Thoughts some 50 years on...

Another of our confreres celebrating a Golden Jubilee this year, shares some thoughts with us. Read below as Fr Philip Jones C.Ss.R., considers all that has been over the past fifty years.

"Fifty years professed – where are we now?

As the chaplain of a monastery containing twenty two Carmelite nuns it was unlikely that I was going to forget that fifty years ago I took religious vows. Nowhere else on earth was this less likely.

The Eucharistic celebration was very moving with the sisters singing some of their own hymns that we don’t usually hear. That was in September. The typically Redemptorist celebration in Perth – the big meal – had to wait till October when we were all at home.

I have been at Dysart for three years and the only connection I had with the Carmelite Order before that time was the rather odd fact that I was studying some of the philosophical writings of Edith Stein. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could read in the refectory – even when you were all on retreat. She had put together a rather lethal package of Edmund Husserll’s writings entitled “on the phenomenology of the consciousness of interior time” which is the most difficult book I have ever read. In the first few chapters of her own introduction to philosophy she analyzes the idea that everything occupies a position in space and time. As I was struggling with the German text I kept getting distracted by an image of a man writing the following letter to his son.

“Dear Gustave, I usually leave the letter writing to your mother, but she is very busy at the moment. In order to pay for your philosophy course we have had to take in laundry and your mother now spends the long winter evenings ironing the shirts of everyone in the neighbourhood. You say you have spent the first three months examining the concept that everything occupies a position in space and time. This concept seems to have affected your mother deeply. While she is ironing she keeps on saying: “Every single thing, either living or dead, in the whole wide world occupies a position in space and time – and the world is getting wider and wider and wider...and wider.”

I am studying this philosophy as part of a module that I have written on phenomenology for the philosophy degree in Maryvale Institute in Birmingham. However, though it may seem unlikely, the ideas on space and time and memory have influenced a recent presentation on the Eucharist which I gave two weeks ago at the local parish Church of St Maries in Kircaldy. For some years now I have been trying to find a pastoral/spiritual approach to the Eucharist and I think it is starting to appear. I am of course greatly helped by the sisters who are not only deeply spiritual but also down to earth with a good sense of humour.

I feel very blessed at this time in my life."   

Fr Philip Jones C.Ss.R.