I was raised in a committed catholic home. I had 3 brothers and I was the youngest. As a child you don’t give much thought to your parent’s spirituality – you just tend to accept it as normal. I can remember being quite a pain as a teenager, I used to lecture my parents about the third world and how they weren’t doing enough about it! I was fairly idealistic and thought a lot about things.

By the time I was 18 I thought I had a fairly strong faith – and I did in one way – but it was almost entirely intellectual, there was very little of a relationship with God in it.

So I left school and embarked upon adult life. I had decided to do science at Uni and during the summer I got a job in a maternity and geriatric hospital. Babies were born downstairs and old folk died upstairs.

Working there changed my life on a couple of fronts.

The first thing that happened was that I was there when one of the old ladies died and the next day I was allowed to be present when a baby was being born. Have you ever seen a baby being born?! It is quite incredible!

Those 2 experiences quite literally changed my life.

At the time I didn’t have the language to explain what was happening but basically I knew in a way I didn’t before that God loved me personally and intimately.

It’s a bit like the first time I went to Africa – I had read about it, seen it on TV, I had talked to people who had been there, so I knew quite a lot about it..........but once I got there, I knew it in an entirely different way because I had experienced it personally. It was like that with God – I had heard a lot ABOUT him before, but now I KNEW him.

The other thing I discovered at that time was that I wanted to work with sick people. I felt a direct call from God to do it – a vocation really. I had never thought about it before, there were no medical or nursing connections in my family. It was a really strange situation, I was convinced that God wanted me to do this, but it was July and in order to get into medicine in those days they really expected you to have wanted to it since you were 5 years old!! So I went for the interview and very naively told them why I wanted to do it and my some miracle I got in.  At the same time as this was happening the nuns in the Nursing Home were going to prayer meetings and invited me along – I was very negative about the “happy, clappy squad” and thought it was all complete exhibitionism, my one weakness in my argument was I hadn’t been to a prayer meeting and so I was persuaded to come along and although I was uncomfortable with much of the spontaneous warmth in the worship, I did meet God there and felt his presence very close.

God’s timing is something I have been aware of though my life, he knew that as I went out into the world the intellectual faith I had would not sustain me and he brought me into a personal relationship with him. Through university life I went to a small prayer meeting where the average age of the members was 50 and so to get more young people along we would bring lots of the students we met – again I think that was God’s idea, I’m certainly not what you would call an evangelist but necessity forced us to bring other folk along and we evangelised without thinking about it! Another truth I had learned was that God took you where you were at.

When I was in 3^rd year University,  a students prayer meeting started up and that led me to join the Community of the Risen Christ 25 years ago. People often ask us what we do in Community – that’s a hard one to answer, because we do lots of different things and no-one is involved in them all, and so the things we do are not our identifying feature. People in the community are involved in youth work, work with children; work with the poor and in parishes......the list goes on, I probably am not aware of all the things that are going on.

So if that’s not our identifying feature what is it?

We are a people who have come into a relationship with God which we don’t want to lose and we want to grow stronger. We want others to meet God and experience this richness also.  However we know that we are weak and left to our own devices God might get squeezed out of our lives.

How does it work practically?

We commit to take part in a regular prayer meeting on a Sunday and we attend a small group through the week. Many of us see each other more than this, we may live with each other or nearby, we do pratical things for one another – babysitting, fixing leaky pipes etc etc.

How does that help in our relationship with God?

One of the things we are committed to do is to love one another and be Jesus to one another. I am sure it comes as no surprise to folk that we often fail – and because it is based on relationships, we quickly run out of our own resources and need to turn to Him. So community challenges us with our own frailty, however the other side of the same coin is that we get to see how big God really is – again and again we see him coming up with the goods – giving us love, patience, forgiveness, mercy – whatever it is we have run out of. Is it an easy choice? no....but is it worth it? Emphatically YES!  I have a group of people who are committed to me, who pray and sincerely try to live their life for God.

That is a rare treasure indeed.

Mary Shields

21/11/09