Scottish Catholic Observer

The Young Women’s Fellowship (YWF) in the Catholic Student’s Union of Edinburgh has enjoyed many lovely sessions where young women come together to pray, discuss, and explore the Catholic Faith together. It was started in October of 2015. The YWF meets once fortnightly, gathered around a table in the Dominican Library room in the chaplaincy.

The YWF has enjoyed a spirit-led and energetic dialogue about the Catholic Faith, for the Faith that has enabled a deeper reflection about our faiths and a bi-weekly reaffirmation of our decision to be Catholics.

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:12-13).

Edinburgh is quite an international city and the Catholic Students Union serves many different types of students from all over the world, and actually from different universities in the city. Even though many of those who attend the Fellowship come from different places and countries, with different outlooks, worldviews, backgrounds and upbringings, mannerisms or ways of expressing our individual Catholic Faiths, it is always most heartening to see unity instead of division.

Despite the fact that there always can be many areas of division and disagreement, all of these women from different parts of the world with different backgrounds are just able to come together to dialogue and journey, together, towards Christ. Women who in many ways could seem fundamentally different to one another come together: to support one another’s growth in love for Christ.

It is miraculous, as, it is almost as if those distinctions and differences no longer matter, because we are all gathered together for a common purpose—to do what St Paul said: drink of the one Spirit in Christ.

Truly, when women come together to support and journey with one another, incredible things are able to happen. The YWF has provoked myself and the other girls to think more deeply about certain issues, something that I doubt we would have done without this forum.

Perhaps it is even the fact that the YWF is able to come together week after week, amidst all of the deadlines, university commitments, and plethora of other things that we could otherwise be doing, that reminds me that the Church is very much alive with young people—young women especially—who are yearning for Christ.

We often look at issues that arise from the feminine aspects of spirituality. From Identity Myths that we tell ourselves, to issues of Chastity and Purity, which of course are often shackled with incorrect ideas of sexual purity and virginity. We have looked at what ‘Indulgences’ are, and how to undertake spiritual and corporal acts of Mercy, particularly during this Jubilee Year of Mercy.

The YWF has also looked at our lives’ passions and whether God really is at the centre of our lives, and how it is that we manage to cling to God in an age where religion seems to be the last thing on most of our peers’ minds. Similar to how Mother Mary clung to her beliefs and trust in God when she became pregnant with Jesus, when it seemed that her whole world had been thrown into chaos.

These issues might be daunting to face when faced alone. But, through the frank and open sharing and mutual insights offered during the YWF meetings, I believe that we leave not only understanding more about our faiths, but also enriched with trust that the Lord is with us, like the Lord was with Mother Mary too.

No one in the YWF claims to have all the answers when it comes to questions about God, and nor could we. As our small group’s facilitator Lillian tells us, she is still learning—we are all still learning—about God and about our faith. For me, I think perhaps this is the beauty of the YWF, that we are all sojourners on this journey to seek God, but united together in a divine grace.

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