Looking Back, Looking Forward: Jesuit Volunteer Community BY GED EDWARDS

JVC recently held it’s 21st Birthday party in St Frances Xavier Church Liverpool, everyone agreed it was a lovely evening. Ged Edwards gave this speech, looking back at the first JVC community.

I’m delighted to be asked to speak tonight.  It’s a real privilege to be here on such an occasion, an occasion we could barely dream off 21 years ago.  I’ve always felt that JVC is a movement, not a voluntary organisation and our collective presence here tonight shows how true that is.

Lest we forget where we’ve come from, JVC was Jesuit Volunteer Corps and started in Alaska about 50 years ago.  Eddy Bermingham SJ was asked by The Society of Jesus, the Jesuits to set up JVC: Britain.  To do this in 1985 he approached 2 students Tess Clancy and Sue Hogg to go to the States to experience JVC programme there and to come back and after a short while take on the running of JVC: Britain which he started to shape in their absence.  While Eddy was recruiting the first community, building links with Community Service Volunteers and the Housing Department in Liverpool, Tess and Sue were in California and Montana.  At 21, Tess ran a soup kitchen for up to 600 homeless people a day in Sacramento which was part of the Loaves and Fishes Project inspired by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement so she’s the longest-standing volunteer with us tonight.

Last September, twenty years after its formation of the first JVC: Britain community JVC Liverpool (or JVC Rialto as we knew it), we held a reunion attended by five of the first six JVC volunteers (Jo Sullivan, David Cronin, Ann Wilson, Patrick Sweeney and me), and Tess Clancy and Ken Vance from the Management Team and Sr Liz Stinson SND: Community Partner, four of us are here tonight.

We had a great day wandering around the European Capital of Culture.  We knew a different culture back then in Toxteth where we had lived for the year.  In 1987, the area was still struggling with the label of the infamous Toxteth riots of 1981 and burnt buildings and dereliction were to be seen everywhere.  We lived in two dilapidated maisonettes in Berkeley St which we had to decorate (after taking down the red light bulbs!) and hurriedly furnish with furniture from a flat where someone had done a moonlight flit.  In our JVC year our work took us away from Toxteth but we tried hard to support the local community and be accepted there too.  One of our community, Steve Jobling was a brilliant magician and the local kids a keen audience so that for the years the Liverpool community was based in Berkeley St, they were all known as “The Magies”.  We helped in the Toxteth Carnival in our year and when some children tried to break into the flat when we were away on the Spirituality Weekend, people we didn’t know came and boarded the place up late at night and thrashed the culprits.  We were in!

When we got to the area last September, it had changed so much.  Both blocks of flats, which had been so liberally decorated with graffiti, had been pulled down and new, smart terraces put in their place, and other houses given a facelift.  It was a great physical improvement but the memories of being there, in a place I thought of as so much as home, were still so powerful and I was glad we were together to experience it.

Then off to Liz’s for prayerful reflection.  We looked at the four JVC values of simplicity, community, spirituality (Ignatian) and social justice, where they had influenced us over the years and what they meant for us now.  We took time to reflect also on the JVC USA strap line “Ruined For Life”.  After all that time. were we?

We noted how the values were continuing to shape little things – like running the office tea fund – as well as having shaped major choices, like careers in health, social and environmental work.  The friendships we had had remained vitally important.  Some of us were ruined in terms of personal relationship: the quality of those relationships, people who had been complete strangers, had been so strong and now we badly missed community living and contact with like-minded people as we had spilt up over the UK and this was hard to come by.  Community is such a powerful, natural and necessary experience it will be rediscovered and JVC is part of that effort.  Where God is leading us is alive for us still and all of us are still strongly drawn to Ignatian spirituality with its foundation of contemplation in action.

Simple lifestyle had become more of an issue for some with environmental issues coming to the fore.  How can we live more simply and share what we have with others?  What are the benefits of this?  In terms of social justice, for most of us dealing with systems and bureaucracies rather than just with the people we signed up to help was causing us to scratch our heads.  We were being paid as professionals and we welcomed that for the most part.  But was this helping others as well as it might – or ourselves?  Again, the simplicity of being in touch with others as volunteers, running soup kitchens, cooking with someone who lives in a hostel or playing the piano in an old people’s home brought back vivid memories of individuals we had formed bonds with.

JVC: Britain started amid a blaze of interest from the Society which was exploring in particular how its charism of Ignatian spirituality could be used with lay people.  During the year we were visited by many people most notably by the then Provincial, Michael Campbell-Johnston SJ and by Alec Dixon, the founder of Community Service Volunteers who had advised President Kennedy on establishing the American Peace Corps who stayed overnight with us.  For us as the first volunteers, staff and support staff, for all the challenges, there was a sense of a great adventure, both personally and as a movement.  We were open to experiencing first hand something of the need for social justice, of the vitality and difficulties of living in community with people we had not met before, of living with the strengths and limitations of few choices and of finding God amidst this, individually and together.  For all of us, 1987-88 remains both a rich and influential period, a touchstone and influence for today and the future.  Eddy’s phrase to us was, “It’s not about getting the right answers but the right questions!”  That’s all part of being ruined for life – in theological terms, being dead to the world and truly alive for God’s work, building a fairer more compassionate kingdom here, now.

Jesuit influence

The Jesuits have always used their limited resources to influence the social fabric by helping people to find God in all things and, because of their courage and approach, that influence has been phenomenal.  The BBC is currently running the 2008 Reith lectures on China and has highlighted the Society’s work, in the shape of Matteo Ricci SJ in 1580, as the first westerners to enter China.  Their impact there and China’s interest in the West because of that is still being felt today.  St Francis Xavier had the same goals when he went to India.  Here in this Church named after him, Bro Ken Vance SJ and the team are seeking to influence modern Liverpool and are hosting as well a special exhibition next month Held in Trust  on the work of the Society in the UK to influence the Capital of Culture.

And the Society is hosting tonight’s celebration as it has so generously supported JVC for 21 years financially and with its Jesuit members in spiritual development particularly.  Why?

It does this because it wants every volunteer, to do what Ricci and Xavier tried to do.  To go into the places where people are excluded from Jesus’ message, to learn from them and live along side them to change the world for the better.  I personally want to thank Fr Michael on behalf of his predecessors and the rest of the Society for continuing to ruin my former conventional life and help to make me part of the Jesuit movement.  I’m sure many of us who have gone through JVC feel the same.  The challenge we took up continues – but God doesn’t leave us alone.  It’s God’s work we are about to make a fairer Britain, where personal relationships are valued and not cheapened, where spirituality is respected as part of the whole compass of human experience and where people are encouraged to see the wisdom and joy in simplicity in a world teetering to the edge of catastrophe through consumerism-led climate change.

On behalf of my Rialto community, thanks for listening and staying ruined!

Ged Edwards was one of the first JVC volunteers in JVC Rialto 1987-88 in Liverpool.

Ruined for Life! – by SARAH ROGERS

This is the motto of JVC in the USA, and I have to say I rather like it!

The motto comes from the “brilliant ideas man” Jack Morris SJ, who set up JVC out of Portland Oregon in the 1950s. Back in November 2005, I had the chance to talk to Dave Hinchen, who was involved with introducing JVC to the East Coast in the mid-70s. Dave explained to me that all the branches of JVC in the US were set up directly by Jesuits, and that the four values started as three values which sprang directly from the Early Church in the book of Acts, as well as from Jesuit ideals. The three values were Christian community, simple lifestyle and social justice: the first was later split into community and spirituality as social changes loaded the words “Christian community” with too specific a meaning.

In 1980, for the first time, a branch of JVC was managed by a non-Jesuit. (This worked so well that when the British Jesuits decided to set up JVC here, they were determined that it would be run by non-Jesuits.) Intriguingly, almost all staff in the different JVCs that I spoke to are former volunteers.

At its biggest, JVC throughout the States had 500 volunteers per year! But JVC East decided quite deliberately to rein in their growth. There was a good community spirit within the whole group, and they didn’t want to sacrifice this to “success” as defined by maximum numbers. Now JVC has about 350 volunteers per year spread across the USA. JVC USA has 12,000 former volunteers! I met several of them as I visited other Jesuit works in the States, and all said that they have an immediate affinity with former JVCs, no matter what work they did or what city they were based in. There is an immediate trust and a sense of shared values. I have seen this amongst former volunteers of JVC here in the UK too, at events, pub evenings and parties where complete strangers seemed to get on almost instantly, as if they shared something important.

Dave Hinchen loves the “RUINED FOR LIFE” slogan, he said, “because life is never the same again after an experience of solidarity like this. The real good is in what volunteers do with the rest of their life”. From my own experience as an ex-staff member, I believe he’s right. And when I spoke to the current JVC East Manager, Kate Haser, she said that while many things change, “some important things are the same: our mission, the four values, the community life and how formative and shocking the JVC year is for everyone, and the real first-hand contact with people in poverty”.

Tom Gaunt, a Jesuit sociologist currently based in Washington, recently did some research into the impact Jesuit volunteering had on volunteers. From the results, he found the values of the volunteer’s experience “do not fade away as volunteers grow old, start families, and develop careers. The values of JVC maintain their level of importance in the lives of volunteers year after year.” What Tom picks out most strongly is the relationships that are formed during the year, and the way of thinking that influences people. He quotes one former volunteer as saying “The food for thought in spirituality is still with me. The JVC experience was a strengthening of my ‘other-directedness,’ and a reinforcement to be a courageous Christian.” Tom concludes by saying that it isn’t any one value that matters, but the combination of them all- “The JVC experience is transformative not just because it places individuals in situations and environments that are different from their own, but it does so in the context of community and prayer.”

The UK Jesuit Province is currently developing their volunteering opportunities, both part-time and full-time, nationally and internationally. If you would like to contact Sarah with your thoughts or ideas on the subject, you can e-mail her at: sarahjerogers@lineone.net

Sarah Rogers is currently Director of Jesuit Volunteering throughout Britain, working with Jesuit organizations that have volunteers in the UK and overseas, part-time and full-time. She was Project Coordinator and then Manager of JVC between 2002 and 2005, which is how she got sucked in to the Jesuit world! (She can’t seem to leave, which she blames on the Examen and a truly inspiring spiritual director).