Emmaus at 25

pathways, SEPTEMBER 2007

 

 

 

As Emmaus Productions celebrates its silver jubilee of ministry, its founder and creative director, Ms Monica Brown, wonders if the Church is loosing heart.

 

"We are becoming big business. We've got professional standards, which we truly need.  We've got better systems, but I don't know that we've got life-giving communities," she said in an interview with pathways.

 

"And it seems to me that at a time in our Church when we need to be reaching out with great respect, and reverence and intimacy, we are holding each other at a distance."

 

Ms Brown, as she ministers around the world, sees a lot of broken people; power struggles within communities; strong shifts towards conservatism or towards a radical future with most people caught in between.

 

"Something about our credibility is at stake as a people of God," she said.   "We somehow are not able to look each other in the eye and to really form the kind of life-giving relationships in which God is enfleshed."

 

And so what Emmaus Productions does in ministry is call people back to the basics, "call people back to the heart of the matter, back to what Jesus did which was to make God real.  And that can only happen on this earth through the incarnation of our humanity, when people are at home with themselves and are forming themselves and are fostering life-giving relationships."

 

Ms Brown's ministry evolved from a Kinder-Gr 12 teaching career that was based around music, liturgy, and Religious education at a time when there was a hunger for a creative and Australian approach to engaging children.

 

"When I started this ministry in the early 80s, there was a lot of excitement about discovering who we were as a nation and as a Church. There was an emerging sense of an Australian identity which was very exciting. And it was the springtime of Vatican II."

 

The big focus was on religious education but the spiritual formation and resources were coming from America.

 

Her first children's songs were written in the early 1980's when the inner Melbourne school at which she was teaching put its RE programme on hold and developed an integrated approach to faith education, specifically designed to meet the needs of the schools'children, many of whom were living in a violent and aggressive enviornment.

 

A wise mentor suggested that she offer to schools the integrated music and creative processes that she was developingin her own RE teaching.

 

Initially, Ms Brown and Mr Michael Fitzpatrick went into classrooms, breaking open scripture with the life experience of the children and youth through music, mime, puppetry and drama.  Within months, they were booked out for 18 months.

 

Eventually, to cope with the demand, she trained teams of teachers. Then Principals began asking that she train their teachers.  In 1996, Ms Brown was awarded a Masters Honours Degree in Education from the Australian Catholic University for a thesis on a creative approach to spiritual development for teachers.

 

Twenty-five years after her first album was released, she is still on the road - facilitating in-service days, retreats, renewal days, assemblies, congregational chapters ...  wherever people want a creative approach to linking God and their circumstances.

 

She shares the ministry with sacred clown and co-facilitator, Dubliner Sr Hilary Musgrave RSC - although large numbers of creative and artistic people, for example up to 60 dancers, singers, performers, can be involved in special events.

 

Sydney is home and her base for her Australian, New Zealand, Pacific, Asian and African endeavours, but Emmaus Productions has offices in Dublin (for Ireland, the UK and Europe) and Sacramento (for North and South America).  While Ms Brown and Sr Hilary travel constantly, the work is done in even blocks - so if they are overseas for three months, they will then work in Australia for three months.  Although she could be based overseas, Ms Brown is adamant that Australia will always be home.

 

Ms Brown puts her overseas success down to the fact that no-one else is doing what Emmaus Productions does.

 

"That is not to say there aren't musicians, clowns and scripture story-tellers.  But no-one is doing our combined, integrated approach to ministry."

 

Ms Brown describes herself as a facilitator - one who "engages people in ritual, imagery and symbol, letting these speak to an individual's own faith journey".

 

She believes it is through such engagement that a person - child, youth or adult - will find God:  God can't be taught from books.

 

"You can teach doctrine. But you can't teach God," she said.  "My concern is that at a time when our (Church) leadership is pushing a more conservative approach again to faith formation - for example, teaching religion from text books - we need to be putting the books aside and drawing our kids into ritual and meditation, into the experience of the God we are proclaiming because you can't teach God.

 

"You can teach tradition. But you can't teach God.  We are doing the teaching but still our kids, our young people, our faith communities are not drawing into their depths the sense of the sacred.

 

"So a lot of our work, the work of Emmaus Productions, is spent around encouraging teachers and faith communities and liturgists to draw upon life-giving symbols, meaningful ritual that will help the kids come close to God."

 

In gratitude for the support Emmaus Productions has received over the years, Ms Brown this year offered a series of three, no-cost events across Australia: Burning Hearts (for the staff of CEO and schools), God Delights in You (for children) and Holy Ground (adults). The schedule stared in Adelaide in May and finished in Hobart at the end of August.  She will be working in NSW during September/October and travelling to Ireland for October/December before returning to Sydney by the end of the year.

 

As the 25th anniversary celebrations draw to a close, and with more than 16 collections of music, a book enjoying its third reprint and many other original resources to her credit, this woman continues to allow her heart to be made sensitive and alive to God in the arts, in culture and in prayer and scripture so that her ministry can continue to embody the Jesus who truly liberates.

 

photo:  Sr Hilary Musgrave RSC (left) and Monica Brown in New Norfolk, Tasmania, at the end of the 25th anniversary celebrations