On feeling speechless…

Stuck at home with a cold, I’ve been trying to decide why I've been finding it so hard to post anything here this last week or so. Perhaps it is partly post-Easter fatigue, rather like the dead spot in January after the glory of Christmas and the new start of another year. Maybe it has to do with something described wonderfully well in the back page interview in this week's Church Times.

John Brassington, Chair of Dance into Worship, says in his interview, quoting a letter he received from Canon Joseph Poole, the first Precentor of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral,

...You will fulfil your vocation chiefly by prayer; and specifically by adoration (for which you have a special aptitude) and by intercession. There are many, many people... who need your intercession. What you will do for people, in adoration and intercession, you will probably never know, and nor will they. Only the Father knows—and that is all that matters...

One could apply those sentences to me, I think, and to many who have been called along the same path, only perhaps adding the word contemplation. Sometimes words simply fail. I think at times the act of cognition itself fails. We pray, but we feel nothing, we are aware of nothing but ordinariness and a sense of being anything but special, or useful. At times like this, words like Canon Poole’s do more for me, really, than anything…