"Triggers".

A Facebook group I belong to started a thread on influential “triggers” in one’s life but we had to try and stick to one, the one that led to the life one made for oneself.  I worked out that first one, but there are actually six important triggers that shaped the way I think about this life and the next one, and why I am content to be a housewife (if not the world’s best!) and what I do with my time. 

Trigger 1 involved my being enchanted at the age of five or so by Sunday School lessons at a school near a sawmill where my father was working; wish I could remember where in Tanganyika it was. The teacher used a felt board with felt figures and images to visualise the Bible stories she was telling us. I never attended any other Sunday School lessons once my parents left that place and they were not church goers nor was there a Bible in our home, but my prayer life began then. I developed a great love and desire to know more about this Jesus she talked about. By the time I got to my first boarding school in East Africa, aged nine, I was praying earnestly by myself about family matters. I think the sense I have today of the importance of images and Art in story-telling and for evoking a prayerful atmosphere was also sparked then. 

 

Trigger 2 was a poetry recitation competition in 1953 in the Junior School at Kongwa, Tanganyika, my first boarding school.  I was ten years old.   Don’t remember if we volunteered or were volunteered but I was given a list of choices and told to pick three.   I chose the “The Magnificat”, Portia’s speech from “The Merchant of Venice” but I forget the third.  I won a book prize, “All In An Afternoon”, which I still have.  After the competition, a lady (teacher, parent?) came to me and said, “I have never heard The Magnificat recited with such feeling ever before, not even by a grown-up.  Are you a Catholic?”  “What’s a Catholic?” I replied.  But fifty years later in 2003, that prayer was responsible for my realising I too could be an evangeliser, something I had been pondering for years. 

In 2003, my parish priest asked me if I would join the Legion of Mary if he started it in the parish.  “What’s the Legion of Mary?” I asked.  He was astonished that I had never heard of this world-wide lay apostolate for evangelising.  Well, no previous church I had attended in England or Italy ever mentioned it or advertised it in their bulletin and during our life in Saudi and Africa my husband and I were not regular church-goers.  He gave me the Legion Handbook to read.  I sat in our summer house, and the book fell open onto the page where “The Magnificat” is printed.  I felt an electric shock as it were, a jolt of joy, go through me.  I read on about the works Legionaries do with Mary as the Captain of our army of lay soldiers, going out and about to bring non-believers and the lapsed to Christ.  It can be difficult at times but I am sure God is with me.  He works through my weaknesses.

Trigger 3 came from an aunt in South Africa who sent me books by Gene Stratton Porter.  I loved them all and they made me think there was nothing better than being a good housewife and mum, while at the same time being an educated one.  In fact I have always delighted in informing myself about all kinds of issues.  My son once said I am a frustrated politician, but I know better because I know my mental and emotional limitations. 

Trigger 4 was hearing a gynocologist call me a liar.  I had used the the “Coil” for contraception for years because my GP in Kenya told me it prevented conception.   I accepted what he said without thinking of asking for more details.  My excuses are youth, naiveness, ignorance.  I had told him I was a Catholic and that my husband and I felt we could not afford more children but we would make welcome any that happened by mistake.  Ten years later, I heard that the Coil was an abortifacient and was shocked.  So I wanted it removed .   By then, we had a house in England and during holidays from Saudi where we moved after leaving Africa for good we made use of an English GP for we were not impressed by the medical services in Saudi.  The GP asked why I wanted the Coil removed, I told her, and she called me a liar!  She said no GP in the world would have told me it prevented conception.  Its contraceptive value was that it prevented the embryo from implanting.  She was jolly rough with me while she removed the thing, I can tell you.  From that day on I became a committed pro-lifer.  God knows how many children I have aborted.   Such regret and sorrow have I experienced! 

Trigger 5 was actually two things: the 5 times-a- day call to prayer by muezzins calling from several mosques around usin Saudi, each with enormous loudspeakers on them, plus the endless Islamist hectoring in the English version of the local papers in Saudi - which were much cheaper than foreign newspapers that I rarely bought, not covered in black censoring ink, and quite interesting in their own way for local news.   The question and answer page on Islam was interesting too.

However, the wailing at prayer time was so unpleasant to my ears that after seven years I felt I could not tolerate it any more.  I prayed for help one day after I had shaken my fist in exasperation at a mosque I was passing from whence the call had erupted so loudly that my ear drums hurt.  Displaying my anger like that was a highly dangerous thing to do and I was lucky no one witnessed it.  I recognised my lack of charity and prayed for help when I got home.  The answer was, “Say your own prayers at call time.”  What peace that gave me.  I was immediately galvanised into beginning to study my Faith which at the time I actually knew precious little about, not enough to explain it to anyone that’s for sure.  The first thing I did was to find out what the Rosary was about and then to start a small Rosary group with a friend and it has remained part of my daily prayer life since. 

 

Trigger 6 was a small handwritten note attached with Sellotape to the church door in Berkhamsted after we had left Saudi for good.  It mentioned the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin in Medjugorje, and a forthcoming pilgrimage there.  I longed to go but it took a lot of convincing to make my husband agree.  "The apparitions were not yet approved by the Church, Yugoslavia was a Communist country so why should it benefit from our tourist dollars, and anyway from what he had read it was all a load of nonsense; hysterical tourists and fake visionaries, against which the Church regularly had to defend itself."  But I was impressed by the reaction I had had when I read the note.  Something occurred in my heart, like a plea: “Please come.” 

I persevered and we went, and our interior lives changed completely.  We both became fully committed Catholics.   I may write about our Medjugorje experiences at another time.  I went through a phase of temptation after coming back from Medjugorje because I began to re-read the Qur’an as a way of “knowing the enemy better” in order to be able to defend my own religion better.  The desire to start doing this followed a vivid dream in which I was asked if  I would stand up for Jesus.  I had read the Qur'an  during our Saudi days and although disgusted or shocked by some verses, and perplexed by the irrational way it is is composed, jumping from subject to subject, I had to admit to the beauty in many verses.  Doubts began troubling me:  “Is God really a father to us? (Such thinking is blasphemy for Muslims.)  What if Islam is the true religion?”  The doubts came out of nowhere and were really oppressive.  One day, while hoovering the landing upstairs, doubts assailed me again, and unexpectedly I cried out, “Abba! Help me to believe truly! Help me!”  Peace entered my heart again and since then I have been comfortable with reading about Islam in order to defend Christianity.  So that little note on the church door triggered my complete fidelity to the Holy Trinity and the Church founded by the Word, Jesus Christ.