Faith in Practice
Personal performance
Hannah Kowszun
The new stations at St Pancras and King's Cross are clean,
consumerist palaces, completely at odds with the notorious
red-light district outside their doors. Sister
Lynda Dearlove MBE works with Women of the Well to
help improve the chaotic lives of street prostitutes.
I come
from a northern working class Catholic family, so I'm shaped by a
strong sense of community and social justice; that's in my blood
and in my DNA. It's from that perspective that I'm a Sister of
Mercy. It's who I am, but it's also what I do. I'm part of a
dynamic movement of women across the world that has the most needy
as a focus and develops a response to that need based on gospel
values.
The Sisters of Mercy have been on a journey that moves them to a
place where they recognise that it isn't enough to give out cups of
soup, it isn't enough to recognise that people are poor, it isn't
enough to respond to those basic needs without challenging the
structures that create that need. So we are an NGO, we have
permanent representation at the United Nations in New York and we
are effectively linked into structures in the UK and in Europe that
are about political change. We're not challenging policies from a
political perspective, but because they're unjust, because there
are values that are directly challenged by what government policy
is and isn't.
In this country and other countries people have education and
healthcare as a right because congregations like ours provided
healthcare and education free to the poor, to improve the quality
of their life. Sisters of Mercy began because Catherine McAuley, a
rich heiress, chose to use her money to provide for the needs of
women and children. Part of this need was women who were being
forced into sexual relations with their masters, who were being
abused, which is where we started what we now do here with women
involved in prostitution.
I don't know that I have a typical day. The services we provide
here at Women at the Well are about vulnerable women: targeted at
women locked into the pavement for a variety of reasons. My
involvement day-to-day can be with the staff that work here, or
looking to get funding to keep us going. So on a given day it can
mean I'm sitting in a meeting with a government minister or sitting
talking with one of the women here whose lives are so chaotic, or
sitting with boring paperwork. It can be as broad as that.
For the development in Kings Cross my concerns were that it
would be exactly what has been developed in St Pancras station,
which is a shopping mall with transport attached, where vulnerable
people are not wanted because they're seen as a threat. Before
Kings Cross opened I was in a high-level meeting having a
conversation with the British Transport Police, who told me they
were going to have a zero tolerance policy. But what good will zero
tolerance be for women who have a right to be in Boots chemist on
Kings Cross station, which is dispensing methodone scripts? How are
they going to operate a zero tolerance policy when they have a
right to be there?
They need to be able to call us, to work with us, because
transport hubs attract vulnerable people. If there is a possibility
of interfacing with that vulnerability on the station, we need to
be involved, but we need to fight to do it. So we have. Now the
trainee British Transport Police do placements here to change their
view and get them to see these women as vulnerable as opposed to
nuisances, to see them as a face behind that difficult
behaviour.
I have a passion about the needs of women. I think it's
important to invest the time, the energy and the experience in
embedding change. Policy needs to have the voice of the people
whose lives are being affected by that policy. I was at a meeting
at the Department of Work and Pensions today, about Europe 2020 and
the things that we have committed to, although not legal and
binding, regarding employment and skills and poverty, presenting to
the people who have to deliver the report by the end of April. I
was part of a dialogue to make change happen for the better for the
people who are not going to get into that room to have that
conversation.
I was given the MBE 18 months ago but I don't believe in the
Empire! However, those awards are useful because they recognise a
response to need. Sometimes having 'Sister' in front of my name
helps because I represent the establishment (or not!).
I think I became a Sister when I ran out of reasons why not to.
I explored vocation for a period of time in lots of different
directions and almost finished in an enclosed order. Then I had a
limited understanding about what being a contemplative was all
about, thinking it was about silence and meditating and so on, when
really being contemplative is about having a resonance, a bit like
a tuning fork, with God being part of every moment and every
action.
I discovered that I had to embrace the question of what it was
about: my journey toward the relationship of what or who I
understand God to be. And it's not a God that's vengeful or
demanding in terms of do this, do that, but total and complete. I
know that for me to be fully who I'm meant to be, this is it. Even
after becoming a sister I was still full of reasons why not to be,
and I've found a lot more reasons since. But I'm still here.
At the end of the day, I am called to be mercy. Mercy is the
business of my life. I may not manage it very often but that's what
it's about. My prayer is my life.
I'm not used to interviews that talk about 'I'. I don't believe
that anything I ever do is as 'I'; my work is part of a mission
that is ours as the Sisters of Mercy. I am here as Women of the
Well. The huge thing we do here is move women out of isolation into
belonging. My job is enabling a team to do that work, so it's about
the we. If ever it's about me, it's a failure.
Lynda Dearlove was talking to Hannah Kowszun
Lynda Dearlove