Nunbelievable is a brand new podcast from the Diocese of Oxford, where sisters share the ups and downs of faith and community. Series one takes us through the themes of Advent. Follow on Spotify and have a read of our first interview below.
Joanna Gallant
Well, welcome everyone to Nunbelievable, which is a podcast exploring what nuns and others believe about all sorts of things. I'm Joanna and today I'm joined by Dr Gemma Simmonds, Roman Catholic sister in the Congregation of Jesus. And she's also a theologian from the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge. Welcome Gemma.
Sr Gemma Simmonds
Thank you, Jo.
Joanna
Thank you for joining us. And today we're going to have a conversation about hope.
Gemma
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I found myself having to think quite hard about hope. I actually came across, it was an encyclical, a letter that Pope Benedict had written on hope called Space Alvi, which is Latin for kind of in hope we are saved. And it was one of those documents that because other things were happening kind of on the world scene at the time.
It slightly disappeared without much notice. And when I went back to it, I thought, gosh, this is really rather good. And there were two things that struck me in what it said. And it was right at the beginning where he said, and I'm not quoting directly, but the gospel message is not just informative, it's performative. It's something that makes things happen and is life-changing.
And I found myself thinking about that, the need for the gospel to be performative, something we enact and embody, rather than something we just talk about or information we hand over to people. And then towards the end of that paragraph, he says,
"The dark door of the future has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently."
The bit that stayed with me, 'the one who has hope lives differently'. And I found myself having to ask myself, well, you know, does hope make you live differently? And what hope is it, you know? And I think more than anything else, and you know that I spend quite a bit of my time when I'm not being a theologian and other things of that nature, is accompanying other people on their spiritual journey, being what they call a spiritual director. And a year ago, we had here in Cambridge, what's called a week of guided prayer. It's a sort of mini version of an Ignatian retreat that people commit to praying about half an hour a day and then meeting a spiritual companion and talking through their experience for about half an hour.
And we did this with the undergraduates and about 68 of them signed up. It was just fantastic. And I was seeing nine of these young people a day. And by virtue of the fact that they're Cambridge graduates or undergraduates, these are clever young people. And they kept coming in and saying, am I getting it right?
And you know, with as much kind of kindness as possible, I kept trying to say, listen, honey, you can't get it right because you can't get it wrong. All God wants you to do is turn up.
And and he will he'll do the rest, whatever you give him in it. Someone once gave him five loaves and two fish and and he fed five thousand people with that.
So, honestly, the little that you can give, that's what God needs to do something transformative in your life and with your life for other people. And to me, that is where the hope lies. The hope really does not lie in our performance.
And I meet so many Christians, and I'm not just talking your kind of average Joe and Jill in the pew. You know, I have these conversations with clergy and with bishops and, you know, all sorts of people who somehow fall into thinking, I've got to get it right. I've got to kind of, it's about my performance.
And for me, the biggest message of hope is it's not about any of our performance. It doesn't matter if we put in the worst performance of our lives.
The fact that we've turned up at all, the fact that we've asked God to be with us, that is what gives God an opening to get working, you know. It's something that's not just informative, it's performative.
Joanna
Yeah, yeah. That's really challenging on a couple of levels, isn't it? Because I'm just thinking about it being 'the one who has hope lives differently', you said.
Yeah. And it does, it really challenges us if we have hope, how are we going to live differently? And yet it's not performative. It's something deeper than that.
Gemma
Yeah. I think at the same time as I'm wanting to say with Pope Benedict, it's not just informative, it's not just about information or an intellectual ascent.
It's performative in that it's something we actually have to do with our lives. I've also said, but it's not about performance. It's not about me getting it right. And for me, the hope is, I know I'm a sinner. I know I'm going to mess it up. I know I'm probably messing it up, even as I speak. But if I have trust, in the power of Jesus in my life, if I have trust in the fact that God's grace is present in so many circumstances that don't have a God label on them, I can believe that life is truly graced even when it's really hard or when there are no signs that anything much good is happening.
And hope seems to me to be given when we believe that God's grace is at work, whether we notice it or not, whether we can name it and see it and pin it down or not.
And the great challenge to us is to have the eyes and ears of our hearts open to notice this, you know, when we come across it.
Joanna
So where do you notice it?
Gemma
I notice it in small acts of kindness. I, you know, my knees are barely out of kilter and I have a folder that's not in great form. And I was carrying a suitcase up a station staircase yesterday. And this man who already had a suitcase on one hand just kind of said, excuse me, can I pick that up for you? And I said, hang on, you've already got one suitcase. He said, no, it doesn't matter. It just balances it out. And up he went, you know. And when I got to the top of the stairs, I said, well, listen, that is your deed for the day. And he just laughed and said, well, we've got to help each other, haven't we?
And it was just this little interchange, this little exchange with a total stranger. But it was this act of kindness that I suppose know, reiterated my hope in human nature. That confirmed my hope that by and large people are good rather than otherwise. And people want to be good and they display that in tiny, unobtrusive, probably fairly insignificant ways. But, but those are perhaps much more important than we give them credit for.
Joanna
It comes down to those little things again, like you said, with the the students coming in and saying, am I getting it right? And in the small that we give God, you know, and the small that we give to each other.
Gemma
Yeah. And, know, I think- I think we make we make a great mistake. And it's a mistake that has really toxic consequences for ourselves. Particularly when when we don't honour the small, when we don't treasure the little, you know.
And there's a lovely bit in Julian of Norwich where she says that 'God doesn't only take notice of the great and noble, he takes notice of the little and the small because nothing shall ever be forgotten.'
Nothing shall be forgotten. That sense of God remembering our slightest good intention. That gives me great hope when I come out of a day and I feel as if I've been charging through the day like a bear with a sore head.
And again, I mean, I'm full of quotations this morning, but The Cloud of Unknowing says, 'it is not what you are nor what you have been, but what you want to be that God sees with merciful eyes'. I find that immensely consoling.
You know, God's not that bothered about our performance. What he's looking about is what's in your heart. You know, what do you want to be? Even if you can't manage it. If I think about people like St. Peter and St. Paul, I mean, they were dreadful people really! You know, St. Paul quarrelled with everybody he'd ever worked with. And St. Peter was always putting his foot in it one way or the other, even after the resurrection.
And yet, you know, here were the two cornerstones of the church. You know, people who got it wrong over and over again, but God saw what was in their hearts. And that to me, that's the bedrock of hope, you know, that that the little we can do actually has immense importance to God.
Joanna
I'm struck by you said about how God sees the small, and I'm just thinking of anybody that might be listening that might be feeling small, might be feeling insignificant, might be feeling forgotten, overlooked. How can any of us at times like that access that hope that is there? Because it's one thing to know that we're not forgotten by God, that we're not overlooked by God. But I'm just wondering how in your daily life, when you perhaps hit times like that, how do you access that sense of hope?
Gemma
Well, the religious order to which I belong, the Congregation of Jesus, was modelled on the Jesuit order that was founded by St Ignatius of Loyola. And Ignatius set huge store by a way of praying, called the examen. I prefer to call it the prayer of awareness, where we become aware by calling to mind by remembering. You know, where have, even in the tiniest things, where have the graces been today of my ordinary everyday experience?
And I have to say, Jo, there are days I have, I know I do, and I imagine a lot of our listeners have, where about the only grace I can think of for today is that it's over. But even little, little things, when we look back at it, it could be, I don't know, an email that I got or I looked out of the window and I saw, you know, the pattern in the clouds and it just looked lovely for a moment or, you know, one of my favourite songs came on the radio.
I mean, something as small as that, but they're all little things that if we take time to go back and think of them and savour them, we see those as moments of light, moments of grace. And maybe if there wasn't anything that we can think of that was a grace or a gift of today, or what about early in the week or what about earlier in our life? Some moment we can go back to and think that was a graced moment.
But I do think the examen is a lovely prayer. And you know, people can pray the examen in whatever way they like. And there's lots of stuff on the internet or there's a wonderful free telephone app called Reimagining the Examen. And it's one of my favourite apps. And it kind of does it all for you. And I like to sit down at the end of day with a cup of tea or if it's a particularly good day, a glass of something slightly more exciting, and just sit in an armchair and just kind of review the video as it were of the day, roll it back and just look, okay, where was I aware of you being present? Where was I aware of the kind of the goodness of the world?
And it could have been something direct, you know, as a sense of God and God's presence, or it could have just have been a chat with the postman or whatever it may be, where there was a sense of gift of grace, of goodness, you know, that we can just savour. I think part of our problem is we're all so busy that we miss the signs, you know? We miss the signs of God trying to say, hello, here I am, you know, and we miss it.
Joanna
Thank you. As we move towards Christmas, I'm just wondering, where do you find hope in the Advent season?
Gemma
Oh, first and foremost in the fabulous readings. I mean, it's like being on a kind month long banquet, you know. And I always I have this very ambivalent attitude towards Advent because I hugely look forward to it because it's my total favourite season of the year. And I always slightly dread it because I know I'm going to miss things because I'm so busy at this time of the year.
But just even just to spend five minutes with one verse of one of the readings, you know:
'The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.'
I mean, I could just sit there and wallow in that sentence for, you know, just to think about Christmas lights. What does it mean for me to be a Christmas light for the world or for who's been a Christmas light for me?
We can take any of those simple things, I think, and just remember the good things that have happened to us or the people who've been good to us or the little moments of gift.
And it's, you know what it's like when you give a Christmas presents to a really small child. I mean, you you've got grandchildren, I bet you've seen this before. You give them the present and they kind of tear open the wrappings and they look at it and they put it down. And what they're really interested in is in the wrapping paper.
And they spend the rest of the afternoon playing with the wrapping paper or the ribbon or something.
You know, God's gifts are a bit like that, I think. Sometimes we just don't take the time to look at the wrappings, look at the little bits and pieces. I think my whole message about hope is, you know, look to the little things, because they are actually, every one of them is a message of hope for us at Christmas.
Joanna
I think that sounds like a really lovely place to end. Look to the little things. Thank you.
And so as you listen today, what struck you about hope and how might looking to the little things help you to notice hope each day and allow that to help you live differently?
Next time on Nunbelieveable, I will be in conversation with Sister Anna, and we will be thinking about peace.