A day in Manchester

10.00-11.00

Tom: Tom arrives in Rainbow Haven, a project mostly for refugees and asylum seekers. Some kids are messing around with Tom’s shoelaces while he sorts out a doctor’s appointment for an Iraqi refugee. Tom spends a while playing with the kids – he’s just a big baby at heart, but only the other children notice.

11.00-12.00

Sarah: The Welcome Centre rents a church hall for two days a week. I and 8 other volunteers get all of our equipment out of storage and set up the tables, chairs and information stalls. The Welcome Centre has a lot of volunteers. Most are asylum seekers living locally. They are not allowed to work. Some have been waiting to hear the outcome of their asylum applications for seven years or more. In both my placements I have noticed that the dividing line between volunteers, clients and staff is very thin – and owes a lot to chance and circumstance.

Aura: People are excited today – they were talking about the TV show where there was15 minutes of fame for Loaves & Fishes and for some of our clients. They showed our new kitchen and a millionaire who gave it to our drop-in centre. One and a half an hour I spend in a kitchen by serving tea, coffee and washing dishes.

Julia: I arrive to the Prison Visitors’ Centre before 10. It will be my first working day there because of all the police clearences, which needed two months to be done. I have some induction and read some leaflets about drug problems, the effects of drinking on unborn babies, and having a family member in prison. Nearly nothing is happening because in the mornings there are only legal visits

12.00-13.00

Julia: Lunch (a nice tuna and salad sandwich), and some socialisation: a volunteer has her 70^th birthday so we even have some chocolate cake, too.

13.00-14.00

Sarah: Visitors are wrapping shoeboxes in Christmas paper and filling them with gifts for children. Every child who visits the Centre in the week before Christmas will be given one of these boxes.

Julia: The gate has been opened for the family members. I sit at the reception desk with another volunteer and watch how the booking process is going on. When nobody is coming I write some new information into the Visitors’ Handbooks, and read the booklets about prison life.

14.00-15.00

Aura: There was one woman who quarrelled with another client. Helen calmed them down. It emerged that woman got angry because she was on a TV yesterday and none behaved with her like with a star. :)

We decided to sort donated clothes in a clothes store. There were some clients who wanted to buy some clothes.

Tom: Tom and a young refugee from Africa eat a late lunch and chat. They play a bit of basketball with  a refugee from Iran who also volunteers at the project. Tom is not good at basketball, and loses the game.

15.00-16.00

Sarah: A manicurist, masseuse and mendhi (henna hand painting) artist are at the Centre today and I am offered (and accept!) a neck massage and a henna painting on my left hand. I can’t bend my left hand until the henna dries so I go and help out in the café, making hot drinks for visitors. Some regular visitors, who I helped to enrol their children into a local school in previous weeks, arrive and I chat with them for a while to see how things are going.

Tom: Amanda (a staff member) and Tom talk with a woman from Somalia who has been given refugee status in the UK. She’s located her three missing children in Ethiopia, but the UK government has refused to re-unite the family. She is very upset, and doesn’t understand why the government can be so cruel…

16.00-17.00

Sarah: The Centre closes at 4.30 so I help clear up then catch the bus home. There have been 65 visitors today.

17.00-18.00

Julia: The others ask about the “prison” (which, in fact, I haven’t even seen), and seem to be a bit satisfied when I tell them that it was pretty boring. They all have had boring days already, unlike me.

Tom: Tom looks up a recipe for dinner, after seeing that nobody has been shopping and the random ingredients that we have are not going to make a “nutritious and tasty meal”. He settles on some new Indian food with lentils and rice, but out of compassion for Julia and Aura he will remove every trace of chilli or spice from it.

18.00-19.00

Sarah: I knit and pray. Not at the same time!

19.00-20.00

Julia: Dinner together. I like it. J Even the cleaning after makes some fun if it’s done together.

20.00-21.00

Sarah: Thursday evening is set aside for faith sharing. We sit down in the living room with a fresh pot of tea and our pudding. We only eat pudding on faith sharing days or when the community partners bring it. During sharing we each have an opportunity to tell the others what has been going on for us over the last week, how we have felt about things and whatever else seems appropriate at the time. This is one of my favourite things we do together. Although it can be hard, I find that it fills me with love and compassion for my community.

Julia: We have sharing tonight. It begins quite slowly, nobody wants to start but then we just come into practice, and talk about things we found good/bad/interesting etc. during the last weeks. I slowly realise my ‘complaining mood’ – the recognition doesn’t make me happy but at least helps to cope with it.

Tom: Faith sharing: the best part of the week! This is personal: I usually don’t know what I’m going to say until I open my mouth, and often I talk a lot more than the others because I ramble lots. It helps me to think, and it helps the others to get bored! I find it very frustrating when we hide our feelings in community (I am very much to blame), because it’s only on Thursday that I actually discover what someone was thinking on Monday! But for me, the sharing is a time of real community and communion: we can talk, share, break bread (or ice cream), and really connect.

21.00-22.00

Sarah: After talking we pull a question out of the box – these are discussion topics relevant to faith-sharing. Today the question is ‘What is the biggest obstacle in your relationship with God at the moment?

Aura: We end up with ‘Our Father’ and a hug when I had to tiptoe for taking as much comfort as I could from our hug.

Julia: I find the “question of the week” difficult but still want to speak – and shortly after it turns out that it was worth trying to answer. The others are really sympathising and it already makes me feel better.

22.00-23.00

Julia: Evening ritual: two or three of us are usually brushing their teeth at the same time. I like it.

Spirituality and JVC – Communal Prayer by STEPHEN HOYLAND

One of the most difficult parts of the JVC year is communal prayer. There are many reasons for this. It might be that one person finds personal prayer difficult or never prays. Perhaps a common way cannot be found which suits all house members with their diverse religious cultures. There is often a reticence around the kind of sharing, which prayer together involves, so that it is easy to let it slip. The absence of communal prayer does not spoil the JVC ethos because the presence of God does not depend entirely upon explicit religious practice, yet if ways of praying together can be found, the community’s life is enhanced and everyone’s JVC experience enriched.

Prayer in common may respond to all of the challenges listed above. Often prayer with others is easier than prayer on one’s own. The community supports the individual. This is not unlike the experience of being unable to study except in a library when surrounded by other people engaged in the same project. The person finding prayer difficult might be pleasantly surprised by how much more it flows in company.

If a JVC member does not really see the point of prayer but is committed to community then so long as the models used are appropriate it can still work.

This brings me on to a discussion of models or ways or praying together which allow people of different traditions to find common ground in a way which is not irksome and awkward. Let’s invent a hypothetical household that might find it difficult to pray together: Martha is a traditional Spanish Catholic who has never heard of Anglicans let alone Evangelicals and is rather shy.
Lucy is an English Evangelical who just loves to share.
Hans is a lapsed Lutheran agnostic hippy with poor English.
Benedict is an English conservative Catholic who changed his name by deed pole after the last papal election and prays the Divine Office in Latin.

OK, the prospects for the kind of communal prayer that is going to last more than one sitting for this spiritually dysfunctional JVC family might be bleak. What are the prospects?

Each person could take their turn at leading a way of praying that suits them individually. This is likely to be embarrassing and unappealing. “Now then, Lucy”, says Benedict, “This is a rosary. . . ” Or imagine Lucy’s face as Hans reaches for the incense sticks and rolls up a ‘peace pipe’. Lucy takes her revenge with her prayer of exorcism as she sings in tongues, hands raised. Martha wonders how quickly she can get back to Spain.

My suggestion, or one possibility, would be different. Each person takes a turn to lead. Music is played, choosing something to which no one objects. You might have a bank of CDs, which everyone can live with. This helps towards stillness. There could follow a period of silence for personal reflection or prayer, but together, in the same space. Then a short reading: something from the leader’s religious tradition or a favorite poem perhaps, but accessible and inoffensive to everyone. Another period of silence in which to reflect or pray follows. Then the leader could formally end the time of prayer/reflection in a suitable way, perhaps by playing some more music for a few minutes and fading it out gently, after which the prayer is over, or with a prayer said by that leader, or the whole group if appropriate. The whole process could take between 30 minutes or an hour. The length should be agreed beforehand. There might be a little sharing on how that was for people. It is a very good way of further building up the community.

Of course, groups might want some prayer aloud, choose to sing, or to do things differently in all sorts of ways, if that suits them. It might be that a community decides to share each other’s traditions. This can be one of the growth points of the JVC year in that different approaches to prayer are shared within the community and each person learns again that God is bigger than one tradition and can come to us in more than one kind of way.

The strength of the model described above is that it could work with any community and perhaps even in extreme cases where there is little common ground yet there remains a desire to be a fully functioning Jesuit Volunteer Community.

Stephen Hoyland is currently on the team at Loyola Hall Spirituality Centre, a Jesuit retreat centre near Liverpool. He is interested in an approach to spirituality that is truly nourishing for individuals and communities and supports the commitment to social justice and simple living. This is one reason why he likes JVC. The other is the joy of contact with the volunteers who embody those core values, and also play football with him