Mother Of Peace Community

We are so glad to have known him and have been taught by his life. We will continue to support Mother of Peace Community in Zimbabwe.

Please help us and pray for his family.

We wanted to remind the children that the most important thing to remember at Christmas was the coming of Jesus; God’s gift of love to us. In all the giving and receiving of presents, the best gift they can give in return is a loving heart. God wants them just as they are. To create the journey they could enact to witness God’s gift, we needed to make a new kind of crib out of “nothing”-nothing bought, anyway, and to help them make representations of themselves, so they could place themselves at the centre of things instead of being only visitors. The journey happens inside the heart, but it is a powerful experience to physically place something visible in a particular place.
And what does it mean to have a loving heart, if not to be there for each other- to really notice other people? We needed to take other people, too.

Part of really being present is to see other people. We can care about the needs of others, but we can only think of one person at once. We think about the people we see every day or week, but maybe fail to notice. Do we notice who is alongside us at mass in our community.
And how can we care about the world outside our community?
Last year during Advent, we brought the world, continent by continent, into our thoughts, discovering the ways Christmas is celebrated in different countries, praying for peace worldwide- ending with the Holy Land .

Father David Everitt had come to talk to the children on our Africa week, telling them about the lives of AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe who are cared for by the Mother of Peace Community. Father David had summed up God’s message by getting the children to count on the fingers of each hand in turn-‘God loves me very much! I love God very much!’ The children in Zimbabwe always relished the word, ‘MUCH’.
Those children returned to our thoughts as we heard the news of the current terrible situation in Zimbabwe. We told the children about the shortages of basic goods, the way money all but ceased to have value, the cholera epidemic, the closed hospitals in Harare.
We have so much in this country; we throw away so much, without ever noticing. We knew there were people in the world who lived by searching rubbish dumps, children whose only toys were made from scrap. So another way of respecting our world and linking ourselves to the people in it was to recycle the materials we normally discard.
And so we had our project- to make our crib using things we would not usually notice; to see people we sometimes don’t notice and to bring all of these things in our hearts to Bethlehem at Christmas. If we could do all of this and help in some small way by raising money for the children of Zimbabwe, we could give in a practical, tangible way.
We made the stable from old boxes, with bricks from discarded packaging, straw from shredded newspaper.

We asked the people of the parish if they would like to come with us to Bethlehem- we would make them out of plastic bottles, if they gave a donation and they would be able to choose to be represented as themselves or as any character or animal from the Christmas story. If they wanted, they could be named and presented in church. We would give them a card explaining our project, so the journey could be used as a present to others if someone wanted to send a friend to the manger for Christmas.

The people of the parish also helped by bringing in the materials we needed: plastic bottles, empty packets, unwanted material.
The orders began to come in. People we had seen for years began to have names! We had to remember what they looked like in order to make them.

We painted all the bottles using discarded paint. Heads were created out of empty yoghurt pots, though some polystyrene balls were used. The children dressed the figures in scraps of material, with wool hair and details from old costume jewellery, buttons given in three years ago when we made a giant collage for church.
One wonderful way people were made present was by the treasuring of memories sparked by scraps of rubbish. The Wellington boots on the gardening figure, for example, were made from pieces of shoe leather given in three years before. The leather had been kept for a lifetime by someone whose father had been a shoemaker and had made all their shoes for them when they were a child. The gardener’s flowers were a brooch found in a jewel box after someone’s Mum had died. The wool for all the hair had been saved in a bag by an older lady who had always knitted and whose last work of art was a patchwork blanket. All of these things and many, many more are now present at Jesus’s birth in secret ways, all of which are little stories of love in themselves.
There are hidden messages- Mary has a bell, because she stands for someone in the parish who is always ringing one. Someone was sent as an angel by somebody who thinks they really are one, because they are so kind.

Visitors to the parish had novel ideas about their arrival in Bethlehem, asking for an astronaut, a wise woman, a typical man, Cinderella, a shepherdess. So political correctness came to our manger.
And joy. A man recently received into the church was able to take his daughter-in-law to see himself as a shepherd, standing next to Mary in the stable. ‘That’s me!’ he said. Right at the heart of things.
Families have been given the gift of a present to Zimbabwe. Someone chose a gift to Zimbabwe as their own birthday present. And to date we have raised £586 for the Mother of Peace Community. Our children are very proud.

Finally, we now think it might be possible to ship the crib to Zimbabwe for next Christmas so it can be used by the children at Mother of Peace. Little things mean a lot.