Elaine Kennedy reflects on 20 years of  EDGES.

She was part of the original team.

‘If I’m going to understand, I need to listen’. (Fr. Jim’s first edges editorial).

In my box full of treasures collected over many years, is a copy of our first ever edges magazine – precious in itself and also for what it represents and for all the great memories it triggers of the people who featured in it and those who were on the editorial team.

Fr. Jim put his ideas to us for a magazine at the end of the first year of THOMAS, during which the Drop-in centre had been expanded to capacity. We learned so much through the clients about the plight of people caught up in homelessness, addiction and crime etc. Two of the facts which became most evident were first, how little was known and understood of marginalised people by those in mainstream society who considered the marginalised as a sub-species best avoided and ignored; and secondly how so many people on the fringes of society had absolutely no means of being heard, thus pushing them further into obscurity.  A poem in our first edition has a line – ‘we never laugh alone, why must we cry alone?’ Why indeed?

So, those on the margins were in need of a platform from which to speak of this humanness, their needs, their dreams, their plights.

The kick-start came one evening when a young woman called Sue rang the doorbell and handed Fr. Jim two poems which she had written, three of her lines read

‘But I’ve got a brain within this head

And even through this strife,

God created me and I have a life’.

With that, edges was on the way. The putting together of the magazine, which we knew would be circulated far and wide, was the most daunting and thrilling event, one which stays with me to this day. We were such a great team! We did have some tense moments too, the most memorable being the day before the printer’s deadline – we had worked late into the night putting all the articles onto the computer; the next day a shriek of horror rang out from the office, all our work had vanished. What were we to do? A pall of gloom hovered over the house, when, miraculously, salvation came in the shape of a computer whizz-kid neighbour who spent hours bringing up onto the computer screen what looked to me like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics! He appeared quite unworried and an hour before the deadline he produced edges on the screen. A few days later the first ever magazine arrived for proof reading. That was a fantastic moment. Soon the team was busy coping with hundreds of copies, spread all over the huge table and each needing packing, addressing and posting – this operation soon became a highly organised process.

Over the years, edges has had make-overs. However it’s basic reason for being does not change. If we are going to try to understand, we must listen first and if we are going to listen, the people we want to listen to, must have a medium through which they can speak out.

Over the past twenty years edges has given a vast number of people a platform from which to relate their individual stories and clearly large numbers of edges readers have listened and have reached out judging by their on-going most generous responses to brokenness such as a young girl depicted in her poem from our first edition in 1994 –

‘I need to feel I’m human still

Not broken, defunct, superfluous.

Please give me someone

Willing to link side-by-side

Not at arm’s length as at hope’s door!

But hand in hand, face to face

Warm, touching, life-giving

You see…I’m still here.

Here’s to the next twenty years of edges magazine!