Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: david hopes, into the heart of the fire, pilgrimage, poetry, prayer
Lord, how long sunset and moonset
against the bare hill at my window?
How long springset, winterset against this heart
before it finds the opening and flies?
If I were a fisher I would cast my net.
If I were a prophet I would know.
If I were a pilgrim I would start
wayfaring now before the longing dies.
I have thought and I have thought
and I gnarl to rest at last
where flesh and soul were poorly bought
with all the world high-stepping past.
Lord, You bring my certain soul to doubt,
spoil heart’s home, that they must set out.
- David Hopes
This poem is from the excellent collection of mystical poems ‘Into the Heart of the Fire’ edited by Mary E Giles and Kathryn Hohlwein
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: helen waddell, Holy Week, journey, lenten journey, passion, peter abelard, pilgrimage, prayer, suffering
The rabbit stopped shrieking when the stooped over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.
It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard’s heart. He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. ‘Thibault,’ he said, ‘do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?’
Thibault nodded.
‘I know,’ he said, “Only, I think God is in it too.’
Abelard look sharply.
‘In it? Do you mean that it makes him suffer, the way it does us?’
Thibault nodded.
‘Then why doesn’t he stop it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Thibault. ‘Unless it’s like the prodigal son. I suppose the father could have kept him at home against his will. But what would have been the use? All this,’ he stroked the limp body, ‘is because of us. But all the time God suffers. More than we do.’
Abelard looked at him, perplexed. ‘Thibault, do you mean Calvary?’
Thibault shook his head. ‘That was only a piece of it – the piece that we say- in time. Like that.’ He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. ‘That dark ring there, it foes hp and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because was like that, kind and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.’
Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth, the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him.
‘Then, Thibault,’ he said slowly, ‘you think that all of this,’ he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, ‘all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?’
‘God’s cross,’ said Thibault, ‘And it goes one.
- From Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Good Friday, Holy Week, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, poetry, prayer, wh vanstone
Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.
- WH Vanstone
Good Friday:
torture, suffering, execution, death, sacrifice, love
and a reminder that the spiritual is the political.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Holy Week, Lent, lenten journey, passion, pilgrimage, poetry, prayer
At the moment of consecration
the priest’s fingers were ingrained with oil
from mending a puncture.
So much more
than purity of clean withdrawal.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bernardino de laredo, franciscans, francisco de osuna, glasshampton, jean vanier, John of the Cross, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer, retreats, spanish mystics, teresa of avila
I’ve been away on retreat for the past week at Glasshampton Monastery, giving me a much needed space for prayer and reflection in the build up to Holy Week and Easter. Thanks to Br Nicholas Alan, I’ve discovered the sixteenth century Spanish Franciscan mystical writers Francisco de Osuna and Bernardino de Laredo who in many ways paved the way for Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. I’ve been slowly reading and praying Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabetwith it’s teaching on the prayer of recollection. Maybe some quotes from this once I’ve pondered and read more.
In the meantime, this from Jean Vanier:
In L’Arche and in Faith and Light, we are beginning to see the truth of St Paul’s words about the choice of God – that God chooses the weak, the foolish, the lowly and the despised. This does not mean that God has not chosen others who are wise and strong. It means that Jesus, the God of love, came to give himself to those who feel lonely and pushed aside, and who cry out for love, who are open and vulnerable to love, who let themselves be led by love. Jesus cannot give himself to those who are closed in on themselves and only want ideas about God. The wise and rich must leave their securities, and their need for temporal and spiritual power and wealth, in order to discover Jesus, the lover. They must recognise their needs and poverty enough to open the doors of their hearts to receive him, to be led and taught by him.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer, Thomas Merton
A prayer of Thomas Merton:
My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean
that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire
in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything
apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me
by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death,
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, poetry, prayer, rilke
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let go. . . .
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: de caussade, graham greene, Lent, lenten journey, monsignor quixote, pilgrimage, prayer
A final piece from Monsignor Quixote:
Without much hope he opened Father Caussade’s ‘Spiritual Letters’ a second time, but this time he was rewarded, although the paragraph he had fixed on began discouragingly: ‘Have I ever in my life made a good confession? Has God pardoned me? Am I in a good or bad state?’ He was tempted to close the book but he read on. ’I at once reply: God wishes to conceal all that from me, so that I may blindly abandon myself to his mercies. I do not wish to know what He does not wish to show me and I wish to proceed in the midst of whatever darkness He may plunge me into. It is His business to know the state of my progress, mine to occupy myself with Him alone. He will take care of all the rest; I leave it to Him.’
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: esther morgan, grace, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, poetry, prayer
This series of Lenten posts will be a journey of forty days but less than forty steps I’m afraid.
I am reading Esther Morgan’s wonderful collection of poetry Grace, which I thoroughly recommend. The title poem speaks to me of the sense of space that Lenten discipline seems, paradoxically, to give.
Grace
You’ve been living for this for weeks
without knowing it:
the moment the house empties like a city in August
so completely
it forgets you exist.
Light withdraws slowly
is almost gone before you notice.
In the stillness, everything becomes itself:
the circle of white plates on the kitchen table
the serious chairs that attend them
even the roses on the papered walls
seem to open a little wider.
It looks simple: the glass vase holding
whatever is offered –
cut flowers, or the thought of them –
simple, though not easy
this waiting without hunger in the near dark
for what you may be about to receive.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: jane williams, justice, Kingdom of God, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer
As we enter Lent today, I would like to share this excellent piece from today’s Guardian newspaper by Jane Williams. If we want to know what Lent is and how it involves us, this is a very good place to start.
Lent begins with a man in a desert. This man has extraordinary powers and knows himself to be of special importance to his God. In the desert, he is facing choices about what that means for the rest of his life. He is alone, and in a semi-starved, almost hallucinatory condition, but the choices he makes here will not be dismissed when he returns to “normal” life. He chooses not to use his power for his own gratification. Instead, he chooses to put himself and his power at the disposal of God, for the use of others.
He faces three temptations, like in all the best stories. The first is to turn stones into bread, to satisfy his gnawing hunger. The second is to get power over people, and the third is to make himself invulnerable. All of these things, he rejects. Later on in life, we see the consequences of these choices. Jesus can produce miraculous food – but for others, not himself. He can influence people, but only if they choose to believe in him; and he accepts the death on the cross that brings the presence of God into all those situations of unavoidable human vulnerability.
This is how the New Testament tells it, and that’s why Jesus’s followers “do” Lent. For a few weeks, we try to see that the world doesn’t crumble if we don’t have everything we want; we try to make ourselves and our resources that little bit more available for ends other than our own.
Whether you’re a Christian or not, this choice that Jesus makes in the desert has to be made. Are we going to live our lives simply trying to get as much of what we want as we possibly can, whatever the cost to others, or are we going to imagine a different way? It’s a particularly apposite question at the moment, when we hear daily about people who are “giving things up” because they have no choice: parents giving up meals so that their children can eat, for example.
These hard times are going to last much longer than Lent, but this is a chance to take stock and imagine a changed world, in which, perhaps, the rich can actually manage with far less than they thought they needed; in which, perhaps, poverty is not treated as a misdemeanour on the part of the poor, but as a failure of society, to be remedied by all of us.
Jesus’s decision in the desert led him into several years of working with and speaking out for the people his society – and ours – thought unimportant: sick people, foreigners, poor people, women, children. The people in power didn’t like to be challenged in Jesus’s day, any more than they do now, and so Jesus faced scorn, derision and, ultimately, death, for his choice to live by different rules.
That’s a far cry from giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, but there is really no point at all in a Lenten discipline that isn’t about reimagining the world so that it revolves less about our own desires and more about the good of all. When Lent ends, that vision of the world doesn’t. It’s a world that is less about what I want, and more about what we all need, in which the good life for me is unimaginable unless it is also the good life for you
