On the Margins

Stories & spritual reflections from meeting those on the margins of society.

About me

Index

Psychotherapy Service & Contact Details

Medjugorje LGBT Ministry

  • Shame and Shaming Does Not Justice Make

    Throw away the key’ is a term applied by some, to most if not all, of the men and women I have worked with in prison, probation and policing. It’s a term informed by hatred of a person rather than an informed understanding of how that person behaved at a particular moment in time. The term holds an implied wish to impart suffering rather than a restorative, redemptive justice.

    It’s an appalling indictment on the UK Government that, on an almost daily basis I am reminded how such a revengeful wish can also inform the thinking of politicians and government ministers.

    It never takes very long for statements made by desperate prime ministers to make claims about how they will reap revenge on those who do wrong. In a barely disguised wish to shame and humiliate, it’s not that long ago the UK government announced a plan to make people sentenced to community service wear hi viz jackets identifying them as such. Such thinking can only be recognised as abusive and deeply inhumane.

    Such public labelling repeats the very experiences of what often informs the early lives of many who offend. What we in criminal justice attempt to achieve is to address the unhealed trauma of the past by facilitating the growth of self-esteem, self-worth, self-respect and, crucially important, the instillation of hope. It is these aspects of the human condition that prevent re-offending. Since when did public humiliation ever serve to redeem and make whole again? Never. It cannot.

    Acts of revenge, naming and shaming are dangerous., They are also especially damaging when done to the powerless by those in power. Shaming and humiliation are never useful experiences, they are weapons of abuse. Having commissioned an offence people, starting out on a journey of reparation, require every encouragement to change and to be different. The most powerful motivating factor is for them to grow and discover hope.

    Labelling someone as bad at that point, at any point, removes the essential essence required to change, live and remain living. That essential essence being hope.

    No one therefore has such a right to ‘throw away any key’ in whatever way they choose to do it or imply it. As a forensic clinician, I learned early on, no matter what psychological torment or anguish I was being asked to address, my main task was the instillation of hope. For without hope little else is possible. Without hope, what are we?

    During my year of specialising in the treatment of trauma at the Tavistock Clinic. I was privileged to be tutored by Caroline Garland. It was Caroline who introduced me to the term ‘the instillation of hope’ She described hope as like a mineral, it grows and diminishes according to its environment and treatment. In the lives of the many I have worked with I have now seen this process repeated many times.

    There are two environments that have taught me most about the instillation of hope. I know both environments well; the prison and the monastery. Without a doubt they are both most certainly places where the human experiences of hope and expectation manifest in their fullest. On arrival in both settings much has usually occurred in the external world to have diminished hope to the point where there is often little if any left. In the solitude and separation provided by both settings, and contrary to often naïve public understanding, both prison and monastery provide the ideal conditions for hope to grow and be lived again.

    Both Prison and monastery, if allowed and resourced, to fulfil their task will make clear the potential of a future, a vision and a way forward.

    Hope is not to be found in complex interventions, formation programmes or expensive schemes. It is found and manifest in human connection, in human valuing one to another where the harms of the past are not repeated. Human connection can be as simple as a smile. On a prison landing a smile and a authentic greeting can be immensely powerful. Many prisoners over the years have taken time to thank me just simply for that.

    Across the world, in prisons and monasteries, there are awesome examples of manifest hope and transformation arising from environments where a sense of connection and being in the mess of life together has been allowed and nurtured.

    In a humane society we can all share in the responsibility of holding hope for others and indeed playing an active part in hopes installation. The main resource we can offer is ourselves. We know that it is the relationship we establish with those who have offended that can provide often longed for experiences of safe connection. Our relationships can offer the experience of a secure attachment. Such relationships founded in hope affords respect and dignity. When founded in authenticity, hope is installed and lives are changed.

    To identify someone who has offended by dressing them up in a labelled hi viz jacket comes from a sadistic mindset. It is vile and beyond the sacredness of humanity. In the redemption of the world, we are all called to be so much more than that.

    Br Stephen Morris FCC

  • Meeting Ourselves in Silence

    ,

    “Silence teaches us to go down inside ourselves to find real life rather than to reach for it always and forever outside ourselves”.

    So, Sr. Joan Chittister reminds us.

    I witness much fear in the consulting room, but none compares with that which some show in the presence silence. It requires much effort to resist the compulsion to break a silence, especially when the client appears tortured by it. Some just won’t allow it. But if real life is to be found then, allowing it, we must. If silence allows for a meeting with our real selves surely this is something to not just be welcomed and encouraged, but also something to be celebrated.

    Such a fearful response reveals how so many carry an image of themselves as someone who is so horrific as to be not allowed and therefore distracted from at every possible opportunity. Such are the tragic consequences of internalised toxicity rooted in experiences of shaming, humiliation, rejection not being ‘good enough’ and of course being considered ‘other’. No wonder the noise of life has become so essential. Silence for many is a risk too great.

    However fact remains, emergence of the real self absolutely does require silence. How else in this world will it ever get a chance? Silence provides us with the harrowing ground of the soul. It breaks up the clods and boulders of our lives. It roots out the weeds, it levels the rocky and unstable ground in which we’ve grown.

    When silence faces us with our own cries of fear, pain and resistance then the knowing of ourselves is without doubt happening. It is only in silence that these things can be addressed and only by that process can the real self emerge.

    Getting beyond the fear of real self and silence, means disengaging from all that blocks us and keeps us separated from whom we really are and have ever been.

    It is in silence that fear can be confronted and its darkness removed. It is in silence that we move into greater light and growth. This very process of darkness into light, inherent in nature, is constantly occurring all around us. We need silence to notice and in noticing be assured.

    Silence is not to be restricted to the limits of the clinicians consulting room, vital in fact that its not. The therapy room is by its nature removed from real life. At best it is a box of mirrors. No, real life happens outside the therapy room and it is in real life that we so need to allow for, integrate and enable occasions of crucial life giving silence.

    This wonderful quote from Leslie Kane provides encouraging example on example of allowed for silence in daily life and where we don’t need to have a word:

    “The dumb silence of apathy, the sober silence of solemnity, the fertile silence of awareness, the active silence of perception, the baffled silence of confusion, the uneasy silence of impasse, the muzzled silence of outrage, the expectant silence of waiting, the reproachful silence of censure, the tacit silence of approval, the vituperative silence of accusation, the eloquent silence of awe, the unnerving silence of menace, the peaceful silence of communion and the irrevocable silence of death Illustrate by their unspoken response to speech that experiences exist for which we lack the word”.

    Silence can begin today, it can fill today and can start by courageously asking the most challenging question of all: What is it that we are hiding from that our flight into noise holds at bay?

    Br. Stephen Morris fcc

  • The Full Stops of Life

    I am working with six people at the moment where, directly or in some other way, all are telling me; ‘I’m not sure how much of myself is real anymore’. It takes a lot of humility for that statement to be made. But in prisons up and down the land, custody suites and courts, it is something I have often heard. It is perhaps among the most useful realisations anyone can ever have. The tragedy is that it often takes an experience of prison, or some other ‘full stop’ in life, to cause the issue of the false self to be recognised and spoken of.

    To just be ourselves is not easy anymore. All forms of media tell us where to go, what to do, to buy, to own and how to look. The process of getting, hoarding things and hiding things in order to meet these demands and create a public image smothers life even before it starts. When enough is never enough, happiness is always just out of reach and unrest is pervasive.

    It is often the search to get enough that ends up for many in prison and if not the brick and mortar kind then one of our own making. As Sr Joan Chittister reminds us; The truth is that too much of anything erodes its essential power. Too much partying leads to a loss of concentration. Too much travel leads to exhaustion. Too much make-up distances us from the glow of the natural. Too much self-talk identifies us as narcissists. Too much posturing, too much affect, too much drama leaves us clown like and alone on the stage of life. There’s no one to talk to because few are really sure enough who this person is to risk interaction.

    Indeed, too much of anything robs us of the rest of ourselves. It cuts us off and separates us from others. But of greater concern and pain it also separates us from ourselves.

    So, when someone at the start of their work with me is able to state they no longer know who they are, it heralds the start of a challenging process in which pretence in its many layers starts to fall away and a more real authentic person emerges.

    The falling away process nearly always involves the letting go of complexity. The letting go of everything that we have invested in to meet the need of ‘enough’. Only to find that, as we shed it layer by layer, it has only covered up everything that we always ever had. So, although at the start the falling away is feared and experienced as loss, it really is a process of much gain.

    Being simple in our place in the world and by not playing at being anything we are not, we start to be all that we have always been. If we are content with less than the latest of everything, we cannot be frustrated by the fact that others have newer, better versions of anything. If what we have does everything we need to have it to do, why bother to want it to be bigger and better?

    Importantly, if we are content with who we are, we can’t be insulted by anybody. Nor then we will doubt or despise ourselves. We will know who we are and what we are and what we are not. Being content with our reality frees us from self-aggrandisement and from our false selves.

    Living a more authentic self enables us to take life more as it comes. It relieves us of the burden of the superfluous, the inauthentic, the masquerade and brings us closer to the best we have to give to the world.

    Enabling ourselves and others to become free of the many prisons of the false self takes courage and more. It requires commitment, determination, a letting go and a saying ‘goodbye’ to all and sometimes ‘goodbye’ to those that played a part in enabling a covering up of authenticity. We tend not to like the ‘full stops’ of life because we fear the losses of ending. But ‘full stops’ are also often the very point where new things begin.

    Br. Stephen Morris fcc

  • 7/7, Who Are We Remembering?

    “I looked at the picture of one of the bombers expecting to see a monster but, I didn’t see a monster. What I saw was a young man” – Gill Hicks. Survivor of 7/7 …

    Today many will be remembering the lives lost and rearranged on the morning of 7 July 2005. I have.

    The events of that day confronted us with many things. Horrific events like that do, and repeatedly.

    The reminders of that time will, for many, occur in the context of anniversary remembrance, news footage which with the passing of years get shorter and shorter. For those who lives were rearranged on that day the concept of an annual anniversary is often meaningless. Each day, and for some, each moment holds a myriad of anniversaries. Traumatic loss in its many forms tends to have that effect.

    Collective traumatic events, as indeed 7/7 was, one way or another insert themselves into our memories and remain. Whether the anniversary effect is moment by moment, daily or annually we will be remembering. ‘Who we will be remembering’? however, is an important question, so obvious, so assumed in fact, it seldom gets asked and in the not asking misses the point that memory is highly selective.

    Selective memory is often defined by acceptable memory. Some memories we allow and are allowed, whilst other memories are banished, not allowed, not deemed accepted or wanted. The memories of 7/7 are one such example of acceptable and unacceptable memory.

    The acceptable memories of the day are literally set in iron in the southeast corner of Hyde Park. Here 52 people have been named, memorialised into cast iron pillars. It’s a powerful setting and a powerful statement. But it is partial, it is incomplete, it does not tell or symbolise the full story and does not give permission for the full story to be remembered. In the later sense it is an edifice to banished knowledge.

    The invitation of the memorial to remember extends only to 52 who died and not to the whole figure of 56. The names of Habib, Germaine, Mohammad and Shehzad are missing. The message is clear there are those we are allowed to think about and those we are not, must not. We must not think about the four young men who birthed 7/7 and the way it rearranged life. Equally, we may say defiantly ‘but I don’t want to think about them’ .

    The exclusion of the four young men from the symbolic memorial is symbolic in itself. I get the varied reasons for this exclusion, but the meaning causes me difficulty to say the least.

    When thinking about something or someone is not allowed, if we ourselves make this choice, it marks the beginning of exclusion, a splitting off, a fragmentation. When applied to a person, to people, it creates ‘other’. Truth is, in the context of Habib, Germaine, Mohammad and Shehzad, it was the creation of ‘other’ that birthed 7/7 into reality.

    The process of making ‘other’ is a process of creating ‘less than’. It’s the process of objectification. The reduction of person into object. If we want to understand why and how 7/7 happened in first place, in those six words, there we have it.

    Crimes of all sorts are commissioned because in the mind of the perpetrator they have consciously or unconsciously engaged in a process of division and of reduction. The ‘other’ quickly becoming ‘less than’ making anything possible. It’s not a question of ‘who’ is being killed? but ‘what ‘is being killed? In the mind of the one who’s doing the killing they are killing ‘something’, seldom is it a ‘someone’.

    This is not a process unique to those who go on to enact such a process of objectification individually. Governments, organisations, communities, rulers etc do it all the time. Approve it all the time. The creation and use of the very term ‘terrorist’ a prime example how the State operates on the dynamics of objectification, findings ways to legitimise the treatment of others as less than and enshrining laws that make it ok for them to objectify but not for others. This process can be referred to, understood and witnessed time and time again in world over the dynamics of oppression.

    If the process we follow is one that results in objectification, then, State, Religion, Politics or indeed our own mind then the consequences are likely to be the same. We are all in peril.

    So, what to do?

    Let’s be clear, the process of all that unfolded on 7/7 began in the mind and it is to the mind where we must go if any different process is to be given a chance. We need to be able to invite our minds to start to comprehend its understanding of the very antidote to the process of objectification, that antidote being the process of wholeness. Easier said than done. More so because our understanding of wholeness is often deeply flawed.

    If 7/7 made anything clear it was that we live in a culture of dividedness and fragmentation of the self. The very opposite to wholeness. When we contemplate what it takes to live a peaceful life, we extol wholeheartedness and a version of wholeness that is only constituted of all the perceive to be good. But being wholehearted, being whole, is only sufficient if your heart is your whole self; being whole is only sufficient if your mind is all you are. We are, of course, so much more expansive than our hearts and our minds or whatever fragment we choose to fixate on. But we compartmentalize our experience in this way, divide it into fragments, as if to divide and conquer it. We banish ‘bad’ and delude ourselves that only ‘good’ has a place if we are to be whole. We could not be more wrong.

    By its very nature wholeness is the coming together of all that we banish in the name of ‘badness’ with all that we embrace in the name of ‘goodness’. It is the unification and acceptance of this paradox which takes us unto wholeness and prevents process of ‘othering’, splitting, making less than, objectification and all that follows in its wake. The 7/7’s of our world.

    On this day of remembering there are of course those who knew Hasib, Germaine, Mohammed and Shehzad. They knew them before they became victims of the process of objectification. They knew them with fuller lives that were not reduced to a piece of media print, and some, if not many would have known them with the human capacity for love as well as hate. They may not have a column of steel erected in their memory but as members of the human condition they were not immune from attachments and all that lasts from such a sacred fact of life.

    Banished thinking and banished knowledge may make us feel comfortable with ourselves. Being selective with the lives we choose to remember may make us feel right and just. But unless we start to recognise what it is that gets repeated in this then the cycle of 7/7 we will surely need to repeat. Remembering what less than wholeness looks like, will only serve us well if we can bare to remember what wholeness actually is.

    Br Stephen Morris fcc

  • Broken, Always Demands Our Best

    Some time ago, I was delivering a briefing to trainee police and probation officers, I presented a heartbreaking case of a young man. I asked the trainees to describe to me what hearing about this man’s life made them feel? My question was met with silence. I’m good with silence, so I let it continue. I eventually prompted; “Anyone?” More silence. So I took a direct approach and started to go around the group. The first trainee gave me his response “I don’t feel anything”, delivered with something akin to arrogance and so I continued to go around the group. Still, no one was naming a feeling. To say I was pissed off is an understatement. But I was also despairing. What have we come to when brokness is met with such an absence of feeling.

    Broken, always requires our best. Always requires more of us than we know we have and is always deserving of even much more. The broken, I have learned over years, have much to give us. It is they who, one by one and by their own uniqueness, have made me what I am today – that started with being able to feel. Right now, it would seem, we need the broken to teach us as never before….

    The broken among us teach us.

    What sustains me is this knowledge, that it’s really the broken among us that can contribute a lot to our quest for full, equal justice.

    When you’re broken, you know something about what it means to be human. You know something about grace. You learned something about mercy. You learned something about forgiveness. It’s the broken among us that can teach us some things. And knowing that you don’t have to be perfect and complete gives you a way of moving through challenge that would be hard if you think that that’s not something that’s possible.

    And so I tell my young officers, you can’t do this work, you can’t be in some of the painful places we’re in, you can’t hold children who’ve been abused, and look into despiring eyes and not be impacted by that.

    You’re going to shed some tears. You are. And you’re gonna be overwhelmed, you’re going to get tired, you’re gonna get pushed down — all of those things are going to happen, and it doesn’t mean you’re weak. It doesn’t mean that you’re not up to the task. It doesn’t mean you’re incompetent or incapable. It just means you’re a human being. And that’s what, is exactly what is needed.

    And so what sustains me is, in part, this knowledge that I can’t always feel confident and sure and clear; that there are going to be times when it’s uncertain what’s going to happen. And I’ve tried to appreciate that.

    We can all in our brokenness be lifted up by the spirit of people who have endured way more. But we must, we must be able to connect with them, see ourselves in them and feel with them. Anything less than this is not our best.

    Br. Stephen Morris fcc

  • Groping, Grabbing, Flashing…. ‘Having a Bit of Fun’ …

    It’s not unusual for me to have been the first person to inform a man who has committed a sexual crime that he is to be placed on the sex offender register. At the start of a court assessment, it’s one of the first things I’ve learned to check out. The many other criminal justice professionals dealing with the individual before me may well have avoided the issue. I get that. The responses are varied; tears, sobbing, shouting, screaming, laughing and perhaps the most common “fuck off you cunt”. It’s usually a substantial wait before some resemblance of calm is restored.

    I’m good at waiting.

    Bewilderment often accompanied with incredulous laughter is nearly always the response I witness in men who have committed the specific crimes of sexual assault, exposure, outraging public decency. It is these men who often say to me “I just don’t see it”, “I just don’t get it”, “I don’t understand it”. In terms of justice, how they perceive their behaviour doesn’t matter of course. How it sits in their mind; ‘groping’, ‘flashing’, ‘grabbing’, ‘having a bit of fun’ ‘trying it on’ ‘drunken tomfoolery’ whatever they call it does not stop it from being a serious sexual crime. After all, it’s why they’ve ended up talking to me.

    These men (and sometimes women) literally think they have done no wrong. Neither do they acknowledge that they have, by their behaviour, created a victim. They struggle to comprehend that someone has been violated and caused all the psychological consequences that defines being a victim.

    As I explain, “it is likely you will be placed on the sex offenders register”, I usually follow it up with a question “can you tell me why you think that may be?” Few are able to answer.

    Month by the month the media is not short of examples of men, notable men, famous men, men often literally in the spotlight, powerful men who, even in the face of immense evidence, still claim they have done no wrong and cannot allow themselves to answer such a question. Just look at the statements of denial they make in an often-pathetic attempt to defend themselves. “It was just a bit of fun”.

    The response to these predatory men by those who often rush to support them (the list is varied but predictable, Government ministers, fellow celebrities, naïve partners, fellow predators, those also invested in collusion, etc) gives us an indication as to why the men I work with struggle to take responsibility for the crime(s) they have committed and the victim(s) they have created. Stark truth is, in relation to sexual crime, it can at times be difficult to find anyone willing to name predatory behaviour for what it actually is..

    Some find it possible to joke about ‘groping’. Much like exposure, exhibitionism or outraging public decency these crimes are often reduced to a music hall style humour of having a titter about flashing etc. In this process of minimisation, the denial of the fact that a victim has been created gets writ large.

    Let’s be clear groping, ‘flashing’ pinching or touching a bottom / breast, crotch etc is a sexual crime. These behaviours are sexual assaults. It does not become anything less just because the individual doing it had ‘had too much too drink’ or ‘embarrassed himself’. No, it is a sexual crime because it is a transgression, an invasion of personal boundary. It is a sexual crime because it is lacking in consent, and it is a sexual crime because it is an abuse of power.

    In such cases, it is not for a government committee’s, a management board, an internal private investigation etc, to investigate, that is the responsibility of the Police.

    No matter how much some may titter and no matter how much these men protest about their self-concern, it does not change the fact that they have created victims. Minimisation and all the denial in the world cannot, should not allow for a hierarchy of offences. All sexual crimes have victims. Neither should we think that their behaviour would have occurred in isolation, no, my experience tells me that there would have been other occasions and they will have other victims.

    It’s not fun telling a man that he is to be placed on the sex offender register. The implications of such are massive, life changing. But when there is such little regard for what constitutes a sexual offence, when some men think that because they get a bit pissed, that its ok to have a bit of a laugh … a bit of a grope or, as in many of these cases, that it’s all about them, then such a register, such holding to account is needed and is right. The victims of powerful, famous and well known men, as with all others, are deserving of this justice.

    As for those who seek to defend them, they too must be held to account, even when they have or are living their lives in the spotlight. Their silence, collusion and acceptance of these crimes can only be considered as permission giving. Sexual offenders the world over depend on exactly the likes of all those that, like the offender themselves, cannot bear to face the horrific truth.

    Br. Stephen Morris fcc

  • My Story …. Part II

  • Am I Turning into my Father?

    Father’s Day in prison always prompts much reflection, sadness, rage and questioning all in equal measure. For fathers in prison, it is a time when the experience of separation can no longer be met with denial, its pain seems to break through even the hardest defences. Evidence I guess of an experience, an identity and a connection which sits deeply in the human spirit of every father.

    All this has been brought to me over the years in the days and weeks following Father’s Day by those courageous men who seek out therapy whilst in prison, many do.

    The pain of a father in prison is not the only emotion. It is nearly always accompanied by anxiety. I honour and respect those men who recognise this vulnerability and name it for what it is. It’s often expressed as a question “Am I turning into my father?”, “Will I be like my father?”, “Can you stop me becoming my father?”, “How do I stop being like my father?”.

    The same questions are also asked on a regular basis by the fathers I work with in my private practice outside of prison. They too will be prompted, following another Father’s Day, to ask me in hope and in despair for an answer.

    For many fathers in prison and out of prison, Father’s Day is not an occasion to be celebrated. Such a day is a reminder of an experience of fathering defined by tyranny, by violence, by violent misogyny, by homophobia, by absence, by hatred, by toxic masculinity, by a father unworthy of celebration no matter what day.

    Such anxious questions emerging from these experiences of human failure, far from being hopeless and cause for despair, are I have come to realise, questions of hope. Such questions even before the answer emerges make conscious all that has previously not been said. Such questions make conscious the deepest fears and vulnerabilities which have often, for generations, remained unasked and therefore only communicated in horror after horror.

    The fact that a man, a father, can ask such questions is the first indicator that a cycle, a history, a legacy is being broken and need not be repeated. It is the first indication that a happy Father’s Day can be possible.

    Br. Stephen Morris fcc

  • Come to the Edge

    I have often worked with someone in therapy for several years. The standard was always three years, these days many are looking for something much quicker, it’s a clinical dilemma. But regardless, the end of any process is a delicate time. Freud prepared us to expect the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ a period where the issues presenting at the start of therapy appear to have returned. More commonly, I have observed, is a reluctance to leave.

    Many patients over the years have echoed to me, in one way or another, Guillaume’s profound poem ‘Come to the Edge’. So much can be understood from it about the human predicaments of dependency, attachment, individuation, separation, liberation. In therapy, all must be allowed and respected.

    But life is an edge state. An uncertainty. A doubt. Further in, may feel safe, appear safe, sound safe, but seldom is it living. Too safe, is no life at all. No, life is an edge, it’s where we learn to fly. And yes, on occasions we do need someone to do the pushing

    “Come to the edge,” he said.

    “We can’t, we’re afraid!” they responded.

    “Come to the edge,” he said.

    “We can’t, We will fall!” they responded.

    “Come to the edge,” he said.

    And so they came.

    And he pushed them.

    And they flew.”

    Br Stephen Morris fcc

    Like

    Comment

  • If Not For Us, Then Because of Us

    I don’t like inconsistency, it achieves nothing! Endurance is however a different matter.

    To be involved in struggle requires endurance. Staying with a situation political or personal to enable transformation or liberation cannot be dependant on feeling good. Screaming and shouting about one cause one week and another the next is often a characteristic witnessed among ‘political’ groups who, over time, move from one cause to the next. Hardly surprising that those who shout the loudest but don’t stay seldom achieve change. Endurance is often dull and thankless. It’s like training for a marathon. It is the exercise regime of the heart, the measure of the soul.

    Without endurance, without the willingness to keep on keeping on, nothing of change would ever happen. What is endured and won in one century must be so often be won again in another. Just as we think the struggle has been won somewhere, somehow it emerges all over again. Endurance involves being eternally vigilant.

    In recent times, many commented on historic slavery and were shocked to learn, when I reminded them, about current sex slavery and economic slavery. We must never assume that equality has been accomplished as long as the pursuit of power exists.

    Justice does not come without daily effort. Injustice must be addressed but may not be achieved for eons. The struggle to fight to free the Guildford Four took every moment of fourteen long years. The freedom for the Birmingham Six even longer. Their families, Sr Sarah and myself did not jump on the bandwagon years down the road but endured from day one and resolved to stay even if our mantra had to become “If not for us, then because of us”.

    Endurance also requires us to stay with what we know to be right or unjust and not to be wavered by what may be popular or what may keep us in favour with one and not another. Endurance requires consistency. When someone dresses up exploitation to look acceptable or respectable, it is still exploitation. We cannot suddenly say ‘oh well that’s alright then’. I am often left aghast at the contradictory stance of some. To not notice is to be deceived. I always notice!

    In circumstances both personal and public, it is the awareness of the power of patience and the energy that comes with endurance that makes the difference in both the substance and quality of our lives.

    Endurance is the cement of human development. The ability to say no to myself, to the oppression of others, is the one assurance we have that we are teachable and capable of becoming fully human. We can change and we can be saved from ourselves. I admire those that turn up to my consulting room week after week and sometimes year after year. They have the patience to bear hard things and to work through their pains to their goal of becoming fully human. They have not been seduced by the fallacy of a ‘quick fix’. They are willing to save themselves from their own limitations and follies, from lack of maturity and experience. They have the humility to receive the wisdom of life and in return become wiser as they go.

    Enduring for ourselves enables us to endure for others. Being consistent in our thinking and in our being, even when it’s not pleasurable, is what brings change yes, for ourselves and for others.

    Br. Stephen Morris fcc