“Which church are you?” — a week with the Missionaries of Charity

Fr Sam Samuel VC, director of the Divine Retreat Centre, has spent the past week in Surry Hills preaching a retreat to the Missionaries of Charity — the congregation St Mother Teresa founded. The sisters live beside St Peter’s church, where they have been part of the parish for some thirty years, sharing the faith in the schools and serving the people of the neighbourhood.

Seven letters, one question

The retreat was built on the opening chapters of the Book of Revelation: the letters dictated to seven churches in Asia Minor — Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Each receives its own commendation and its own warning, and the warnings are not gentle. Ephesus has laboured and not grown weary, and has left its first love. Sardis has a name for being alive, and is dead. Laodicea is lukewarm, and does not know that it is poor and blind and naked.

They were written to particular congregations in the first century. The retreat took them as letters to the people in the room, and returned through the week to the plain question underneath them:

Oh, sisters, which church are you?

The answer, in chalk

On the last day the sisters gave their answer. A blackboard, filled corner to corner: the seven churches drawn as seven small chapels across a hillside, each one named. Above them a monstrance with the Host at its centre, throwing out rays, and above that the dove. Below, a priest in a chasuble kneels with his back to us, a thurible smoking beside him, and the sisters are at prayer on either side. From the priest, in a speech bubble, the question he had been asking all week.

Across the top, in four colours of chalk: a big thank you, dear Fr Sam.

It is a catechesis as much as a thank-you card. The seven churches are not left as seven places on a map in Asia Minor; they are put on a hillside under the Blessed Sacrament, with the people who had spent the week being asked which of them they were kneeling underneath. Nobody needed it explained.

Which church are you?

Retreats away from Somersby

Most of what the centre does happens in the bushland above Somersby, but a good part of the ministry travels — to parishes across five states, and to communities like this one. A retreat preached to a dozen people in a convent chapel is the same work as a retreat preached to two hundred in a hall. The schedule has what is coming up.