Skip to main content

Lent

On Ash Wednesday I went for a walk on the beach. It was one of those silvery late summer days when the sand and the clouds and the sea all seem to be made of differently worked bits of the same stuff. There was a wind from the South, cool and insistently strong but also in an odd way, gentle and enfolding. I didn't want it to go around me; I wanted it to go through me and open me and unsettle me. I wanted it to turn me inside out and help me unattach.

I had made my Lenten resolutions. This year I am not giving anything up; I am adding. As well as my customary morning meditation I have added another of equal length late in the day, and where my timetable permits, also one at noon. I have also added a daily reading from one of my favourite books, Anthony De Mello's The Way to Love. This Lent I want to let the wind blow through me; as much of it as I can stand, so it's as well to build into my life some more opportunities to stand in the breeze.
At the end of the beach is a small cave. I walked through it, under the black damp rocks towards the light which was marking a turning point, back along my own footsteps and towards my home.

This little pilgrimage, there and back along the beach; this little pilgrimage of 40 days, following the footsteps of my master towards the cross and resurrection, will be about attachment. Or rather, will be about releasing attachments. The Way to Love is, amongst other things, about attachment. It is a series of addresses  recorded at a retreat, and, I would guess, transcribed pretty much verbatim long after De Mello's death. The small essays (about 3 1/2 pages each) are not very literate. But they are orate. I read them and I can catch the Indian accent and the oblique  structure  of a gifted storyteller. I read them and I can feel De Mello's gaze as he speaks unflinchingly to my heart, laying open truths so obvious I would have seen them years ago had not my own illusions and vanities prevented me.
The wind carves patterns in the sand as I walk back to my car. Already this has been one of the biggest, busiest weeks of my life. I have so much to relinquish and some small things still to acquire. Life is short and there is so much to be done. I covet the patterning of my own soul.

Lord, Holy Spirit,
You blow like the wind in a thousand paddocks
Inside and outside the fences,
You blow where you wish to blow...

 ...Lord, Holy Spirit
in the love of friends you are building a new house,
Heaven is with us when you are with us.
You are singing your song in the hearts of the poor.
Guide us, wound us, heal us. Bring us to the Father
(James K Baxter)
Labels:

Comments

peregryn said…
Thank you for this. I like 'unattaching' - I need to do it too.
I wonder if you know Postcript, a poem by Seamus Heaney about a journey like this: You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass / As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. The whole poem's at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/postscript-8/
16 February 2013 at 08:45
Elaine Dent said…
It seems easy to look at my congregation and observe their attachments and wish: if only they would let go of this or that.... It is much harder to discern that my own unnamed and unrecognized attachments can be just as debilitating. Thus I too am on a Lenten journey of sabbath rest (in the midst of work)via an online retreat which involves more silence and reflection. But sabbath rest requires letting go and often it is letting go of the things or thought patterns I am attached to and think that I (or the congregation I serve) cannot get along without. What hubris! Thanks for your post.
17 February 2013 at 13:31
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more