Cecil Rogerson

Year 1 (shortened course)

St. Mary’s College, Oscott

 

My awareness of God seems to have developed very early, and during my first year of school, age 7, I requested a “book about Jesus”. My grandfather bought me my first children’s Bible. I was baptised on the 7th June 1959 by Fr.Alban Perkins, SSM, and taken to Sunday School in the years that followed my start at school. After my confirmation on All Saints Day 1972, I began serving at the Eucharist on a regular basis. This was also the year I started at Christian Brother’s College in Welkom, having attended an Anglican primary school for seven years before.

I thrived spiritually in the Catholic ethos created by the Christian Brothers, which in turn nurtured what was being developed in my Anglican Parish. I lived for Sunday, with its rich involvement in the Liturgy, including sacristan work, serving, reading and eventually organising the server’s rota. I enjoyed ‘first Friday Masses’ and the prayerful ethos of the school day. I picked up various catholic booklets at that time, on the sacraments, the Mass and saints. What I learnt in this regard came from these sources, and seemed to translate well into the Anglican context in which I was living out my faith at the time.

I expressed my love for God through serving at the altar as often as I could, leading eventually to my acceptance as an ordinand and being sent to the Anglican Seminary in Grahamstown. While at Seminary I made my first retreat, Ignatian in character, and my first confession. My time in seminary was deeply fulfilling, and I grew in my knowledge of God through the scriptures, community and liturgy.

My vision of God and of ministry has changed over the years, from believing that I could, through priesthood, make a difference to the world and the Church, to a realisation that through priesthood and my own experience of the world, God is in fact present and redeeming me in and through the Church. I therefore see myself as a fellow pilgrim with others, who has been entrusted, by God’s grace, with “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven”. (Matt.13:11). This is where I came to as an Anglican priest, and it may sound as if I am presuming priesthood as I write – in reality I see this understanding of vocation as emerging from my baptism – my first call, which I hope, God willing, can still be lived out in Catholic Priesthood.

The Offices and the Mass have always been an integral part of my relationship with God, though they have varied in observance as my life circumstances have changed. I have also made an annual retreat. My experience of God has come through times of prayer, but more often than not it has come through having to work with the given experiences of my life, most of which has not been of my control. Images of “wrestling” or “being in the cloud”, as with Jacob, Moses in the wilderness and the three on the mount of transfiguration, have been particularly strong for me. Having spent time in the Namib desert during my National Service, I appreciate too the Biblical images of “wilderness” and “desert” as places where one is able to “see” more clearly, both God and oneself.

My outlook in life is determined by a profound experience I had while staying in an Anglican Benedictine Monastery in the State of New York. My wife and I were staying with the Order of the Holy Cross for my six-week sabbatical in 1991. We had got to know some members of the community by the time a group came in for a weekend, who were adult survivors of abuse. The pain was almost tandible. At the Sunday mass, as was the custom, we gathered round the Altar after the synaxis, for the Eucharistic prayer. What I then experienced was for me, the reality of the Kingdom of God, in the context of the Mass. Gathered around the Altar were survivors and bearers of unimaginable pain, recovering alcoholics, someone who was HIV+, and ourselves, with our own longings, pains and history. And it struck me like nothing before or since, that we were in the right place, and doing what was entirely and eternally appropriate – we were gathered around the Altar. This was the Kingdom of God, totally present. Broken people together where bread was being broken – a sign of infinite love by a compassionate, forgiving and generous God.

The gifts that God seems to have given me have found expression in preaching, teaching, sacramental ministry, pastoral ministry, deliverance ministry and spiritual direction. All these I have tried to use to enable people to experience and catch a glimpse, through the grace of God, of the Kingdom of God, and ultimately, of God himself. I would therefore concur with Richard Rohr, who remind us that the mission of the Church is to enable people to “see”. Such a ministry might not fill our churches as they were in some “golden age” – but it will build a community who know the love of God and can be channels of that love.

Without a doubt, my passion lies in enabling others to experience God, for therein I become a witness of the Resurrection.

Cecil

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