Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast. This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose. I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

C: So welcome Maria, it's really, really lovely to see you again, albeit online.

M: Likewise, thank you.

C: It feels like quite a long time since we've spoken actually.
Was it Advent? Not this Advent, but the past Advent?

C: Yes, so a bit more than a year, yeah.

So what have been the highlights in your life in that time?

M: There have been many, but I suppose the biggest one is that I decided in July last year, well I had decided earlier in the year to retire from the work that I do or have been doing. And I decided that my retirement would start on the 1st of July and it was glorious. I sat here in Ross Trevor and looked down over the mountains and went walking in the woods. But I suppose what it did at that time was it allowed me to root in the village I live in. I remember a number of months even before I decided to retire, I had said at a training I was leading. And we normally ask people to make a declaration of what they say and see now as possible. And at that time I wrote in a notebook, I now stand for the possibility of local rooted beloved community. I think I've always stood for beloved community.

So others might call that the reign of God or the kingdom of God, but a community of belovedness, that's always been my sort of focus. How do you create a space where people know that they are beloved and they belong? But over the past few years, I've been really interested in the alternative pandemic, which never gets spoken of, which is the pandemic of loneliness. And it's considered by many people now who are sociologists and anthropologists that the trajectory of loneliness is on the rise. And one would wonder at a time where people are so connected in so many ways, like we are right now, why it is that at the exact same time, loneliness is increasing. So I got curious and started thinking about, I wonder if all of our ways of connecting, sort of the end point is necessarily not connection. It may be a way of being together like we are now, but maybe it actually doesn't really bear any fruit in terms of people's experience of belonging. Anyway, that was just a thought. My bigger thought was around my own life. And I thought I'm 67, do I want to spend my life so busy in being connected in the ways we are connected now and being connected through my work and being connected through the relationships I've built around my work that I will find myself in my old age, actually lonely where I live. That became a really big question. You know, how do I live now so that I do live a life of connection and belonging until I die? And it's funny because today is the anniversary of my mother's death four years ago today. She died during COVID. And I've been in touch with all of my family this morning and various friends. And the one thing we would all say is that my mother, even during COVID, was deeply connected where she was. Like she was present. She was in relationship. She was in community where she was. She and another lady who, mom died at 87, and Greta, who was still alive and turning 97, Greta and mom were known to be people who attended the funerals of all the people in Mitchellstown who died because they knew them. It was a small town. They knew them and believed in being with people right to the very end. And I realise now that one of the things in all of the places I've lived in, I've never been at people's funerals because I've never known them. I've never known them enough to want to stand beside their families and grieve for the loss of them. So I had a lot of certain things that were going on in my life for about a year. And that led me to think it's time to retire from the work that I do and enter into what it takes to belong at local level. So the highlight that you asked me about is becoming a villager, becoming somebody who lives in a village, loves a village and knows people.

So I stopped in July. I had great plans and I did a lot of what I thought. I thought I'll see what's on in the village, see what I can join to be part of, to get to know people. And I did that magnificently. Mind you, things slow down in the summer, but nonetheless, and it gave me a chance to really get to know people and to show up. Somewhere along the line, I realised that life, really, whatever I want, requires me to get up and show up. It's all very well for me to be thinking about it in my lofty little position up here up a hill in Ross Trevor. It's a whole other thing to actually make the effort of getting up and showing up.

C: Yeah. Yeah.

M: So that I had time to do that. And then I planned a holiday because I always thought it'd be nice to write a little bit towards this stage of my life. So I planned a writing holiday with a friend in Donegal, and that was wonderful. We didn't write much. We had a great time. And then I planned to do a walking retreat in Assisi. And God, I suppose, determined differently because four days before I left, I bent down like any intelligent person does to fix my dishwasher because it was broken and I looked up how to fix it on YouTube. And YouTube suggested that it was probably water stuck in the pan of the dishwasher, the bottom of it. And if I lifted the dishwasher up, it would move the water and the dishwasher would work again. However, I didn't manage to fix the dishwasher and in the process I managed to slip a disc. Ooh, ouch. Which has led to a lot of complications since then, interesting enough. But ultimately there was no Italy. And what it brought was a sitting here, unable to move anything really, like it was terribly so in the beginning, unable to move, sitting, looking down at the mountains, being present. I mean, it stopped me in my tracks to a certain extent, but it also rooted me in that whole word rooted community.

Not just beloved community, but rooted, rooted where I am, rooted not just with people, but rooted in the, I live in a beautiful place. I overlook the forest. I overlook the mountains.

I overlook a valley. I overlook, generally speaking, sheep and lambs at this time of the year and the field in front of me. So, if I never had a single other thing in my life to give me a sense of belonging, I'm surrounded by nature. And that time, those few weeks of just getting used to my bath not working the way it used to, gave me access to that as well as to the people that I wanted to get to know. Those few months, and I say that a few months because I had said to people I was taking time out until October. And listen, Catherine, the minute the 15th of October arrived, I had said the 15th of October as an arbitrary date, I got requests again for work. Literally.

Somebody sent me a message in September and said, are you definitely back on the 15th of October?

Because, so the retirement didn't last. And in fact, my weeks have filled up again and my months have filled up again with busyness. But I realized two things. One is that making a shift or transforming a life doesn't happen overnight just because I wanted to. Like I went back to what was familiar. I went back to my comfort zone. But this year has been almost like a cocoon, that space between one way of being emerging is hopefully a butterfly, but another way of being.

So this year, my plan is I have work until the end of August and I have a big piece of work that I'm involved in. And then to step out of that even notion of work and into the notion of, I suppose, community in its ordinary, everyday, lived reality with local people, community that isn't intent. Most of my life is spent working, supporting people and indeed creating intentional community. This time I want to explore what community looks like when it doesn't have any intention other than being a good neighbor, right? Or being a neighbor, forget good.

So that's where I am really.

C: Yeah, interesting. So are you feeling more connected with your community? Are you more kind of involved or intentionally present despite the fact that you're still working? Has that kind of shifted?

M: What has shifted is all of my, I won't even say commitments, all of my promises that I've made in terms of involvement and whatever are in my diary before I put in any work now. Whereas in the past, my diary, my work diary determined my life.

It determined my belonging locally. It determined everything. Whereas now my community diary, my life diary, it has already started to determine my life or shape. I say yes to and no to.

C: Yeah. Yeah. Those are the kind of the big rocks that you put in first.

M: And I mean, I never did it kind of intentionally. The one thing I knew was that in order to live and die in a healthy way, and I suppose I've learned that from my mom and my parents and indeed my life in a small town, is that once you finish work, unless you're really careful, you can also lose the social connections that are really important for health and well-being.

C: Yeah.

M: So I suppose without even realizing it, and I didn't realize it, but I've put in a whole lot of new social connections that will last me hopefully the length of my life because they're not work connections. They're just connections of being a local woman living locally.

C: Yeah. So tell me again what those three words were about what kind of community you're committing to.

M: Local, rooted, beloved community.

C: Yeah.

M: So it's like going to my own church locally, being part of what's happening locally. It's being part of a crafters group in the Church of Ireland down the road and the local book club.

And there's a pop-up Gaelthacht, I grew up speaking Irish, so there's a pop-up Gaelthacht here in Ross Trierberg on the first Monday of every month. So I go to it, even though my dialect from the south west of Ireland is very different to the Ulster dialect. There's a film club, which I'm part, you know, there's just being part of what's happening at local level.

And I love it. I feel like saying I've come home again to what really I've it's almost like, you know, that song I've been to everywhere, but I've never been to me. Community has always been my passion since I was a very small child. I remember going to mass locally in Mitchels town and everybody, it's a small dairy town, very local town, and everybody had a place in the church. And if they were missing, you worried about them. You knew they were missing. They had their seat. Now, there's pluses and minuses to having your own seat in the church. But one of the pluses is that people know when you're not there and they can check. And you know, the life I was living, Catherine, because I don't have children, nobody would ever know where I was because I was always on the road or out and about. But nobody would necessarily miss me because I wasn't consistently showing up. And it was wonderful, is wonderful to travel and to be out and about in the world. At this stage of my life, it's more wonderful to be home and here or here at home.

Not because I feel old, but because I have been longing for that degree of rootedness.

All of my life and didn't know where to look. And now to discover that it's exactly where I am, it's extraordinary. Yes. Yeah. What have you observed about yourself and what have you observed about your local community that you haven't spotted? Okay. So the first thing is in this place, because I only moved here four years ago, I have no reputation. I have nothing that I can stand on. I can't say, oh, I used to do this or I was that or this was who I was known to be or this is... I don't have it for myself. I mean, I have a little bit of it still because I'm still working, right? But as soon as my work is gone, what also goes with it is some of the places I've stood in the past, like standing on my reputation. And you evidently have that in spades because otherwise people wouldn't have been ringing you on the 15th of October saying, we need you, Maria.

C: Yes.

M: And do you have any idea how lovely that is? It's like, oh, that's important because I'm needed.

Yeah. Now the interesting thing is, I'm not needed in Ross Trevor. Everything that I am involved in Ross Trevor goes on without me. Yeah. Right. But what's really interesting is I love being in those spaces. I very often, if I help out, I'm pouring tea or washing dishes with the whole other group of people who are pouring tea and washing dishes. Right. And just being me without reputation is interesting. I'm going to say it's very freeing. And I remember at one stage there was a man, I don't know if you know him, Indigit Bogle. He was a Methodist. He was at one stage the president of the Methodist church, I think in England, but he was also the leader of the Cori Mila community at one point. And Indigit and I used to meet when I was the leader of Larchand, he was the leader of Cori Mila. We would meet regularly just for a chat. And his big faith quest was to come to know the Jesus who lived without reputation. The man who chose to live without reputation.

And for some reason, because Indigit used to talk about that, I got really interested in what would it be like to live without reputation. And it's only now I'm discovering that being welcomed here in this village is not about doing anything. I'm welcomed. And what I experience is a welcome for who I am. All I have to show up. So when I showed up at various events, I just showed up as somebody who was there without being able to lift trays or I mean, I can wash cups and saucers for a certain length of time and then I can't. But what I experienced was the absolute love and acceptance of everybody else in the room. So somebody would say, is your back OK to do that? Or do you want to step aside? I'll help you. Or young people. I go to a particular event on a Saturday morning and there are some young students and they'd say, Maria, I'll open the door for you. Maria, I'll carry that for you. And in the beginning, it was like, oh, I don't want this. I don't want to be the person that people are helping. But I've lived all my life with people with disabilities and the mystery of their lives is that through their openness to being loved and cared for, helped for the want of a better word, supported at least, they have transformed the lives of thousands of young people around the world, like volunteers who have come to be with our, what we call core members in L'Arche, were transformed not by people who could do everything for themselves, but by the direct opposite, by people that they could experience their own greatness by helping them. So it's my turn. Like I now I'm the person that people say, you know, can I help you? Do you need help? Can I carry that out to the car for you? So I've had to swallow my pride and begin to see with new eyes that those are opportunities for me to chat to those young people. You know, just they're so glad to help me. They see me as an old woman, you know, I mean, can't really see it well on Zoom, but I have quite a bit of silver in my hair now. And they and I'm 67 and for a young teenager, 67 is old. I mean, I suppose because I've lived an interesting life by their standards, they kind of want to know more, but they also want to be the ones who are young and able and support me. I think so what? Like not even so what, but it's my turn. In my lifetime, I've worked 47 years and of those 47, there were 35 of them where I worked with young people and I worked with young people who were volunteering. And 35 of them had me working with people in the margins who created a space of welcome for all those young people to feel like they were grown up. I mean, it gave them a sense of I matter because I can help you.

I matter because I can feed you. I matter because... Now, the whole theology of Larsh, I mean, Larsh has had its difficulties in recent years, particularly, you know, reputationally, which there's that word again. But essentially the whole theology of Larsh is that we meet in our vulnerability and that our vulnerability is the cornerstone of community. It's the cornerstone of belonging. And so it's the theology and for sure it's the theology of a vulnerable Christ. Also that the healing, what we call miracles, were brought about by people needing people who were lying on stretchers. It catalyzed the kind of love that creates miracles. So our core members, that's what we call our people with disabilities, sort of in all the early years of my working life, and it wasn't my working life, it was my life, right? It wasn't my working life.

I never experienced, I have never experienced my life really as work. That's why it's hard to retire. But any of my life, I've never experienced any of my life as work. But essentially I witnessed young people who didn't, who barely knew that they had value leaving Larsh after a year or two knowing who they were. And it wasn't me. My only job was to hold the space so that our vulnerable people in the world could work their magic, could be the space where miracles occurred.

So at a more serious note, like when, and I don't like that my body is struggling, just to be perfectly honest, and I do rail against it a bit, but it's going to happen, like whether it's today or in 10 years time or tomorrow. But what I'd really hope is that as I, I suppose it's a bit like John the Baptist, as I grow small, love will grow big. Love can grow big. And I'm using love as opposed to he in that context. I have witnessed how smallness is miraculous. And now I'm choosing it. Not with huge, big, oh, let me get really small and let me, I have no idea what's going to happen in my life. I live a beautiful, wonderful, big life. Right? Let's not make any mistakes about that. But the little things that have been happening over the past few years in terms of my body are indicative of me needing to step back from the one who does to the one who is, whose presence. I said to you a few weeks ago, I'm really interested in unleashing really the power of love, presence and community. And I'm not going to unleash it in any big grandiose way, but more like unleashing it by just being present in my village. Right? And if somebody comes and they want to chat and have a cup of coffee, I'm available. In fact, I'm not only available, I'm delighted. You know, it's like, I don't have to look at my diary and say, I wonder if I have time. I visited a couple recently, Catherine, and they're an older couple. We won't call them elderly, but they both had very big professional careers and they find themselves now living a new life here in this area. And they're lonely. And one of the partners has the beginnings of confusion and some dementia. But I met them at a book festival locally and a woman in question said to me one day, would you visit us? And I said, yeah, of course. And I did like I always do. I said, of course, without putting a date in my diary. Or like I often do. For my, I mean, for every work commitment, I have a date in my diary. Right? For every commitment when it involves others in that way. But I didn't put a date in my diary. And so the weeks went on and the months went on and I got a message, a Facebook Messenger message from the same lady. And she said, are you still thinking of visiting us? And I said, of course, of course. Now, after Christmas, I'll come. And after Christmas came and went. After Christmas wasn't a date in my diary.

I would never do that in a working arrangement. I'd meet you after Christmas. And then sometime after Christmas, I got another message saying, it would still be lovely to see you.

C: Oh, bless her.

M: So I went a few weeks ago and I called in and I can tell you, there is very little that has happened in the past year that moved me, touched me, inspired me and made me feel valuable as much as that hour I spent with them. Because they're magnificent human beings and they're lonely. And she had made a lovely little lunch for me with, you know, little canapes, all simple and tea and coffee, but all really simple. And I sat there and shouted and we talked about what they love and what I love. And now, like now I want my diary to have regular times where I experience their presence in my life, because it wasn't like visiting somebody who you're doing something for. It was like visiting two human beings who love company.

And kind of isn't that all of us?

C: Yes. So would you yet call them friends?

M: Yes, I would actually, to be honest. I loved them. I love them both. I love their talking about what they miss about their lives, the loss of their lives, the moments that they, particularly the husband, he wants to hang on to because it still makes them feel valuable. You know, the moments he was a teacher of, you know, making a difference in students' lives, like wanting to be known for more than just the forgetfulness that is his cross. And listening long enough and being with them in such a way that to hear what matters to him, but just knowing that if I listen, I'll hear him again and he'll hear me. You know, it's not like I'm just hearing, but that space in which there's no rush. There's just us. We're all of a certain age where we have time to be with one another and just the joy of us really. And if I'm ever going to make a difference in the trajectory of loneliness, it will only be that way. I can talk about it. I can write articles about it.

I can do a lot about it, but can I be the possibility of connection?

C: Yeah.

M: I could write a book about loneliness, but it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference.

Or it might, but I think what makes a difference is showing up and being connected.

C: Yes.

M: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know, I met a man recently in the library, local library. I went down quickly to try and some books and it was an older man who had taken a bus into the library and he goes there every single day at 10 o'clock.

And that'll tell you what time he has to be up. Right. And he goes there because he said, it's lonely at home. So he goes there in the hope of meeting someone and he always meets people.

But like, he's like this little Buddha in the middle of the library.

You know, that's making our lives matter. He's open and thirsty for connection.

Connection isn't a concept for him. Connection for him is life itself.

I remember that reminds me of another man when I was really busy and I was in Larsh years ago, the leader of Larsh Ireland. And so I was travelling all the time and had a briefcase with me when I was travelling and had a laptop that I could use on the train. You know, that kind of lifestyle Catherine, like it's our lifestyle nowadays. But there was a man, I went to the, I travelled a lot by train and there was a man who used to sit in the same place, in the same carriage. The days I was there, he was always there. And as you do, you become habituated to one seat. So I always sat in the same place as well, in the same carriage.

And one day my seat was gone. Right. And the only place to sit was beside him. And it was annoying to me at the time because I thought, oh, when I had my own seat, I could do my work and be ready when I got to Dublin for my meeting. But on this day I was sitting beside him and I couldn't, it would have been really rude, I won't say bad, to take out my computer instantly.

So I turned to him and said, I see you often on the train. And he said, yeah, I'm on the train every single day. And I said, are you? And I said, are you working in Dublin?

And he said, no, no, no, love, I retired a few years ago. And he said, my wife died since I retired. And he said, and you know, the house is terribly cold and I don't have a lot of money so I can't heat it. So I said, I discovered that with free travel, I can travel down to Dublin in the morning. I can get a cup of coffee cheap on the train. I eat something down in Connolly station and it's always, you can get good chips and burgers. And he went down to tell me, his usual guys. And then I come home in the afternoon train and that's my day. And I'm lovely and warm and I meet people and it takes away the loneliness. And he lives in me. I think of his courage. I think of his creativity. I mean, flip it, it's not a bad way to live. You know, we could be judging, we could say the poor old man, but what wisdom there is to get out every day and meet people. All he was doing was getting up and showing up and transforming the life of somebody like me who was not showing up in every moment, who was getting up, but living the future 10 miles down the road. You know, that laptop wasn't about being present on the train. That laptop was being about being present four hours later at a meeting. Yeah, I wasn't showing up. I think you asked me like, what is new? What is new in my life is I understand that being here is way more important than being there. Being here right now in this moment is all that really matters.

And most of us want it, but are terrified of it.

C: What do you think it is that terrifies us of it?

M: I don't know. I think there's always in our imagination a better place, which we might call there. It's almost like if it wasn't like this, then it could be like that.

Because being here means being with the good days and the good moments and the more complicated moments. And there are emotions that arrive in the here that don't always... Like today is the fourth anniversary of my mother's death. I think I might have said that, but she died during Covid.

Yeah. And I almost walked past it this morning because I was coming onto this call with you.

I almost forgot. Right. And yet today is a really important day in my life because it's sad. I miss her. Yeah. Right. I mean, so the sadness can actually be painful. Sadness is painful. Grief hurts. Like whatever we love, we lose. That's the truth of life. And I love my mother. I sometimes wish that nobody ever had to die. But I wish that my mother could have lived forever. I miss picking up the phone to her. And one of the things I thought about this morning was, you know, in the Catholic tradition, in the tradition of saints, and it's not just Catholic, but in the very uniquely Irish Catholic tradition, saints days are important. And my mother did a huge devotion to Saint Joseph. And today is the feast day of Saint Joseph in the Catholic lectionary.

And I nearly went past that, too. I was so busy thinking about what would you and I talk about.

And then straight after this, I've got to go somewhere else and then somewhere else. And I'm doing a Lenten reflection later on. So I was in all of those places, but not here.

And eventually, suddenly, when I was reading the scripture text this morning, I realized, today's mom's anniversary. And I started thinking about her devotion to Saint Joseph.

And I started thinking about her being the daughter of my mother. One of the things that struck me about Saint Joseph was the line in his dream, "Be not afraid. Do not be afraid." He had the dream. He wanted to be righteous. He wanted to be faithful. He wanted, but he couldn't.

And then he had a dream. And the dream said, "Don't be afraid." And it was a crazy dream, but he honored it. And I realized that my mother, her entire life, was given by that text, "Do not be afraid," because she had lots to be afraid of. There were lots of things in my family that were complicated and her family before my family that were complicated, as every family.

It didn't say, "Don't feel afraid." It said, "Don't be afraid." That's what Jesus always says, "Do not be afraid." And so I found myself thinking, "Mom felt afraid." I remember her saying at one stage, because nobody would ever have known that she felt afraid, ever. I remember saying to me one time, "Don't be fooled, Maria. I'm scared by every single thing." And she said, "But you can't live in that. You have to move on. You have to step into the world and just get on with it." And I realized this morning that her getting on with it was that very text, "Do not be afraid." I mean, I think there's a book written, "Feel the fear and do it anyway." It's not so much do it in resistance to the fear, but step into the fear and step up and step out again. And when you ask me, "Why are we afraid? Why am I afraid of the being here?" The being here allows everything to arise.

Being there distracts me. So being there this morning distracted me from just the grief of the loss of my mother. But it also brought me to the place of realizing that I can be here and feel all that is in the present moment. But I can also trust that be not. I don't have to be fear.

I can feel it and then I don't have to be it. And I think, Catherine, in our world at the moment where we're being bombarded by fear, where it looks like fear is the ultimate reality in so many ways now. Government changes, what looks like dictatorships rising to the fore. If I keep running as I have been, you know, like we all do, running into better places in my imagination or better busyness that keeps me distracted, I never get to stop long enough to recognize the love that is always, always present and that people are good and that essentially the world is good and will never be otherwise. I never get to step into the truth that gives me life.

You know, if I don't show up for all of it, I don't really have access to any of it. Does that make sense? It's like I'm on the run. I'm on the run from all of my concepts and my notions and what the media says and what the world is telling us. I'm living a life that's given by fear. Fear that I'm not enough. Fear that if I grow old, I'll be fragile and have nobody. Fear that. Fear that.

There's a million things. I can conjure up any picture from fear, right? But love doesn't live there. My discovery in Ross Trevor, I think, is that love lives in the present moment. I knew it with my head, but now I'm discovering it. That the place that I'm reminded, which is like the Saint Joseph line, which is be not afraid. Of course you're afraid, but be not afraid. Of course you feel afraid. So I think that's what I'm learning. And funny, it's probably what all of the people with, that the world would say has disabilities, have disabilities. It's probably what they know and have always known and are there and ready to offer themselves to us so that we can encounter love in all the tiny moments, like in the tiny moments. So I was thinking about my mom and I was thinking, she really was a daughter of the God who is. Do not be afraid. And I realized I'm her daughter, so I may also be the daughter of the God who is. Do not be afraid. And using be rather than feel. I don't hear God saying, "Don't feel afraid." I hear God saying to me in my fear, "But Maria, don't be afraid." Because too many of us are being afraid.

Most of us are being afraid in our world today, even though it doesn't always look like that.

C: Yeah. So much of what goes on is kind of an outworking of that fear, isn't it?

M: Yeah. It's kind of like fear is what gives us the shape of our lives at the moment.

And I am saying right now that we can have a different life if we allow love to be what gives us the shape of our lives. If we start to see where love is and grow it.

C: Yes.

M: Because there's always in the being in the present moment or the present place, there is always a choice about what element of that you sit with, isn't there? So, we are on the planet in a geopolitical environment. We are in that place. But we are also washing teacups with friends. MS. Yeah. And there's someone going to say to you, "How are you?" And someone's going to ring you and somebody's going to send you a message on your birthday to say that they love you. And we discount all of those. It's like they're lovely in the moment, oh that's great.

But we don't actually stop to read that birthday card that says, "I'm so glad you're here with us." And let it in. It's like that whole idea of the negative bias, like that we have a bias towards danger in order to survive. So, we're in survival mode. And right now in our planet, it seems like we're being constantly told we won't survive, we won't survive. So, we're being constantly pushed into survival mode, which is to look out for danger and to either defend ourselves against it or protect those we love from it. Whereas there is another much, much quieter energy, right? Like our little Buddha in the library, or our couple who are living a very quiet life with simple little canopy lunches, or a child who says hello to you in the street wearing a St. Patrick's Day wig. You know, they're the moments that I want to sit down at night and grasp as being every bit as important as anything I've heard on the news about the American president.

C: Yeah, we can do nothing about that. The weekend that I'd had a conversation with somebody from my family who was insisting that people are generally horrible, that was a sort of view of life. And sort of in the couple of weeks around that, I need to give you a little bit of backstory.

We live in a little street in the city, we're kind of in the suburbs a bit. And our street ends with a canal. And there's a gate onto the canal. Interestingly, there didn't used to be a gate there apparently. But before we moved here, the neighbours next door to us wanted access to the canal for some disabled people that they worked with, and they wanted to take them on walks. So they just single handedly created a gate. So there is now a big gate and there's a little sort of footpath space. My husband was widowed six months before lockdown, and there's all of that kind of clearing out a house that we still have. And in his house was this sort of goose that's been hanging on the wall for ages. And I think, I don't know where it came from, I think they picked up because they quite liked it. It's kind of a big wooden goose that was probably hanging outside somewhere and it had been in their house. And what do we do with the goose? And Stephen said, well, we could put it on the gate. People might quite enjoy seeing the goose. So he screwed the goose to the gate. And I'd sort of thought, well, I hope people don't mind the goose and they don't think that we've kind of imposed the goose upon everybody, you know, because we put it there.

And it was there for a couple of months. And then somebody had obviously decided to just pull the goose off of the gate. And we found part of the, the body of the goose was in the canal and the head of the goose had just disappeared. And so we kind of fetched the body of, this is a silly, but anyway, it's small things.

M: It's small things, isn't it?

C: Anyway, so, so we fetched the body of the goose out of the canal and Stephen said, well, maybe we'll find the head or maybe somebody will spot it. And I felt quite shy about this. But he said, well, put a note on the local Facebook page, put a note to say that we're looking for the goose head.

M: Brilliant. I love it.

C: But I felt really shy about that because I don't particularly, you know, it felt a bit of a public thing to do about something that I was a little bit worried that people, because we hadn't asked anybody's permission, we'd just sort of done it. And then there were lots of messages that really touched my heart. People saying, oh, we really miss the goose and isn't it a shame. And quite a few people being a bit kind of cross about, oh, that's what people do to nice things.

But the fact that people had kind of welcomed this bit of frippery that we'd stuck there, blessed me and we'd sort of looked for it. And eventually there'd been some bits of wood that Stephen had used to screw the goose to the gate and he took them down. He said to me, but I'd, I'd had this feeling that the end of the story hadn't quite happened yet. And then somebody knocked on my door that obviously worked out which house was mine and who I was. I think I'm more visible in my community than I think. Anyway, this guy knocks on the, knocks on the door and he'd found his wife had seen the goose head in the canal. And so he came with his little dog and it was dripping wet. So he'd returned the head of the goose to us. And so we were able to kind of mend it and put it back on the gate. So I just put a photo of it on Facebook restored.

And lots of people have kind of, they're still doing it. So, so kind of, I still get notifications to say that somebody has liked the picture of the goose back on the gate. And there it is, a little thing,

M: But it is the little things, you see, I like having lived in Northern Ireland, one of the things that I'm 100% certain of is love leaves no mark. Like fear leaves wounds, it leaves scars. You know, we talk about building peace and where we go to look at building peace is where there's, you know, walls with barbed wire on the top or there's, but you know, like living here, I've always been saying this, is we don't ever get to build peace.

We get to look for where it's present because it's already here. Peace isn't something you can build.

Peace isn't something that you find in the rubble of war and then build, right? Because what you're doing is building no war, but peace is in the, oh, there it's at the moment. At one stage, I was involved in making a documentary called The Window in the Wall and it's been able to see where peace is. And we asked a group of very involved community workers and politicians to a dinner, special dinner. I was doing this with an American filmmaking group. And so we hosted a dinner and the question was around the table was, what do you say peace is? These are all peace builders.

And I come back to your thing about love. And one woman said, I know I shouldn't say this.

Really, she said, like, I know that this is going to sound stupid, but what would be peace for me, she said, is if I went home in the evening and my children all sat around the table and said, dinner was lovely, ma'am. And if my husband was there able to support me instead of being at work and I have four children, I've come home busy, she said, I just want a moment of peace.

And I realized then that they're the moments, the moment when you're feeding four hungry children and they say that was lovely, ma'am. That's the moment of peace. It leaves no mark. No one will see it. It's unspectacular. And I think love is unspectacular. You have, when I say spectacular, it's almost invisible. You have to have the eyes, as Jesus used to say, if only you had the eyes.

You have to have the eyes to look, to know that it's there all the time and to keep your eyes open for its presence. And that story you tell is a perfect story of in the small, small, invisible, what seems like unimportant things. But it is powerful though, Maria. It's difficult to admit just how scared I was of posting on Facebook to say, if you find the goose head, will you bring it back? And you know, your description of I need to not live in the fear. I need to be not afraid.

C: It did take more courage than I would care to admit.

M: Of course it would. What fool is going to put up a message about a goose and a head?

That's all. It's the foolishness of love. You know, that reminds me and I know I'm caught in scripture. I love scripture, not necessarily as something that absolutely is true, but as continual story about humanity. And when Paul says, what God kept hidden from the wise was revealed to the foolish. Love is foolish. I can't tell you how empowering and courage creating that response of everybody else. You know, the, the positivity of everybody saying, oh, we liked the goose. We miss it. Or we really chuffed with its back. And it's, it's incredible that suddenly I have, I understand it more firmly in my community with more courage and with my shoulders slightly more sort of raised and confident just because of...

Yeah, because it doesn't have to be anything big. And might God rest her soul again, my mother comes to mind, she used to always say, nobody ever found heaven by following a sad saint.

C: Yeah.

M: And I think there's such wisdom in that. And we can be so caught up in how it should be and how it could be and how we need to sound like we have something to say, and we have to have a bit of gravitas. You know, I often feel that, I don't know if you know the story of Pollyanna, but people often say to me, you're just a Pollyanna. Well, I think I'd rather be a Pollyanna who believed in mystery and love and miracles than an old cynic who believed that everything was dangerous and nobody was good. And, you know, I believe firmly that life is good, people are good. And when I think of our people, that again, as the world kind of says disabilities, I'm not going to say that they do. I'm going to say that they have amazing abilities of the heart that can reveal love.

I ran retreats for a number of years called pearls, hidden pearls. And pearls were people who have an extraordinary ability to reveal love. People with an extraordinary ability to reveal love. I don't know if you ever heard of this man called Cáil Dáilí. He was the primate of the Catholic Church in Ireland for many years. And I knew him because he lived near us on the Ormaw Road where our first large community house was in Belfast. And I used to meet him for tea. And he always poured me tea in China cups and there was always cake and it was lovely. He was in his 90s.

But when he died, he left a diary. And in that diary, it said, I spent my life thinking about love. I spent my life talking about love. I spent my life encouraging my priests to think about love and talk about love. I asked myself now, did I ever really know love at all? And then he went on to say, love is a quiet underground revolution. And I hear myself being asked, will you be a revolutionary for love? And I remember hearing that one night when I was on retreat in the monastery down the road from here, a Benedictine monastery, at midnight on New Year's Eve, because that's when Cáil Dáilí died. And I remember thinking, that's who I will be. A revolutionary in a quiet underground revolution. And I'm writing a blog just to get myself to get my appetite for writing. I'm writing a blog at the moment and it's just simply, it's called I am with you. And it's really about revealing the hidden leadership or those people who are the leaders, the actual leaders of our time, those people who have the capacity to reveal love in the fullness of its existence. And you said the word you use, the power of love, right?

I do not believe that our world and that our universe and that all of creation is destined for awfulness. This is a time we have to go through because we have stopped being able to see love in action. We've been so busy, many of us. I've been, I'd speak about me. It's only now when I stop, I really see what I've been talking about all through the years.

You know, like the Cardinal said, I've been doing about rather than being it. I've been making choices that have been based on a philosophy and that's wonderful. Now my choices are about being with people and being present. And it's not better or worse. It's like it takes a lifetime to get here and there's more to go. And I'm not here because I still am very happy to say yes to too many things. Let's not imagine that this is some magic formula, but little by little, a different world is showing itself to me. And little by little, I'm saying yes. Yeah. And that little by little, I think you said you can't change a life in one moment. No, because it's transformation.

It's what's happening is it's a matter of being transformed to being more fully who I am, maybe who I was sent here to be. Catherine, we know each other somewhat. We're getting to know each other more, but like I am such a playful little girl and always was. And I hear myself saying so often to anything I'm asked to do, that'll be great fun. It's like everything shows up for me as the possibility of being great fun. I now want to come out 100% as a woman of great fun, rather than what I've been hiding behind, which is Maria has, you know, she's a wise woman and she's very responsible and she's very capable and she's very even inspiring. They're all reputations and identities, which are wonderful. Nothing wrong with any of them, but who I really am and always have been is a playful soul. And this is the time. Get up, show up and play loads.

C: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And you can play and be wise all at once. That would be fun too.

M: Well, I suspect that any wisdom I might have, any wisdom, and I'm not claiming any of it, but any wisdom may come from the fact that I have fun rather than that I have serious thoughts about stuff. Do you know, I have plenty of serious thoughts about stuff, but so do millions of other people. Right? We all have serious thoughts about stuff, but I've always thought, because I've been, over the years, people have said, for instance, when I was small even, you're Pollyanna. You're a real Pollyanna. I've always been ashamed of that in some way and felt like I should have more gravitas. So I spent my whole life seeking gravitas. And it's like, it's 100% not who I am.

And the only times I've ever felt like I was out to play is when I was with people with disabilities who were equally out to play with me. And we had a ball, but in our community homes. But now I'm thinking I'm going to have, I'm going to have great fun in my village, in the street, in public.

I'm going to say hello to everybody unashamedly. I'm going to wear bright, ridiculous green on St.Patrick's Day and ridiculously sparkling clothes at Christmas and for Christmas. You know, I'm going to come out as the Pollyanna that I actually am.

C: Yeah. Yeah.

M: And maybe nobody will ever say, my God, did you hear what Maria Garvey had to say?

I don't care. I used to care. And now I think, so bloody what?

So there was a woman, and I'll finish with this, Gillian, who was our first person that we welcomed to Larch in Belfast. And she was a troubled we soul, a really troubled we soul. But she and I were great buddies. And I discovered very early on that she really needed clowning as a therapy.

She thrived on it. So anyway, I rang various, I looked and see was there such a thing as therapeutic clowning, not doctor clowning, but therapeutic clowning. And I discovered, lo and behold, there was. And the reason that I found it was I had rung the children's hospice here for children who were dying and said, do you know if there's such a thing as therapeutic clowning? And I told him about our Gillian. And I said, I said, you know, she really does need some clowning. Right. And they said, no, we don't have it, but you sound like the perfect person.

So off I went, I looked it up online, went to Canada. Three weeks later, the woman who ran the therapeutic clowning, a woman called Joan Barrington was running a program in Toronto.

And she offered me a free place, full training, 20 hours contact time and accommodation if I paid for the flight. So off I went, packed my bags and trained as a therapeutic clown, believe it or not, in the hospital. But the thing that I learned about clowning, which worked for Gillian afterwards, was the gift of a clown to a child who's dying. I worked with children who were dying in Sick Kids Hospital. The children who are dying in Catherine, everything shows up for them as abusive.

Their parents crying somehow or other is traumatic. The injections, lines into their bodies, everything is, they go often in diapers, like all of that, they experience abuse. There's 57 experiences of abuse per day is the research. But the role of the clown is to have no authority to walk into the child's room, but to be so small that the child feels big, even if the child is dying. So my clown stood outside the bedroom of a child who was dying and just sent in my finger to say hello. And I mean, my clown was just waiting to be welcomed. And eventually the little girl's finger moved and my clown finger moved, ran back to me at the door and said, "Whoa, you went to the door?" in gibberish. And eventually the little girl's hand moved with a cannula where she was being kept alive. And my little clown self went in and painted a picture of a flower around her cannula and then kissed her hand and said, "Bye, bye." Enough I went. And her parents came to me that night and said, and I remember I was only training, they said, "Thank you for giving us back our little girl. She passed away just now." So what I want to say to you is in that moment I knew that who I really am is smaller than the smallest child. And that's the fun bit of me. It's like just play. You know, and I went back and Gillian and I, I said to the assistants, you know, be the clown outside Gillian's door. Do not be assuming that because you have a role in relation to her that you have the authority to walk into her room uninvited. And the second thing was whenever Gillian and I were together, we always spoke in gibberish. She could speak, but didn't. And I'd say, "Oh, do you want, oh, do you want?" Meaning it's a hard day. And she would go, "Hey, boy, do you want to go to your house?" And I'd go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." We had 100% full blown conversations without speaking a single word except for gibberish. That was her language. That was her language.

So I just want to offer you that because I think love speaks in gibberish. Maybe I should write that on my blog, but I do think that. And it's my time for gibberish really.

C: Yeah. Oh, there's been so much, so much in that conversation. Thank you so much, Maria.

M: You are so welcome, my dear. What a space you create. It's amazing. A space for love. You are.
This podcast is a space where love can show up. So thank you.

C: Oh, thank you.

[Music] Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can email lovedcalledgifted@gmail.com. You can find a transcript of this podcast at lovedcalledgifted.com. And that's also the place to go if you're interested in the Loved Called Gifted course, or if you'd like to find out about spiritual direction or coaching. Thank you for listening.