|
TESTIMONY Road to Reconciliation and Unity
Mike Shortt, who is married with six children and works full time for An Tobar Nua, an ecumenical evangelistic outreach centre in Galway, Ireland. Below he tells his story and how, throughout his faith journey, God has used other Christians to help enrich his faith.
|
|
|
At the age of 15, however, I got involved in the Mod revival of the 1980s. My idea of being cool was wearing a tailor made ice blue mohair suit, with wrap around dark glasses, a pork pie hat and carrying a walking stick. The dark side of this was sniffing glue, smoking hash and getting drunk frequently and fighting. On one occasion someone got very badly hurt because of myself and a friend beating him up. When I was about 18 I got into even more trouble with the law by petrol bombing my school. It was pure vandalism and anti- social behaviour fuelled by a rage inside me. My poor parents were completely unaware of what was going on and they were totally shocked when one morning the garda turned up at the door with a summons. I remember sitting in court and seeing my mother crying. But my heart was very hard. I was totally self centred and absorbed in my own world and despite my upbringing I had consciously chosen sin. I was fortunate in not getting sent to gaol as I had raised some money for the damage caused to the school, but the judge warned me that if I came before him again I would go to goal. I had been going out with a girl since I was about 16, so I decided that this was a good time to get away and I went to London to join her. We were together in total for about six years. I thought I loved her and we more or less lived together in London. “Filled with daydreams of committing atrocities for the IRA” In the meantime I had become very interested in Irish politics. I have a cousin who was in the IRA who was in H block during the dirty protest and he was a hero of mine. When I came to London I joined a socialist group called the Connolly Association and began to go on marches and sell newspapers and generally hang around with IRA sympathisers. Although I didn’t join the IRA myself, I was filled with hatred, and my head was filled with day dreams about committing atrocities for the IRA and the republican cause. But at the same time I was also feeling rather lonely and sad. The turning point came for me when I split up with my girlfriend and had time to think about life. A girl I knew from Derry gave me a book on Medjugorje. This encouraged me to go back to praying the rosary. But I found it difficult in trying to connect with God because my mind was filled with so much hatred and bitterness and general garbage due to my ungodly lifestyle. “Convincing Pentecostal Christian” I was working as a plasterer at the time on a building site, and it was here that I met a Pentecostal Christian. He refused to get into political arguments but simply shared with me his faith and what Christ had done for him. It was the first time I heard the gospel message in a clear and understandable way. He was also very convincing because as a Christian he really lived his faith and I could see he had a peace I didn’t have. I visited a Pentecostal church which he recommended. Here I heard powerful teaching on the scriptures and people speaking in tongues and praying for healing. Culturally, however it was very alien to me. When I left, I prayed. “Are there any Christians like this in the Catholic Church.?” I also asked God to find me a wife, as I was fed up of being on my own. A short while later I was in an Irish club on Leytonstone High Street, in the East End of London, where I saw this beautiful blonde girl. I told her I was an artist to impress her and asked her to dance. We got chatting and she told me that she was Catholic, but baptised in the Holy Spirit, and prayed and read the scriptures just like the Pentecostals that I had met. Her name was Cathy and she knew all about praying in tongues too. She was the one who basically evangelised me. A couple of weeks later she laid hands on me and prayed over me for the baptism of the Holy Spirit and I gave my life to the Lord. I had a brief but intense experience of heat and tingling and an overwhelming experience of the unconditional love of the Father, which was truly life changing. “Inner correction of the Holy Spirit” The following day on the building site there was a buzz among some of the workers because the IRA had a successful operation and someone had been killed. I started to express my support of this, as I usually did, when I felt an inner correction of the Holy Spirit, that this was not right, and I must forgive. I decided from that moment I would do it God’s way and allow myself to be led by the Holy Spirit rather than what I thought. I realised God is a God of love and forgiveness and if we are his followers we have to be too. Gradually over time, I found the Holy Spirit melting the hardness and bitterness of my heart and I found that I could feel love for the people that before I had hated.
Cathy and I began to pray together and read the scriptures. As we read there were many things that I thought were right but realised weren’t, like sex before marriage and drunkenness. God gave me the grace to accept these and change my behaviour accordingly. Cathy and I joined a Catholic prayer group in Leyton and we also went to the Westminster Cathedral prayer group for a while. It was a very exciting time of growing in the Lord and getting closer to each other. After two months Cathy and I decided to get married and within 9 months we were. We decided to go back to Ireland, to Galway where Cathy came from and we have been married now for 15 years and have six children. “Growth in appreciation of the sacraments” Between them, married life and faith straightened me out. I went back to college to study and eventually got a good steady job. I also started going to daily Mass. This helped me to grow in my appreciation and wonder of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. I initially thought confession was daft, until I went away for a weekend for young people. Before that although I had been to confession I had never told all my sins to a priest before, because I was so embarrassed about what I had done. I thought if I share it with a priest he would look so shocked that everyone would know what a terrible person I had been. But in the end, God gave me the grace to go and I let it all out. I remember he just looked at me afterwards and said, “you’re a big man, Jesus loves you and forgives you.” When he said this I felt a weight lift from me and ever since then confession has been a great grace in my life. As a couple we have always experienced God’s provision in our lives. It seems like whenever we had a new baby, I would either get a raise or a new job with more money. God was always there for us, and showed us that if we trusted him, he would be the Lord of our lives. Both of us became involved in the CCR in Galway and helped out with things like the Life in the Spirit seminars. “Evangelicals studying the Catholic Catechism” Then about 6 years ago I became friendly with Kelly Curry, who founded the An Tobar Nua café. He and his wife Susan are both from the States and have an evangelical background. Prior to coming to Ireland, Kelly felt the Lord prompting him to read the Catholic Catechism. When they arrived they began to attend a local Lectio Divina prayer group in Galway city and were very impressed by the people that they met there. Through this they realised that their role was to be a support to all the churches in Galway both Catholic and Protestant and to encourage people to be converted to Jesus Christ and be active in their own faith communities. Thus they felt a café would be the best way to reach out to people and to act as a support to the existing churches. I was very impressed with Kelly and his ideas. We used to meet up about once a month for prayer and a chat. After a year or so an opportunity came up for me to work full time, in a paid position at An Tobar Nua. I decided to give it a go and have been here now for 5 years. I was the first Roman Catholic employed by the ministry. Since then 5 others have joined us. Among the team are 8 Irish paid workers and 7 American volunteers who are funded by their churches and friends. An Tobar Nua café is run by Foundation in Christ Ministries which is a registered charity set up here by Kelly and is funded both by our sales in the café and our bookstore and also by Christians from various denominations, Catholic and non-Catholic from the US. They are incredibly generous in their support of us without any ulterior motives. One of the girls in the bookshop, for example, eventually went on to join the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, and another member of staff is going to the Catholic university at Steubenville to study theology. As we are a non-profit organisation; all the funds that we receive go back into the ministry enabling us to provide various services free of charge. “We need each other” The work of An Tobar Nua is truly ecumenical. No matter what your denominational background we want people to feel they can be faithful to their own identity as we believe the Holy Spirit is working through all the different denominations. We need each other and the riches that each tradition has to offer, and we want to make this possible at the centre. Thus as well as interdenominational praise and worship sessions bringing people together to praise God, we have a weekly Bible discovery programme going chapter by chapter through Sacred Scripture (we’re on Romans at the moment).
Recently we were very privileged to have the Bishop of Galway give one of the talks at our Catholic Catechism course. We try and draw on all the expertise of the different churches and had a Byzantine priest for example talking about how to live your sexuality as a Christian. We also do marriage workshops, crisis pregnancy counselling in conjunction with Human Life International and prayer for healing and Christian counselling. In January we are starting Emmaus Scripture School and also a Lectio Divina group. One of our main areas of work, however, is with teenagers. Every lunch time over one hundred 13-18 year olds, come for lunch and to hang out. We befriend them. There is no pressure but if they want to talk about Jesus, we share our testimony or the gospel in low key ways. We also do school retreats and other general outreaches, including the “Plugged In” video series produced by Catholic Evangelisation Services in England. The power of the kerygma to set people free I see the work of An Tobar Nua as part of the thrust for the New Evangelisation which the last two popes have talked about. This means we have to be open to new ways, and we can learn a lot from some of the other Christian denominations in their ways of doing things. Key to the development of my own thinking was reading “Life in Christ” by Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap and the way he separates the kerygma, which is the proclamation of the gospel, from the didache, the catechesis. As Roman Catholics we tend to think they are the same, which they aren’t and I think we need to rediscover in a new way the power of the kerygma to set people free. Reading this book has been very instrumental in me being able to work with Christians of other backgrounds.
|
|
|
 |
My
family originally came from Belfast but we moved to Shannon in Co Clare
when I was about five. We were a very happy family and my upbringing
was as near to the Waltons as you could get it, with family prayers
every night and Mass on Sundays. My parents shared their Catholic faith
by how they lived.
