A helping hand

The piece below is the Thinking Anew column in today's Irish Times

By Michael Commane
Two experiences in recent weeks have made me sit up and think about the influence that faith, belief and prayer have in our lives. In the scheme of things they are small events, nevertheless significant.

Walking my dog in a park, a young boy approached on his bicycle. Some paces earlier I had met a neighbour and she and I were walking in the same direction. Suddenly I heard a yelp. My dog had run against the boy's bicycle. My immediate reaction was to criticise the boy for cycling too fast. The woman with me immediately and instinctively asked the little boy if he was okay and if he had hurt himself.

He was fine, so too the dog, the little boy apologised and cycled off.

Some days later, again out walking with the dog, Tess is her name, I spotted a woman walking in a determined way. I looked to see where she was going. And then I understood. A man was huddled up on the ground some metres away from her house entrance. I got talking to her and she told me that she had noticed him there earlier and was now going to offer him some food and something to drink.

I had passed the man and had not even noticed him.

Both those events made me ask many questions. Maybe at a fashionable and topical level I ask myself how much better off the Catholic Church would be with a greater female involvement right throughout its ranks.

But at a deeper level it set alarm bells ringing in my own head. I have no idea if either of those good women believes in God, if they are members of a church, or if they ever pray. But I do know that they were genuinely interested in people who were weak and fragile at that particular moment. And I, a so-called minister of religion, berated one of the people and passed the other without even noticing that he was lying there in most unpleasant circumstances.

In tomorrow's second reading from the Letter of James we read: "If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, 'I wish you well: keep yourself warm and eat plenty', without giving them these bare necessitites of life, then what good is that? Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead." (James 2: 15 - 16)

One does not need to be a biblical scholar to appreciate what is being said here. Of course it means that if we are to be followers of Jesus and live the Christian belief then we have to be there in solidarity and empathy with those who are weak and fragile.

Surely all our praying has to be about putting us in touch with God and being in touch with God is inseparably linked with being people-orientated, especially those who are most in need of our support and love.

There can be no sense in separating prayer from our everyday experiences, anything else is a sort of aberration that has lost all meaning. Can the pomp and ceremony of liturgical prayer take on a life of its own that might well distract us from what we are about?

Jesus's entire ministry was people-centred becasue it was God centred.

My two walking incidents might well be considered trifling. You know, they are not at all. I have always said when it comes to the real things that matter I would be unworthy to tie the shoes of my parents.

Christianity, above all else, is about loving and respecting other people. Our prayer should help us in that task. That's what all our prayer is about: loving God and our neighbour.