Memes and mission

 Today I dreamt of creating my own meme. There is something almost cathartic about them and my current situation definitely seems meme appropriate.

As a medical historian, I have fairly good knowledge of what diseases were eradicated with vaccines, which weren’t but are no longer so latent, and which are still merely roaming the earth. Or so I thought…..turns scarlet fever, the disease that caused Beth’s heart to weaken in Little Women, and so it stayed in my mind as something from that period and like several from that time period, it was no longer ‘around’. To my surprise, the daughter of some friends may have had a mild case after an outbreak of it in her nursery. So one week later, after an encounter with said child, I found myself with a bad sore throat, I am prone to laryngitis so I didn’t connect it to the child and her possible scarlet fever-induced rash. I don’t actually have scarlet fever but, predictably, laryngitis but for a day or so before going to the GP it crossed my mind that maybe it was scarlet fever. On the day of going to the GP I fell down the last two stairs in my house but as I was late for a class I was teaching and hadn’t cycled since January, I got myself up, jumped on the bike, and cycled over to Blackfriars. Now a bit blue. All this presence of bruised cycling and possible scarlet fever gave me the impression that somehow this particular day was quite meme-worthy: “How is 2023 going? A ‘jumping’ year.”

The ‘scarlet fever’ cum laryngitis have meant a bit more sleep, wfh, and a bit of tv watching, “Death in Paradise” specifically, a very British distraction. In the last one, the inspector stationed in the small Caribbean island shortly after being widowed becomes accustomed to life on Saint Marie until three years in he meets someone. While he doesn’t go off into the sunset with his newfound love she helps him to realised that while he has loved his three years in paradise it is time to go home. His travels have served their purpose and it's time to get back. This rang a bell with me.

While travelling the world is something I have done with relish for most of my adult life so far, I have gone about not often thinking of the why and wherefore. Well not quite…. At one point in my nomadic comings and goings, as I found myself unexpectedly in a small village in the Thuringer forest with a small contingent of Nightfever members from Jena, Dresden, Erfurt, and Munich I was struck with the missional nature of my travels. Some days later, in the one Catholic parish in Jena, the priest read a pastoral letter from the Bishop: “ Deutschland ist einen Missionsland”:“ Germany is a mission land” and we were all called to this mission. 

As a 15-year-old I dreamt of being a missionary sister and of adopting two twin Chinese girls. The former, I suspect, was spurned by watching my dad’s sister, a Salesian sister, live, and the latter from having learnt at school about the plight of girls under China’s one-child policy. 15-year-old me didn’t quite see at the time that these two things weren’t entirely compatible, at least not as I was thinking about them. I didn't become a sister travelling the world evangelising nor did I adopt two Chinese twin girls. Other interests took hold, studies, a first job, and then more study meant I was living apparently quite differently from what my 15-year-old self had imagined. Then Germany happened. Nightfever, Lobpreis with the Emmanuel Community and friends from Communion and Liberation and the Opus Dei, and in the background the Dominicans, brothers and sisters, and a friend who’d become a Lay Dominican. The pursuit of truth in an academy that no longer recognised this pursuit as possible, like the first Dominicans, I and all those Catholics, my small community of deeply faithful German Catholics, worked away holding to the Truth in the midst of heresy and lost souls inside and outside the Church.  And that night in the Thuringer Forest with a small group of us from different Nightfever groups set up for the young- and on his own- parish priest a night of adoration, prayer, and music, God gently showed me how I had been on mission, led by Him imperceptibly along the way and now He was making it evident: I didn’t need to be a sister or adopt two Chinese girls to serve Him and the world because the mission was at my door, had been all the time, and without being fully conscious of it, I had been on mission, and was called to continue on it. Now there are people called to be missionary sisters and brothers, and those that are called to be open to adoption, God was simply saying that in my case I didn’t have to embrace something else outside of what I was already doing to be on mission because there where I was the mission was present. Now back in England I have had that moment, like the character in the series, the moment of realisation, it is time to return to ‘home’, to where it all began, this adult journey of faith. For the moment, it looks like it's just a short period of returning, like diplomats that return to HQ for brief recharging periods, or maybe it will be for longer. Only God knows. 

It is quite appropriate that today is Frohleichnam, Corpus Christi, and that my friends who remain in Aachen and other parts of Germany will be starting the procession. I join them in spirit.

Adoro te Devote: Gottheit teif verborgen