Sunday 25 May 2025.
Our Lady Immaculate
I stayed behind for the coffee and croissants in the church hall. It only comes around during school holidays and it’s a good chance to meet people.
I got talking with Mark and John. Both got into the Croissants while I sipped coffee, which was much better than the stuff we get out of the machine at home.
I’d seen Mark before. He’s local, lives with his parents, is unemployed, and a recovering alcoholic. Three humbling thing to admit to any stranger. He’d also packed in the fags ten days ago. This man was reporting from the front lines of temptation.
John was from Canterbury, but his work as a social worker is in Whitstable, so he came to find the local church. Both he and Mark were familiar with people’s problems. Their own and those of others.
Mark told us something about the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting he was about to leave for, which stuck with us.
AA meetings had brought him back to the church, he’d said. But now, the religious element of the meetings was being watered down. The values that had reignited his own recovery years earlier were being denied others.
In its place was the “personal faith” of the modern secular world. He wasn’t sure it had the gravity to help people out of the gutter.
It was a minor tragedy and Mark seemed to hold back from revealing his most intense criticism. People struggling with addiction need stronger guide rails, surely? Something less tepid than the worldly values that create problems like alcoholism in the first place.
The Gospel was John 15: 18-21. Jesus tells us that if the world hates us, remember that it hated him long before. And that if we belonged to the world the world would love us as its own. It doesn’t. And we are chosen out of it.