Celebrating 30 years

Solemnity of Corpus Christi 2008

A few months ago I was in the Limerick Youth Service in Glentworth Street when Deputy Enda Kenny came there to meet some of the young people of Limerick. Many of them were from Moyross. They expressed constructive, practical ideas about their neighbourhoods and what might be done to address the issues they face. But the thing that struck me most during the discussion was how often those who came from Moyross said things like: “We are proud of Moyross; it’s a great place with great people; but there is a small minority who mess it up for everybody else.”

The thirty years of Corpus Christi Parish clearly demonstrates that there are great people here: the community of Moyross does not lack the ideas, the commitment or the potential leadership that will be needed so that the Regeneration Project will bear fruit.

Of course there have been struggles for the last thirty years. The community was built without the services that are necessary –recreational facilities, shopping centre and so on. But from the beginning, there were people working for the well being of the parish and especially of the generation which grew up here over the last thirty years. They were given encouragement and resources by priests and sisters and teachers and community Gardaí and by other bodies. We remember all of them this afternoon and we offer our prayers for those who have died that they are receiving the reward of their efforts.

The young people were right. This is a great place with great people, in which many have worked to bring about the fulfilment of what the reading tells us we are: one single body”. Families have brought up their children with love and wisdom and courage. The school has worked with vision and care; you can see that as soon as you go in the door. There are groups of all kinds. I think of all that goes on in the Community Centre and in the Bays, Céim ar Céim and the Corpus Christi Band, which will, I believe be playing for us afterwards. This is a parish in which lots of good things are happening.

When the young people spoke to Enda Kenny, they kept repeating that this is a great community and that there are great people here. Whether they realised it or not, they were saying that this parish lives up to its name. We are Corpus Christi, which means, we are the Body of Christ: “although there are many of us we are one single body”.

Understanding that we are God’s People, we are the Body of Christ points us towards the central idea of our Christian faith. Pope Benedict told us what that is: we believe in God’s love for us. That is what we are celebrating in the Eucharist and what today’s readings tell us: God is always with his people. He was with them for forty years as they travelled through the desert. He guided them on a journey where they were threatened by fiery snakes and scorpions. Many times on that long journey, they were tempted to give up hope.

In the desert there was no water and nothing to eat. Just when they felt that they were going to be overcome by hunger and thirst, he fed them and brought water out of the rock. The message of the first reading is that God never abandons us. When we feel most lost and most threatened, that is when we can know that he is travelling with us.

The same God has been with this parish on your journey of thirty years. Today we hope for all sorts of things; we hope that the regeneration process will bear fruit for Moyross; we hope for our personal ambitions to be fulfilled; we hope that people who are sick will get better. But we know that even if every hope we ever had was fulfilled, there is more to us than that. We are made for a happiness that we will share with each other, a happiness that we cannot even imagine.

There is only one hope that really satisfies us, one hope that can answer all our longings. That is the hope that God gives us. That is the hope that we celebrate in the Mass when we receive the Body of Christ and when we become more and more the Body of Christ.

“The Body of Christ is the bread which has come down from heaven… anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.” This is not like ordinary bread; it is not like our ordinary hopes. When we work together to make our community better, we know that there will always be more to do, we know that some of our plans may not work out as we hoped. But we are the Body of Christ – we live in Jesus and he lives in us. His life is growing in each of us and in our community – that is why no hope is too big for us.

Our efforts, even if they don’t turn out exactly as we hoped, will go to make up a future that we cannot even imagine. Nothing that is done for the good of others is ever lost. All of the things that we are grateful for in the last thirty years are part of that hope. Everything good that we have done and achieved will find its place in the Body of Christ living forever as Jesus promised. And everything good that we do in the coming years too is part of that promise and that hope. May the coming years see many more hopes fulfilled and many more reasons for young people to be able to say that they are proud of Moyross.

+Donal Murray