A Call to Communion

The natural world calls us into communion, several times a day. We are invited to drop our version of things, and enter Earth’s understandings, God’s love palpable in created energies.

The other night I was sitting quietly by the Arve, silvery in the twilight, under Saleve, which was blushing a soft pink as the sun left. An adolescent fox came rustling through the bushes and sat down two metres from me, totally intent on human noise on the far side of the river. He still had his grey-brown juvenile coat, and the rich red of adulthood was not yet upon his brushy tail.

As the noise abated, he stood and moved on. In a second he’d detected me, and was gone. I was left with an acute sense of his presence, the total concentration of youth without, perhaps, the wisdom of self-preservation. I knew I’d been invited into his world. I felt the tug of grace.

Edmund Rice International has taken root, like the evening primrose opening their rich yellow blooms in the warm spring twilight, among the youth of the world. It is their eyes and ears, intent on a future that is not ours, that hold our attention. The adolescent fox was vulnerable, but learning. In their poverty, our youth are still offering us a chance to build a better world. It’s a matter of being there, of listening, of communion.