith has real effects in life.




The expression of faith in these terms marks out a pathway for faith development in the future. To some religious people it may seem to reduce religion to just another humanist philosophy. To more secular minds the research may seem to be less than scientific. Both parties are challenged by this type of research and the struggle to make sense of it will take our culture forward to a better synthesis about faith and well being. So don't expect the faith dimension to disappear from the listings for a long life in next years Daily Mirror feature.

Gentleness as the wisdom of God

There is a story heard by many school children about a battle between the sun and the storm who decided to test their skills by making a traveller remove his cloak. The storm tried first and hit the traveller with wind and snow and rain and ice. The more the storm blew the tighter the traveller held onto the cloak. Eventually the traveller stopped and hid from the storm. The sun tried next and gently warmed the air and the ground after the storm and as it grew warmer the traveller began to loosen the cloak and eventually took it off. The sun had beaten the fury of the storm with gentleness.

The story reminds us that gentleness untangles hearts and minds and that taking people by storm creates fear, anger and isolation. That at least was Don Bosco's view. He reminded his youth workers that more could be achieved with a spoonful of honey than with a barrel full of vinegar. He was using an image from his  inspirational patron, St Francis de Sales whose feast day is January 24th. 

Gentleness was one of St Francis' major insights into spiritual life and an attitude that left no room for the hard-hearted and punitive images of God that still haunt the church despite the words and example of a gentle and humble Jesus.  Francis was working in the post reformation period of church history and had to manage the tensions between protestants and catholics in Geneva. Exiled from his own town and surrounded by the anger of the cathedral chapter many wanted to start a full scale military attack to re-take Geneva. In the discussion Francis said this:

I propose neither steel or powder; nor will I levy an army of mercenaries with no faith or piety. . . . It is by charity that the walls of Geneva will be breached, by love the city will be invaded, by kindness it will be won over.

This gentleness will have been viewed by many as naive but it reminds us now of the work of Mahatma Gandhi and the words of Don Bosco who spoke about a young person's heart being a fortress that will only be opened up by loving kindness. The same could be said of every friendship, marriage, family and community. Only love is worthy of ultimate belief and only love can open up, energise and heal what has been broken or stunted in its growth.

Gentleness disarms, leaves people free, reassures, waits, hopes and believes in the goodness of others. That is the real profile of the God we see in the Gospels; The Father of whom Jesus spoke and The Spirit that heals and inspires. Whenever you find a God who is not gentle, forgiving, optimistic and patient you will have found a false idol.That is what many young people have discovered in our church and they are right to reject it.

A God who judges, places impossible burdens on young lives, condemns whole groups because of their orientation and excludes groups from full communion projects an image of God that no one has a right to bow down to. We need to think again as a church about the primacy of loving kindness and use that to keep our fearful voices and narrow minds in a wider embrace of God's gentleness. Especially on this feast of God's gentleman saint.

Young people save adults

Today is the feast of Laura Vicuna, a 14 year old girl beatified in 1988.
She gave her life over to God at the age of 9 and found a spiritual director who eventually allowed her to live the vows of a religious in her own student lifestyle.
One of Laura's worries was about her mother who was living on the edge of a number of destructive relationships. On her deathbed Laura begged her mother to change and after her death her Mother sorted out her life and returned to church.

Is Laura extraordinary? I think that she is but she is not unusual.

Young people like Laura are around us all the time. They are optimistic, idealistic, determined and courageous. They can be found in the thousands of young carers who hold their families together especially when the Father is absent. They are the young people who dig deep into the meaning of life to carry burdens too heavy for many adult family members. Sometimes they are young prophets, reminding the adults in their world of uncomfortable truths, rubbing salt into the wounds of adult compromises. Their other gift is the joy and wonder with which they meet life that earths adult cynicism and teaches grown ups to play.

We often think that saints must be serious, old, dripping with wisdom and mystery. In fact, as Don Bosco often said "we want no long faced saints here." Young people are the hidden saints that emerge from the deeper goodness of adult lives. Their dedication, their courage and their cheerfulness point to the child of God at the heart of each adult. Young people preach the Gospel with their lives to us adults who are often deaf to the message.