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Amos Trust at 30 years

It’s been a thirty year pilgrimage with Amos Trust, initially enabling me to visit situations around the world where I was invited, and then go back writing songs and telling stories – and that continues.

 

But it has been a pilgrimage of evolution for Amos – the next significant step was saying we will support partners around the world, and we found this meant that we learned even more from those partners.

 

So Amos has been growing (in its supporters and in its partners) and changing. Having said we would focus on certain parts of the world, at one point we needed to cut back to four areas to be more strategic and focussed. Now we have broadened again, keeping our regular partners but going wider under Amos Street Child.

 

In the changing, the evolution and the pilgrimage I find there is a spirituality rooting us, helping us in our decisions, and we return to this – it is our rootedness. At 5 o’clock on Tuesday evenings at St Clement’s we pause for the Words of Hope liturgy which reminds us where our inspiration has come from, and of the liberating power of the gospel.

 

I’ve quoted Thomas Merton before as someone who has helped me on the pilgrimage – I quoted him when it was our 25th anniversary: “The great danger is that under the pressures of anxiety and fear people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril is the deadening of conscience.”

 

In Amos’ pilgrimage of 30 years and onwards our prayer and our hope is that our consciences will not be deadened, rather the opposite, they will be enlivened to be those for justice and the values of equality reflected by Jesus in his words, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

 

Seamus Heaney said,

 

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

 

So hope for a great sea change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells…

 

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