In October annually, we commemorate World Mission Day, also known as World Mission Sunday.

Pope Francis says in his World Mission Day 2021 message, “to be on mission is to be willing to think as Christ does, to believe with him that those around us are also my brothers and sisters. May his compassionate love touch our hearts and make us all true missionary disciples.”

For World Mission Day this year (24 October), Sr Helen Caughley provides a poem for reflection:

Mission
The yearning of God to be
Yearning explosive, insatiable, boundless
A multiverse is born
Quarks, black holes, string theory
Indefinable
“I am who Am”
So who am I to define You
A fry trying to swallow the ocean
The insatiable thirst for the more
The beyond
The otherness.
That they may be one
The Divine echo
Etched in the essence of all that is
Be compassionate
As God is..
Your pain now mine
Snared by recognition
Our common humanity
Chocked whisperings of memories
A past too heavy to bear alone
Tentatively listening
Testing our hearts’ capacity to carry
A silent space
Cloaked in compassion
Calling forth your strength
From victim to survivor
We heal one another
Pain loosens its inhibiting hold
Space now to grow
Vision turns outward
My needs, your needs,
their needs, our needs
Community forms
Hunger to soup kitchens
Insecurity to sharing
Loneliness to Gospel groups
Mission’s sinews strengthened.
Life in abundance He said
But where?
For whom?
Cyber space stories
Challenge the parameters of responsibility.
So easy to switch off,
Struggling for numbness
The comforts of self defining limits.
Mission rattles loose boundaries
Calls forth audacity to believe
Our help shall come from the One Who made heaven and earth
So why the myopia?
Egoism, the original sin squirms
Suffocating under superficiality.
Mission’s ministering
Tantalising divine possibilities
To embrace its call.
Who defines the defining?
Am I my own creation?
Succumbed by divine beckoning
I escape myself
Seduced by the ineffable
Divine yearnings
Within