February 2007 Veronica, or Ronnie as she was known by everyone, founded the local Communist Party and had held most offices; she organized the city’s May Day march, she picketed and protested and petitioned all throughout her long life. To many she was an eccentric embarrassment, to others a heroine. And every Sunday she sat in the front seat of the cathedral, the same seat she had occupied since she was a girl at the Cathedral school, right in front of the pulpit. When she didn’t like what the Bishop was saying, which was most Sundays, she ostentatiously cleaned out her handbag, upending it and shaking everything out on to the pew, and then counted and stacked all her coins in neat piles. When that failed to distract, she reached for her nail clippers, and her repetitive snip, snip, snip rang through the church. That was generally enough to shut the bishop down. Needless to say, the bishop didn’t offer to preside at Ronnie’s funeral. She had two sons, one a professor at the university, the other a dockside worker; that morning the academics all sat on the right hand side of the cathedral, while the trade unionists and Communists and dockside workers occupied the left. The tension was palpable, but something immensely healing and grace-filled happened that day, because it became clear to all that it was only in this church, only in the context of a lifetime of hearing the Gospel and receiving the Sacraments, that all of the disparate parts of Ronnie’s life came together and made sense. She had championed the cause of the workers, and agitated for just wages and safe conditions and reasonable hours, because she had heard the Gospel, proclaimed and preached, every Sunday of her life. She was able to survive the many attacks made on her integrity and her patriotism because she knew the lesson of the Cross and the power of forgiveness. She was able to face death with confidence, even joy, because she already had experienced the victory of the Resurrection. ‘Church’ was not something she did for an hour or so, once a week: it was the core of her being, it informed how she thought and spoke and acted. Not that she was ‘churchy’ – far from it: she was tough and feisty and contrary. And she was rich in wisdom and generous with encouragement, mildly but frequently shocking in her behavior, and always good for a laugh. Not many of us will tango through life like Ronnie, waving flags, chanting slogans, upending our handbags in protest. But we are listening to the same Scriptures from which she drew the great lessons of her life, and like her, we are doing so within the community of the church. Week after week we, too, are instructed in the ways of justice and compassion, in forgiveness and peace, in caring for the hungry, the poor and vulnerable.  We hear about the coming of a kingdom where all of the categories and labels we use to divide and exclude will be rendered meaningless. And every Sunday we are sent out into the world to witness to the lessons we have learned here. How we do that will be different for each one of us; that we do it is the hallmark of a Christian life. For we are what Saint Benedict called his community: “a school for the Lord’s service”. After Ronnie’s funeral, the Communists were the last to leave the Cathedral: they stood around and laughed and told stories, as if they were at home. Because of Ronnie, perhaps they realized they were.