67: It's the Holy Spirit that's doing it all

Episode 67: John was first an Anglican and then a Catholic. In this conversation, he gives us glimpses of a life filled with dialogue with people of other faiths, care for creation, an enduring love of music, family, and trying to put the Gospel into practice each day. All these things, John says, are 'joined in my head' with the mission of the church.

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Laudato Si'

Fratelli Tutti

Laudato Si' Animators

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Music: Greenleaves from Audionautix.com

Transcript

You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we're living our faith today. Pope Francis used the image of a caravan for our travelling together on a sometimes chaotic journey. And Pope Leo, quoting Saint Augustine, reminds us, Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged now and then. I am too in these conversations. And if you're enjoying them, it helps if you rate and review on the platform where you're listening. Thank you.

00:00

Listeners, thanks for joining the episode today. I'm being joined by John, who's down in Southwark Archdiocese, and we've got two big areas we want to talk about, but let's see how we get into the conversation. Welcome, John. 

Hello. 

So I'm going to say, can we go back a little bit? I don't know how far back we're going, but can you give us an idea of when your faith was first important to you? 

00:29

I think from about the age of about eight, I'm now 78, so that's 70 years. I grew up in a very  committed household. My father played the organ and my mother had become an Anglican. She was previously a Methodist and she was very committed to doing things socially in the world. So there's a combination of music as being a very important part of our lives  and doing things for other people. I very much followed my dad and I was in the choir and he had a remarkable gift for telling us what we were singing about to the extent of people in the choir becoming Christians because of Dad. I went to a very good school, St. John's College in Johannesburg, which was Anglican and was founded by the community of the resurrection. And unlike the rest of my class, I loved going to chapel every day. I loved singing hymns and I really liked anything to do with religion and music, of course. So I spent my whole period when I was at St. John's - people used to say, Oh, he's going to be a priest. In fact, I'm very fortunate that I have friends who I met when I was six. We still meet every year and it's a great joy to see them. And then when I finished at  the college,  I went to the University of Witwatersrand to do a BA in  English and History of Art, but I also did Biblical Studies.  That was very, very interesting. I then got a job in the public library.  I had been working in the library after school, actually loved it. Really liked being in the public library and so I decided I would do a diploma in librarianship and then started to work in Johannesburg Public Library. Then I was put in charge of the libraries in Soweto. I was very young. It was a real eye-opener. I mean, I always say apartheid was a massive success because it actually divided people. So I’d never spoken to a black person like we're talking now at all. It’s only when I went into Soweto and started meeting very intelligent people who were librarians, I started to discover what was really going on in my own country. Eventually I decided I was going to go to England. I was born in England and I was taken to South Africa when I was three months old. But my mum brought me over when I was five to meet my grandparents. I just loved it from that moment on. I said to my mum, I can't live in this country anymore. They don't treat children properly. They don't treat old people properly. And we're talking about the African townships really. They said, At last your eyes are opened! Because she'd been running feeding schemes in the township, she'd been doing all these things to help. So I started saving like mad and I worked in a music library in Johannesburg for a year. I absolutely loved the job. But then I left and I travelled through Europe for nine months and started off in the Holy Land at Easter. At this stage I'm an Anglican. It was really wonderful to be in Jerusalem for Easter. Then on to Greece, Italy, art galleries, operas. And eventually ended up in Edinburgh at the festival, and down to London. I had a very good friend and he was a tenor. He said, You like singing? I said, Yes, yes. And he said, Well, why don't you join the Philharmonia Chorus? Because you like travel. And you won’t have to pay. I duly had an audition and on the very first rehearsal, met Liz. It progressed from there that we married the following year.  We had a wonderful wedding  and we've been married now 51 years and we're just made for each other. 

04:44

And congratulations on finding someone who is just right for you and being together all these years. How wonderful.  

About two months before our wedding, I became a Roman Catholic. 

Explain, explain. 

04:47

The reason was very simple. I believe very strongly in communion. I was quite determined and the person I loved so much, I was not going to be divided at the altar. I was not going to have this happen that we were not together. She'd been to the Anglican church where I was singing. I had been to Mass where she was singing. In the seventies, she had to ask the priest permission to go to the Anglican church. And I'm going, What? When I first met her, I assumed that she was Church of England. She said, Oh, no, no. She said, I belong to the opposition. What, are you a Methodist? She said, No, I’m a Catholic. I said, You’re not the opposition. We’re one church. We’ve had this great relationship with this where we've actually been at both churches. We've been involved in both churches, in fact, a very ecumenical -  all three children sang at the Anglicans.  My life has been largely Saturday night Mass and Sunday morning at the Anglicans playing the organ. It works. 

06:11

You're talking there about a very ecumenical life, which is great to hear about, but I know that actually the net has been thrown wider for you into an interfaith role. So tell us a bit more about what that means for you and what it means for you as a Catholic Christian.  

06:40

When I retired from the library, I went to Heythrop and did an MA in Christianity and Inter-religious relations, specifically looking at Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam. I just loved the course. I loved being with the group. My professor wanted me to do a doctorate and I said, No, I'm not doing that. I'm going out there and I'm doing dialogue. You've been teaching me how to do this.  And  I had already started the Westminster Cathedral Interfaith group and we started with understanding Islam. And we went on from there to studying all the papal documents, starting with Nostra Aetate, all the documents that had any relevance at all to interfaith. And that's been going now for 13 years. So we meet once a month. 

Who's we? 

They're Catholics. We've had different people coming. It's open to anyone. So we've had a Lutheran, we've had an Anglican, we have a very lovely Muslim who comes regularly, absolutely loves Pope Francis. So we've really done a lot. We've also done lots of visiting. In fact, we're doing more of that now, like going to mosques, visiting synagogues  and going to interfaith walks.  I've done a lot of talking and I really want to do more kind of action and also these visits.  I'm now building in dialogue when we get there. So the last time we went to the mosque, we had these lovely Muslim students telling us all about the Quran and the climate. That's how we're moving. And we've also in the last two years, we had Father Hugh, who's just wonderful. He's just such a marvellous man because he can, at the end of a conversation, he can bring it all together. 

08:30

So I'm hearing there what sounds like quite a thoughtful journey into interfaith work where you've not rushed into things, but taken it quite carefully. And, you know, you mentioned you're now beginning to do visits and you're now beginning to do some dialogue. So that sounds really careful and thoughtful, which I think is important. And I'm wondering if there's been prayer as part of that journey,  helping you to, you know, have you been discerning where to go next as you've worked your way along this journey? 

08:35

That's a great question because that is absolutely central to the whole thing. Every meeting we have prayer at the beginning, at the end. This applies to the Laudato Si’  animators as well. It's a very important part of the whole thing. I'm also trained as a spiritual director. So I go to meditation once a week and sit silently and think really.  And so this, this, this whole thing about praying is so important for everything. It's very  easy to think  I'm so important. I'm not, it's the Holy Spirit that's doing it all. I had, to go back to the very beginning of the story, I think that the thing that really helped me a lot, I was actually praying at church using the music as a prayer. All these hymns, I know off by heart, so I will go around with it going round in my head and that's going to be a prayer as well. When we were in the Philharmonia Chorus, we did these wonderful concerts where it was so uplifting. It was just so...After the concert, you just couldn't come down to earth for about two hours. It was just wonderful to be part of that. So yeah, prayer is absolutely essential. 

10:24

Great. Now we'll come back to the Laudato Si animators, because that's the other thing I think would be really good to talk about. But I just wanted to ask just for my own understanding a little bit there, among the faiths that you mentioned, I feel like I know something about the connection between Islam and Christianity, you know, that there is some common ground like, the person of Mary and the person of Jesus are recognised in Islam and in Judaism, you know, the Abrahamic religions. But now Buddhism feels like  a bit of an outrider. No, not outrider, outlier. So I was kind of thinking now where does Buddhism share some ground with Christianity? But then you mentioned about meditation as a kind of prayer. I'm wondering if that might be part of it.

10:56

It's very much part of it. The last visit we did to the Buddhist  temple, the little monk unexpectedly took us all in the temple and we sat around in a semicircle and we started talking about the afterlife. It was fascinating, absolutely fascinating because, you know, they believe in reincarnation and we don't.  And we were talking about the resurrection and what that means to us. Frankly, there's a lot of muddled thinking going on about what happens after you die in the Christian tradition. But the meditation, the John Main meditation, which I do, is very much linked to Hinduism and Buddhism. There's a lot to be learned from the other faiths. It's also challenging for me. My dear Muslim friend, when I met him at the mosque, I'm putting my shoes on and he wants me to explain the Trinity. I said, Thank you very much. But you know, this is way beyond, you know, I'd have to think about this.  Listening to other people responding to their questions, being open.  I have had some very spiritual experiences.  The last trip to Jerusalem, we went with the Christians and Muslims together. It was such a great pilgrimage because we went to the Sea of Galilee. The Christians mostly went swimming. The Muslims went, This is where Prophet Jesus was.  They washed in the sea and then they did prayers.  And we had this wonderful dialogue. And we asked all these questions. The more you get to know people, you can start asking these awkward questions about the role of women in Islam. You know, it was very interesting to talk to the women.  So interesting. I'm so interested in people. Such a fantastic journey. And I think the Holy Spirit works.  I've come home from work one evening saying, Oh, so tired. I don't think I want to go to that meeting, but I go and I meet somebody and something comes out of it.

12:54

That's great, John. Thank you. I think that will be really interesting for people to hear about if they've not made friendships with people of different faiths or at least not broached the subject of faith with people of different faiths. Now, may we move on though to the Laudato Si animator role? And I wonder whether just because you mentioned that you studied a lot of papal documents, I'm wondering if it was the Laudato Si encyclical that brought you into thinking about care for creation or, I mean, I'm conscious that you grew up in a country where - my idea of South Africa is that it's, the natural world is larger than it is in England. And maybe you always had a deep love for creation. Tell us a bit about how this all came about for you. 

13:49

Well, about South Africa, I'm a real townie. I mean, Johannesburg is a great big city, but  I absolutely loved going to the zoo from when I was a little boy. That was the biggest treat of all to go to Joburg Zoo and observe the animals because I knew all the names of the animals. I had all these books about animals and of course we went to the game reserve. So I think from that point of view nature was very important to me from a young age. When Laudato Si’ first came out I arranged speakers to come to the interfaith group from Islam, Hindu, Humanist, Jewish, a Buddhist and they all loved it. They all thought it was wonderful. So during Covid, I found out that the Vatican were training people as Animators online. So I signed up. But every single Zoom, I went, So here's my email address. I'll put it in the chat. If you're from England or Wales, just drop me a line.  And we started meeting on Zoom twice a month, which we're still doing. We built up all these friendships on Zoom. The first Lent, we did a Lent course. It was a fantastic success. So we were trying to get all these people to get involved. The, as I said, the Zooms are still going.  And from the very beginning, we said, We're not going to create another organisation. We're going to join with all these other people who have been doing this for years. So we're going to work with CAFOD, Justice and Peace people,  anybody who's doing it. Some of us are Green Christian as well.

15:18

What are the kind of things  you wish Catholic people were doing around this? 

15:20

I wish every parish had a green group. I don't care what it's called. And I also want every single agenda to have something about green on it. So somebody will say, Have you thought about the implications for the climate? So we're doing things at different levels. We're doing things at parish level. We're also addressing bishops and diocese, so I've written letters to every bishop about these issues. And I also feel very passionately about young people. The reason I've been doing this is because of my grandsons, who I love very much, and I want them to have a wonderful world. I want them to have elephants and giraffes and rhinos. I want them to have all of that. I want them to be able to live. That's why I'm so passionate about all this and all the young people I've met, they're actually pushing us.  This is the Catholic Church's theology. It's actually, you know, this is evangelical. This will bring young people back to church who don't think the church is relevant. They think it's boring. But actually it's not because there's so much in Pope Francis, which is absolutely on the button. It's all joined in my head. So it's joining  all these interfaith things, the music, the mission of the church.

16:39

And you've mentioned that young people can be very motivated by climate change and wanting to take action. What about people in a parish now who just, you know, may be struggling to make ends meet, working two jobs,  trying to bring up children on a shoestring. What's a good way to bring climate change into a conversation with people in those situations? 

16:45

That's a very tricky question because Pope Francis is very clear that the church is for the poor. And maybe we have to face up to the fact that we do have the poor in our congregations. We have to be clear that the church is for the poor. It is for everybody. The message of the climate is for everybody because it affects every one of us. I could see that if you are struggling, it's not going to be very high on your priorities. You're not going to be thinking, I need to be buying green food for my kids. But maybe there's a way through - you actually, you know, when you go to the food bank, have you actually asked for vegetables?  This is better for your children and for the future. Very gently, it would be very difficult to do that. And also, I think it's their story. Let's listen to your story. Let's hear where you're coming from.  This is really what the church is about. It's really about supporting each other, like a net which comes in and supports you.

18:08

That's lovely. We might start to work towards the end of the conversation, John, and I often ask about Scripture now, just to really bring out some of the ways in which God is working in your life, some of the ways in which you're hearing the Word of God in your life. Is there some Scripture that really means something to you that comes to your mind? Now, I know for you music has been really important, so I don't know, maybe Scripture, maybe Scripture, not so much. Let's see. 

18:36

No, no, Scripture is absolutely vital.  Every day I  read the readings for the day. I have a wonderful companion called Carroll Stuhlmueller . I bought these books back in 1977 and they've been a companion every day. I also go to Blackfriars and watch the first part of Mass because you get, the psalm is sung, which it should be, and you get a really good sermon. The gospel, I’ve tried all my life to actually use that gospel during the day. When I was in the library, I would try to remember something from the Gospel that was relevant to the people I was talking to and dealing with. I love St John's Gospel. That's my absolute favourite. I was well named after John. So, you know, the beloved disciple, that's me. Jesus is my friend. He'll listen to me and He knows me. And something else I must say is that Laudato Si’, because that I come back to this over and over and over again. And the prayers at the end. We have to mention Fratelli Tutti because  I think that Pope Francis,  I read all his documents actually, the whole thing is integrated brilliantly  and the whole synod  comes out of all this as well. Fratelli Tutti needs to be better known in our church. It needs to be read. It needs to be put into action. It's about the love of neighbour.

20:03

So on that note, John, I'll put links to Laudato Si and Fratelli Tutti in the episode notes so people can follow up and maybe to one or two other things you've talked about. Let us wind up this great conversation here, although there's much more we could talk about. It has been really great to get an insight into what seems to be a very rich spirituality that you are living. So thank you for sharing some of that during this time and you've given people lot to think about and there'll be things that resonate with people and things that people want to spend a bit more time reflecting on, which is always good. Thank you. And I kind of think maybe we should meet again when Pope Leo has produced a couple of encyclicals, when he's had a chance to do that and you've had a chance to have a look and see how they fit together in your mind. I think it would be really nice to talk again. But I think what's going to stay with me is I think you spoke well there and demonstrated how you try and meet people where they are. And I think that's absolutely foundational. you know, that's been really good to hear that in practice in your life. So thank you very much for spending some time talking today. 

22:00

I've enjoyed it very much.

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, @kindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.