71: I have called you by your name. You are mine.

Episode 71 Each time she has had to adapt to life in a different country, Phyllis shares how her faith has sustained her and helped her to put down roots. She explains that ‘the Holy Spirit just sends these little connections and the right people,’ especially at a time when she almost stepped away from the Catholic Church.

Find out more

Link to Celebrate Festival

Rome Sweet Home, Scott Hahn

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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 St 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. 

Listeners, thanks for some great feedback about last week’s episode in Padley Martyrs’ Chapel with Gerard and Anne-Marie. I know many of you appreciated the prayerfulness of our conversation. I hope you’ll enjoy today’s conversation too. As always, it’s different again.

 So listeners, I'm joined today by Phyllis. It's really great to see you, Phyllis. We haven't seen each other in person for many years now, but we were once in the same parish. But now you're in a very different part of the world. You're in Qatar and I'm really looking forward to finding out more about what that's like. So, welcome, Phyllis. 

Thank you, Theresa. It's a pleasure and it's amazing to see you. 

May we start at the beginning, Phyllis? So, you are from Cameroon and that's where you were brought up. Were you brought up in a Catholic household?

So, yes. So, I'm a, what do call it, Cradle Catholic. Yeah, I was born to Catholic parents. and Dad were Catholic and so were the whole family. Growing up, I thought everyone was Catholic. My dad's sister was a Reverend Sister, so she was in the Congregation. And that played a really key part because she got all her siblings, my dad and his siblings, baptised when she became Catholic. So everything was centred around that growing up. 

With quite a lot of guests, you know, sometimes we can see back to one particular relative and because of their witness and efforts, we can see how we are Catholics today. So that's really interesting that it was a relative of your dad’s that you can see was important. I don't know too much about Cameroon, but I know that there's English speaking and French speaking parts of Cameroon. 

Yes. 

Is it a country where there are lots of Catholic people or are there different religions side by side? 

Just anecdotally, so Cameroon has 10 provinces. The provinces in the north of Cameroon, those are mostly Muslim, but that is a minority. I think the majority of the country is Christian and the majority of the Christians are Catholic. Cameroon also consists of that divide - I'm talking about the divide from a religious point of view - but there's also the French /English-speaking, like you said. So, two out of the ten provinces are English-speaking, the other eight are French-speaking. It's very heterogeneous. It's a mix of different things. 

I was just trying to understand then. being a Catholic in Cameroon was not a minority, but maybe being English-speaking would be more of a minority.

That's accurate, yeah. 

We spoke before just briefly that there is armed conflict in Cameroon, isn't there? Which has been going on for a number of years now. And just for listeners to just hear a little bit about that, although you were sharing that you're perhaps not as connected because you're not living in Cameroon at this time. What do you know about what's happening there in the armed conflict? And does that have any impact on how you think about the country you grew up in? 

There is. I mean, when we spoke earlier, I think I said that it doesn't have that much of an impact, but actually it does. So when we moved to Qatar, one of the reasons we moved was that every holiday we’ll take the kids closer to home so they'll get to spend more time in Cameroon. But the year we moved, which is nine years ago, this conflict started and we've not been able to go back home. Literally the kids have not been home for nine years. So basically the conflict affects the English speaking part of Cameroon because it started off with a lot of people in the English speaking part of Cameroon protesting about the fact that the legal system was more francophonised - and also the educational system. So that started up the protest and then it became this fight to secede. So you had a fraction who wanted to break away from the French-speaking Cameroon and form a new country. And there was a section that wanted federation - so they wanted to be part of a country but have some autonomy, which is what apparently was agreed, had been promised Cameroon, when they had their Independence. I think the government then clamped down on protesters and people just civilly protesting against this. A lot of people were arrested and thrown into prison and somehow it became an armed struggle where people then were being killed and there's insecurity in this part of Cameroon. So nine years later, it's still the same. So people still being killed. It's really sad. This English speaking part of Cameroon, some of the villages or the schools don't exist anymore. There's uncertainty.  My mom hasn't been in her house for seven years. So my mom is retired and she's a refugee. She's actually one of the lucky refugees because she has children who live abroad. So she actually is with my brother most of the time, comfortable. But it's sad because she can't be in her own space. So where she would be in her social groups and mingling and doing her own thing, she's now with her children and doesn’t really have a home. A lot of her friends who were back home or kidnapped or they've been internally displaced, they've had to move out of their homes in the English-speaking parts of Cameroon to the French-speaking parts. People who've worked their whole lives, saved to retire and now they've had to move away from the houses they built to live in little apartments in different parts of Cameroon. The kids can't go back to spend time over the summer like we had planned. So they've lost in a sense that part of their identity. But we are the lucky ones because we're not in the middle of the armed conflict. So we have relatives who lived with us. So she went back to Cameroon, very happy when she left. Got married, we were all very happy about it - her husband was arrested and jailed. He got released, but they're living in that part of Cameroon. He's been kidnapped a few times, lack of security, that's not a good story. 

Phyllis, it sounds terrible. I appreciate that you've spoken about it in quite a matter of fact way, but the way that it's affected the plans for your family, if not that you're actually living in the middle of that and thinking of your mother being displaced from her home all these years.

There have been a few priests who have been kidnapped and killed as part of this. It's tough for the Catholic community. Priests who are out there in the villages saying Mass, so they're doing that and putting their lives at risk. So, I just want to say if anyone feels the need to just pray for them, because it is a worry sometimes when the priest friends we know, sometimes they're kidnapped and you don't know whether they'll come out of it alive. Some have been killed.

I'm glad you did mention that, Phyllis, and actually that resonates so well with a recent episode on the podcast. We were talking about the history of the Catholic Church in England, and at one time here in England, hundreds of years ago, Catholic priests were killed for the practice of their faith. It is good for us to remember that in some parts of the world, priests still make a huge sacrifice to continue bringing Mass to people in hard-to-reach places. I'm sure there are listeners who will want to remember those priests in their prayers and those communities affected by that armed struggle. So I'm glad we've been able to talk about that as part of the episode.  There is armed conflict in a number of places in the world, and I did just want to take this opportunity for people to hear from somebody directly affected by an armed conflict they might not be so familiar with at this time. But let's think about your faith then as a Catholic person, because not just Cameroon and Qatar and here in the UK, but you've lived in a number of countries and carried your faith with you into those places. What has that been like? Has your faith been something that's helped you to put down roots in new places or has it been more complicated than that?

It definitely helped me to put down roots. It's actually sustained me and continues to sustain me as I move around the world. And I didn't realise how much because I grew up, like I said, in a Catholic family. I didn't know any different. My dad's sister was the Reverend Sister, so she was always on us to get baptised, your First Communion, your Confirmation, so all those milestones. Auntie Benedicta Mufo is her name. She was always there encouraging us. So we didn't think much about what it was. In Cameroon, the best schools are your private schools and the Catholic one is really top notch. So for us, it was never a choice. So all the children went to these schools. They weren't cheap. They’re very expensive. Our parents would sacrifice everything to pay the fees for us to access education. There was no money for anything but education and it paid off because we had really great experiences in this school. For five years I was there.  Every morning we'd wake up at 5 a.m. 5.30 we had to walk down to Mass. That was how we started our day every day.  And on Sunday we actually went to church twice because we had the Benediction and Adoration. By the time I left I must say, I felt like I'm never going to church again. So when I went to high school, it wasn't a Catholic school. So for the first month I rebelled. A lot of us from the Catholic school, we chose not to go to Mass. But after a month, we realized we missed Mass. So we went and started going to Mass and realised how much connection, how empty I would feel on a Sunday if I didn't go to Mass. So even when I left high school and went to Germany where I had the scholarship, I didn't go to Mass for the first few months because we were in this town in East Germany and there was a lot of skinheads. So it wasn't safe for minorities to be in that part. We were advised against going to church. We decided once to go to Mass. There were a few of us who were Catholic. And number one, it was difficult to understand in German.  And number two, I think this church had never seen any black people. It just felt a bit difficult because you feel like they're staring at you and it just didn't feel right. In that one year, I was learning the German language, which you had to do before you then went into university. So that year, I didn't go to church. But the minute I left and went to Berlin and started university, I reconnected with other Cameroonians and we found the church. So there was a priest who encouraged us to have a Mass where we would sing Cameroonian songs and that grew the community and that was really beautiful. All the time I was in Berlin, that was also a community and part of my identity. So as foreign students, they gave us like a home, a reason to come together, pray together. So that really sustained us through really difficult times being in a foreign country. I think I was in Berlin for four years before I could afford to go home and see my parents. 

Wow. 

Faith was strong. Ever since I moved to England, would go to Mass every Sunday, wherever I was. I wasn't really part of a church community for a long time until I moved to Leicester.  We started going to the church where we met. This was two years after I got married. Part of, again, my whole identity. I never imagined that I would get married to someone who wasn't Catholic. I met my husband. He's also Catholic. His family is all Catholic. He also went to a boarding school, so we had that in common. We knew that the kids would be raised Catholic and baptised from young and all of that. So, we would go to church and just quickly leave. And my mother-in-law had come to visit and she actually went to the priest and said, Can you please get my daughter-in-law and my son involved in the church community? At the time, I was like, What a nuisance!  That ended up being something that was really beautiful because it made us grow into the community. And so, Father actually took that seriously and he came to the house, gave me little tasks to do. And it felt at the time as if I was contributing something to the church. But years later, I realised that actually I benefitted more. My family and I, it was us gaining from being part of that community, the richness. So there were so many things we got involved with and it felt like home. All three kids were baptised there and First Holy Communion. Father then asked us to form an African choir, which we did. It was beautiful to be able to come as Africans and sing the way we worship. What you find as we're moving around the world is that the Mass is universal. So every part of the Mass is the same and you have that shared identity and you understand. But the way we worshipped back in Cameroon was a lot of singing and dancing in church. Coming to the West, we found it was more solemn. There was singing, but not the dancing. And was not with the drums we're used to.  Sometimes there was a guitar and there was a piano. But in Cameroon, we had drums, we had xylophones. Having the African choir, we could bring that. So it felt really like home. Father also got me involved in Catechism.  Never taught little kids before. When my kids were young, to be able to take them to the catechism and have them do their junior church and come with their paintings. Later on, Father got me being a catechist for the teenagers for Confirmation. At each stage, you're kind of learning from the perspective of that age group, if that makes sense. Beautiful to listen to some of these children and the questions they would ask grew us because we couldn't answer some of it. Every now and then we'd call Father and say, You have to come to this one and answer about different questions they have. So I would say where I felt the most connected to my faith was there because we were there for 14 years, same church and it was just family. 

You've captured there - people will recognise when you belong to a parish community where there's lots going on for people with children and lots of ways in which you can be of service, lots of roles you can take on over time and be of service to the community - it does help you to feel really connected and there's something wonderful about seeing all of the children growing and taking part in different things. Trying to answer their questions and finding that you can't. All of that, that's all part of it, isn't it? 

Yeah. 

That will resonate with lots of people listening. I'm just wondering, you captured there a little bit about the difference between the way you experienced Mass in Cameroon and then coming to the West. And now you're in Qatar, you know, a very different culture again. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, are there some things about Catholic people in all those places that you can see are the same and some things that are different in those different places? What kind of things have you had to adapt to? 

So coming to Qatar was again different. So I remember when my husband said we’d consider moving to Qatar and I said to him, There will be no Mass! Because at the time I thought the Middle East, you know, you wouldn't be able to attend Mass. So when we came, we were surprised when we were told that there is a what they call a religious complex where you can have Mass, attend Mass. The biggest church I've seen on earth is in Qatar, the biggest Catholic church, massive. So easily, some of the Masses, you have 2,000 people attending. So, there is a thriving community here. So, Qatar is very tolerant. So, it is an Islamic country, but they're very accepting and really supportive and welcoming of others. I think they've done it so you do your Mass in this religious complex, so you don't have churches outside dotted around the city, but within the space.  I understand it's for the security of everyone. What I struggled with initially was it's kind of barricaded for safety. So it's like going through an airport. So you then have to go through all these pillars to go through security, to go into the religious complex and go to church. So it's almost like a five, 10 minutes’ walk from your car to Mass.  

What's the security about? What risk is there for people going to Mass? Is that because it's a different religion or is there something I'm missing? 

I'm not sure. It's a different religion. And I don't know if maybe there might be people in Qatar who don't welcome other religions. Like I said, it's an Islamic country. So, thank God, since I've been here for nine years, never had an incident of someone trying to harm anyone in the complex. But I imagine that it may be this concern that that might be something that, you know, might happen. So that's why there's heavy security to go into church. So you do feel secure doing that, knowing that. But Qatar is generally safe. It's not something that we've worried about being here. But before coming, we were worried about that. The faith community here, it's the same in the sense that the Mass is the same but in Qatar, because there's so many different communities, so the church is split into many, many communities. You have the Filipino community, so they have Masses in Tagalog. You have people from different Indian communities. You also have a lot of people from Lebanon who are Maronites, so they have the Catholic Mass, but then in Arabic. You have the French Mass. You have the Spanish Mass - and then you have several English Masses, which is like a mix of different people like us. But then you also have the African community that have the West African community and Central East African. They worship in a slightly different way. So it's the same Mass, but like the singing, the choir, the songs they sing, slightly different. So what I find is similar is again, the Mass, but also a lot of the worship for the non-European -  I think that's the one umbrella word I would say - communities, Filipino, Indian, African, they do a lot of similar singing and praising. So the worship is a lot of singing, very similar to how I grew up in Cameroon. But I think the African community takes it up a notch. So the drumming and the xylophone is louder and the dancing in church is something which the other communities don't necessarily do. But what the other communities do that I only experience in Qatar is they celebrate different feasts. Like every single sacrament in the church and all those sacramental days, there's a huge celebration. During the Marian month, May and October, the Filipino community and the South American community, I think, and Indians as well, they would have this big statue of Mary in the church and it's adorned with roses and flowers and lit up. On the Friday or Saturday, once a week, there's a Marian procession. It goes around the church and you pray the rosary. During Easter, the one thing I encountered here was the Seven Wounds of Jesus. Good Friday is a whole day of different things that I'd not experienced before. For the Filipino community, before Christmas, there's like nine days of singing and choral, that they go to church and they sing and pray. So, there's so many different nuances and things that different communities bring and the church is just alive. So, when you go into the religious complex, most times there's always a festivity. There's some community celebrating something and it's just huge and big. So it's beautiful, but what I felt when I came here was that sometimes you can get lost if you don't have a small community. If you don't really belong into one of the communities, you would go and pray and then sometimes you could actually go and leave and not even have a conversation with anyone. A friend of mine encouraged me to become a catechist. It was kind of difficult initially because the classes were quite big. I would have about 40, 50 children in the catechism class. I felt like I had to learn to understand them. So, most of the majority of the class were either Indian origin or Filipino origin. So, sometimes even teaching in the class, I felt like they struggled with my accent and my emphasis. So, it took some time to get to know how to maybe bring some of the lessons alive. Again, I really enjoyed doing that. I learned a lot and it blessed me. So, here the Catechism was organised in such a way that it was about learning the Bible. So, was kind of different. So, your first catechism lesson was Genesis, and then you moved through the different books. And I'd never learned the Bible in that way. So, when I had Bible classes in the UK, we did different things. Like, we had a certain session once, which was about the Acts of the Apostles, or it was the four gospels. I'd never really had any opportunity to learn the Old Testament and then see how it fits into the New Testament. And being a catechist here, it was beautiful. Teaching the kids and having to prepare those lessons made me start with Genesis and go from Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses. So, it just flowed all the way through to the New Testament. 

That is really interesting, Phyllis, because I've been doing this Bible in a Year podcast with Father Mike Schmitz, because one of my guests early on on the podcast here was telling me about it. And that's what I'm doing with that. We started at the beginning and working through. It's amazing actually, suddenly I'm thinking, Oh, now I see how the New Testament is building on the Old Testament much better than I understood before by taking the time to go through chronologically. What I'm really noticing about you, Phyllis, that I just admire so much is a real kind of perseverance in having to adapt to so many different places and languages and ways of doing things. And you just have some resilience somehow in just finding a way to do that, finding a way to be a catechist when it didn't seem to work at first and you had to kind of keep trying and come back and look at it differently and get over the accent changes and things. I just really admire the way that you do that. I'm not sure all of us would be able to keep going as you have. 

Thanks for saying that, but I think it's the Holy Spirit. There were times where I couldn’t and then the right voice, like you pray and you just get this. The Holy Spirit came in different forms and different people because when I came, I struggled. So with the kids, when we came to Qatar, we couldn't drive. They just changed the law and said we had to go through driving school to be able to drive and get a car. So the first three months we were here, we were not able to drive. We were using taxis to get the kids. They were in three different schools. So on Sunday, to go to church was really difficult because we were a family of five, so we needed two taxis to get to church. It was expensive. So our very good friends were Pentecostal. We started going to the Pentecostal church because it was around the corner and the kids loved it because was lively. There’re things in the Pentecostal church that I wish we had in the Catholic church. But then my sister called me and my mom and they were like, how is church? So it helps to have a family. My mom always, you know, did you guys go to church? So she always, and I was like, No, we went to the Pentecostal church. And she was like, No, you know, you can't do that. I was like, Why not? It's the same God and all. But I would come back feeling as though something lacking, couldn't articulate it. But then I spoke with my sister-in-law because I knew she'd gone to Pentecostal Church and then gone back to Catholic Church. So I asked her what happened. It's the first time we'd had the conversation. So I said, This is the thing I'm struggling with for the family. Can you tell me your experience why you went to Pentecostal Church and left? And she was like, Think about it, Phyllis. What is missing in the Pentecostal Church? The Bible is good but think about it. What is it? And that's where I had the Aha moment. I went, The Eucharist. And she said, Yep, there you go. So that's why you're feeling this emptiness after you go to the worship service thing. And that just did it for me. And she said to me, I'm going to send this book to you to read and you'd appreciate more about the faith. So I took this book, Rome Sweet Home. I didn't put it down for two days. I was reading through the night and it tells the story of Scott Hahn. That was the book about his conversion.  It was something about reading about the Catholic - I mean, I get goosebumps when I think about it -when you see the Catholic Church from non-Cradle Catholics and how he tells the story, he gave me this appreciation for what I almost lost. That was the Holy Spirit. It was a journey and a lot of dots connected at that point. It just felt like it was the work of the Holy Spirit. Through that, I became more intentional with the family as well about trying to get this connection with the kids. So a friend of mine, so she'd made it a thing where every summer she would take her kids to a Celebrate festival. It's a three-day Catholic Charismatic thing where you take your kids. It's residential in the UK. So the Celebrate Trust, they run this, it's almost like a summer camp where you go with your children, where they run streams for adults and then for the young children. And you have Mass every day. You have praise and worship. You have different people talking. So when we came to Qatar, I decided then that every summer when we come back to the UK, we'll go to Celebrate retreat. It's just a celebration of your faith. Because of the singing and worship element of that, that resonates with me and the way we practice our faith, it's all these different things. I think somehow the Holy Spirit just sends these little connections and the right people to say, Try this. And it's just helped to keep the faith alive.

People will be glad to hear about Celebrate who don't know already. I'll put a little link to that in the episode notes in case that's right for somebody else's family too. That's interesting that the Charismatic way of worshipping appeals to you, when you've grown up with something more lively, with dancing and singing in church. That's good that the Holy Spirit has led you to something that feels alive for you. I can really hear the Lord answering your prayers. You reflect on how things are going with your faith and ask for help and help comes. That's wonderful, isn't it?  We're coming to the end of the conversation, Phyllis. I sometimes ask people if there's a piece of scripture that really means something to them. Is there something for you that comes into your mind? 

There's this, I think it's Isaiah. It's interesting you asked me that because it's a song we always sang in school that came to mind at Mass today. It always reminds me of when being in secondary school, there was this exercise during a religious lesson where it was this verse from Isaiah. They made us write our name. You would say, for example, Phyllis, I have called you by your name, you are mine.  And we had to write that and put it up on our desk and it was there all year to remind us. I just love that. I always come back to that. For the kids sometimes is the blessing, so Numbers 6:11, to just pray that over them. May the Lord bless and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine upon you. The Lord lift His countenance upon you and give you peace. 

Wow, Phyllis! 

So there's this priest in Cameroon. They do this daily reflection. That again is something for 10 years, I do that every morning. So as I walk around, I listen. So there's a Catholic reading of the day and then there's a reflection. And that also has been very sustaining. 

So, Phyllis, it has been wonderful to reconnect with you and talk to you about your faith and how you're living your faith all over the world. It's amazing to think that somehow going to Qatar, the whole world is coming to Qatar to be in that huge religious centre celebrating Mass, bringing different parts of the world together there. That's amazing to think of for people who haven't experienced anything like that. I've been so inspired by the way you have managed to keep practising your faith in so many different environments and keep adapting to different situations. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. 

Thank you so much, Theresa. 

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 AllKindsOfCatholic 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.