11th Sunday B
Our Lady of Walsingham, Netherton
12 July 2021
Today is the final week before the synod decision day. Most of the work is done- the work of listening with the heart, of listening in prayer. This is a listening where each person has an equal voice and says the truth as they understand and feel it. During all these months, we have prayed to support those who have done the “work” of the synod; the members, and the leaders.
Now, a week before the event, we are invited to pray that the process of decision-making next Saturday will go according to the will of the Holy Spirit.
It is important for us to remember that this synod is not approaching the end, even if we may feel a little tired of the whole process. When we celebrate the synod next Sunday in a gathering in the Cathedral, it is not the end that we will celebrate but the beginning.
These past three years mark the beginning of a rediscovered way of being church. We could say that the celebrations next Sunday are a celebration of the work done and a celebration of the work yet to be done. This work is to allow the Spirit of the Gospel we have just read enter truly into our hearts and the heart of the church. Our new task will be to ensure that this process of growth in the Spirit is allowed to continue and that it will not be stifled and starved by those who are frightened of this life-giving process.
Synodality, we can remind ourselves, was not invented here in Liverpool in 2018. It is a way of being church that was practised at the beginning of the Church. Its roots are to be found in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. As the church grew, its practice slowly disappeared. Its spirit, however, was kept alive in the monasteries, in what was called the Chapter meetings, where every sister and every brother was considered equal and had an equal say in the government of the monastery.
Synodality was then revived by the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s and has been developed by the succeeding Popes, most notably at the levels of the bishops and Rome. But it has also made its way into the life of many local churches throughout the world, especially in the French speaking churches of Africa and in South America.
When I was a missionary in Burkina Faso, which had been colonised and evangelised by the French, synodality was a common practice. Every village had a Christian Community Council which would meet every week, headed by the president of the Christian Community and guided by the catechist. Every month their delegates would meet with all the leaders of all the other village Christian communities, at the parish council, with the priests and religious of the parish. These monthly meetings would begin with a morning of prayer and reflection and then continue with deliberations and decision making in the afternoon.
Every year, the leaders of these parochial bodies would assemble with the bishop and all the priests at diocesan level. Usually, these annual meetings would last 2 to 3 days. It was here that the pastoral plan of the past year would be reviewed and a new one decided on for the next year. Every 5 years, there would be a greater assembly of all the leaders and influencers in the diocesan church, where the pastoral 5 year plan would be prepared and promulgated. This is the way of a synodal church. And this church, existing in one of the poorest countries in the world, a country that is 40 or 50 % Muslim and with a large majority of people of traditional religions, is a thriving, blossoming church, where each year the baptism of adults is numbered in the thousands..
This is the way of being church that we are now called to develop, or at least a similar model. Experience shows that it can bring about an end to clericalism, where Father decides all. It can restore the vocation and the place of all baptised Christians, giving voice to those who live in the Spirit they received at Baptism. It can open up the church to the world in which we live, encouraging us to be missionary, to go out to the peripheries as Pope Francis so likes to tell us.
In the gospel reading today Christ gives us the image of the seed that is sown. The farmer sows it and then patiently waits until his hope is rewarded by the appearance of the first shoots breaking the surface of the soil. Then he watches as the shoots grow and extend until they give the fruit that was intended. Similarly, we have begun the process of Synod. It is now the work of the Holy Spirit to transform the seed into the plant God intended. In the end, after all our efforts, it is the Spirit of God who makes fruitful change happen. So, we call on the Pentecostal Spirit to breathe strongly on our Church today and awaken in all our hearts that loving desire for sharing, for communion, for witness, which is the ideal at the heart of this Synodal reawakening.
