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One World Week in Portsmouth Diocese

  • Maureen Thompson

Cutting the cake

Cutting the cake

Each year for the last 40, the final week in October has been highlighted as an opportunity to promote peace through friendship and justice through global understanding by supporting One World Week.

This year One World Week has encouraged us to think about this by getting together and reflecting on what has changed over the last 40 years and what this means for us.

At SS Thomas More and Thomas of Canterbury Church in Emsworth we took the opportunity to start our Caritas Supper Club, with a sociable simple meal and a speaker. We were delighted to welcome Ellen Teague, journalist and writer with the Columban missionaries to speak to us on 25 October.

By reflecting on her own work and by sharing pictures from all over the world, Ellen was able to illustrate how rapid industrial development and consumerism has impacted world change and how these environmental changes are affecting not only plants and animals but people, particularly the poor. Pope Francis was of course able to frame all these concerns in a Christian context in his Encyclical Laudato Si, and now more three years later we continue to reflect on ways we can be good stewards of God's creation and carers for each other.

The talk motivated us to think more about personal changes and renew our commitments in our own lives to recycle, reduce and reuse, but also and how to seek further ways to grow as a Church community to lighten our footprint and share more.

One of the great ways we can work together as parishes is to work towards the Live Simply Award. Our own parish achieved the Award more than six years ago when it was first introduced. We focused on recycling, bringing creation care into our liturgy, Lent prayer walks and supporting young people. Our biggest effort was on weekly ideas to live simply, sustainably and in solidarity linked to the Sunday Gospel reading - although some of these ideas are now a distant memory, it was clear from our discussion at our supper that for many of us these ideas have become a way of life. As a parish over the last three years we have continued to pray as we walk, with pilgrimages to the Cathedral for refugees and commemorating Oscar Romero. Our fund-raising fayres continue to be for charities and we are still collecting those milk bottle tops and food for the foodbank. The Caritas supper club is a new idea for this year to build friendships in our own community and thinking about the wider world and we are also highlighting collections for local refugee families.

This Advent we are being encouraged share together the CAFÉ sessions on global healing, with resources at the 'Our Common Home' website. Maybe we will get together to do this.

Thank you One World Week for giving us the chance to reflect on our own understanding of the world as Christians and how we can impact on making the world a place we can all thrive within life supporting systems of our common home. Congratulations on your 40th anniversary.

Maureen Thompson, a Livesimply assessor and local CAFOD volunteer, will be travelling with CAFOD to the UN Climate talks in Poland in December.

LINKS


www.oneworldweek.org
www.ourcommonhome.co.uk

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