Plenary, 04 Sep 2002

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 4, 2002

Official Report 421KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

To lead our time for reflection this afternoon, we welcome the Right Rev Monsignor Michael Conway of St Ignatius Parish in Wishaw.

I thank Sir David Steel for inviting me to share this time for reflection with members. I will begin by outlining my background.

At the outset of my ministry, I spent 10 years working in parishes throughout Lanarkshire. For the following 22 years, I was involved in tertiary education—for 16 years as a chaplain in the University of Glasgow and for six years as rector of Scotus College, Glasgow, which is a seminary where we train candidates for the Catholic priesthood. At present, I am in a parish in Wishaw. I will not burden members with an overview of those years, but I would like to share an aspect of my work at Scotus College.

The major function of a seminary is to equip students to cope with the pressure of full-time service to people. One little exercise that I found useful was to invite the students to reflect on Jean-Paul Sartre's observation that

"Hell is other people",

and on a quotation from another French writer, Gabriel Marcel, who wrote that

"Hell is being alone".

I would go on to emphasise that to be good at what we do, we must be happy in doing it. I would point out that although at times my students would inevitably identify with both those responses, they should never allow those extremes of mood to determine their attitude to people.

I am pretty certain that, at times, most of us have felt that hell is other people and that we would rather be miles away from people and alone with our thoughts. I believe that such a reaction is not unusual when serving the public. In attempting to cope, we sometimes go into what could be called survival mode, by which I mean that we become somewhat emotionally disengaged as we go through the motions of the daily round. In other words, we become practical cynics.

People's demands and expectations, along with our expectations, can push us into that mode, but paradoxically, it is only through appreciating people and their needs that we can be saved from such an attitude.

In the New Testament, Jesus became overwhelmed by the demands of the public and tried to get away to deserted and lonely places with his little group of supporters many times. Sometimes he even felt the need to go off by himself to reflect on and absorb his experiences and to pray, so that he could return with renewed enthusiasm and insight for his work among the people.

To give of our best we must recognise that our energy, enthusiasm and emotions need replenishing. Indeed, we are often the last people to recognise the reduced quality of our performance and to acknowledge our need for personal space. Most important, we do not always realise that when people become hell for us, perhaps we are also hell for them. That is a signal that we should head for the desert.