Faithfulness and temptation…

If the salvation of society depends, in the long run, on the moral and spiritual health of individuals, the subject of contemplation becomes a vastly important one, since contemplation is one of the indications of spiritual maturity… You cannot save the world merely with a system. You cannot have peace without charity. You cannot have social order without saints, mystics, and prophets.

A Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas P. McDonnell, p.375

One of the greatest and most persistent temptations facing those of us who are called to the contemplative life is that of feeling that we are wasting our time, that we are sitting (kneeling, lying…) around in our homes, our convents, our “quiet spaces” doing nothing, while our infinitely more useful sisters and brothers are out there on the street feeding the poor, visiting the sick, preaching the Gospel. Unlike most temptations, this one doesn’t seem to lessen no matter what we do, or however much we pray. It is one of our enemy’s best pieces of craftsdemonship, too, since it appears to come straight from Scripture (e.g. Matthew 25.31-41).

We need to be clear about this: contemplation is a work of God, not a self-improvement project. It is a definite calling, and one which our Lord himself valued deeply (Luke 10.37-11.5) during his time on earth. Scripture is in fact peppered from Genesis to Revelation with calls to prayer, and “saints, mystics and prophets” walk its pages in throngs.

The Third Order Society of St Francis puts it like this

Tertiaries desire to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, whom we serve in the three ways of Prayer, Study, and Work. In the life of the Order as a whole these three ways must each find full and balanced expression, but it is not to be expected that all members devote themselves equally to each of them. Each individual’s service will vary according to his or her abilities and circumstances, yet each individual member’s Personal Rule of Life must include each of the three ways. (The Principles, Day 13)

Faithfulness to our calling is difficult. We must not expect it to be otherwise, I think. Jesus himself appeared to find it very difficult (Luke 4.1-13; 22.39-46) and, as I suggested the other day, temptation is part of our following, part of the way of the Cross.

I am so grateful that for me, at least, the Jesus Prayer is not only my principle means of contemplative prayer, but it is, so far from being a mantra or a means of “zoning out”, the deepest prayer for Christ’s mercy in whatever circumstances…

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Trust in God…

I do not understand how it is possible not to trust in God, who can do all things. With God, everything; without God, nothing.

St. Faustina Kowalska, with thanks to Friar Rex

---

Absolutely – these last few days with my dear TSSF sisters and brothers at Hilfield has demonstrated this so beautifully. Trust, and the patience and littleness that grow out of trust, are the ingredients of humility, of which the Principles so memorably says, “Humility confesses that we have nothing that we have not received and admits the fact of our insufficiency and our dependence upon God. It is the basis of all Christian virtues. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said, `No spiritual house can stand for a moment except on the foundation of humility’. It is the first condition of a joyful life within any community.” (The Principles of the Third Order)

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.” (Jesus, in John 14.1 NIV)

Retreating...

Off to Hilfield Friary tomorrow for our TSSF Area Team Retreat; I’ll be back on Friday sometime…

I am so fond of Hilfield – set deep in the skirts of the Dorset Downs, it really does feel like A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, in Ursula le Guin’s words.

We’ll be staying in Bernard House,

the loveliest of the guest houses, I think.

It will be good just to be part of the rhythm of Friary life, to settle into these ancient patterns that are new every time, and to renew my acquaintance with Olive the Cat. More when I get back…

We lost it years ago…

Let us therefore not be anxious because we are getting better, but rather worse. Let us give up the idea of spiritual progress, if that means being more holy, more devout. God meets us in the absence of things, all sorts of things. And this is good news. Because we are not getting any better, we are getting worse. We are not making any progress, we are regressing fast.

The only qualification is to have no qualifications, the only admission ticket is to admit we don’t have one, we lost it years ago. The trouble is we have been looking for it ever since. Just say, “I haven’t got anything to show you. I can’t prove a thing. I can’t really tell you who I am or provide a good reference – or any reference – or tell you whom to ring up, I’m an unqualified, unskilled, inexperienced non-entity.”

Say that, and what he will say is, “Come in my dear. You are the very person we’ve been looking for!”

John Fenton, from TSSF Contemplatives Newsletter, July 2011

---

Anyone who believes in coincidence should have been with me this morning. After a troubled night, I woke feeling exactly as Fenton describes here. After I’d washed and dressed, later than usual, I picked up the post, and there was the new issue of the TSSF Contemplatives Newsletter. “Oh, great!” I thought, “I’m supposed to be one of those. What a joke…” But I sat down to read it over a mug of coffee and a piece of toast, and there was this passage from Fenton looking at me, set in bold type. Somewhere, I’m profoundly grateful. God has found me, as he always does, wherever I try to hide from him.

For some odd reason, the deeper my happiness, the deeper my penitence needs to be. This is not false humility, at least I hope it isn’t, but merely the increasing sense that I don’t deserve anything really. What I am is so intrinsically flawed, so broken, that I can’t even lay claim to gradual improvement. Grace is all I can lay claim to, and that only by means of – by way of – the Cross.

Tomorrow we are setting off for Norfolk, to join the TSSF Pilgrimage for the 950th Anniversary of the Shrine at Walsingham on Sunday. I’ll take the laptop along, but I don’t know how easy it will be to get Wi-Fi. If I can, I’ll post from there.

Orate pro nobis!

Giving us his own Name…

We in the western world are a circumference people, with little access to the centre.  We live on the boundaries of our own lives, confusing edges with essence, too quickly claiming the superficial as substance.  The superficial level of things is largely useless and leads us to do evil without knowing it.  To plumb the depths and substance of things, even our sin, is to be led to God.  Perhaps the greatest sin of our time is superficiality itself.

Maybe there was an earlier age when people had easy and natural access to their souls and openness to transcendent Spirit.  If there was such an age, it must have consisted of people who were either loved very well at their centre or who suffered very much around the edges—probably both. 

The path of prayer and love and the path of suffering seem to be the two Great Paths of transformation.  Suffering seems to get our attention; love and prayer seem to get our heart and our passion.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Everything Belongs, pp. 13-15

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ. (2 Corinthians 1:3-5)

Have you ever noticed the odd spiritual law that seems to govern us, that the more we are afflicted, the more honestly and (com)passionately we can pray for others—and its parallel, that the better things seem to be going for us, the harder it is to pray?

Perhaps this is why we have been given, in our various degrees, the gift of empathy, “the capacity to share the sadness or happiness of another sentient being through consciousness rather than physicality.” (Wikipedia) But we have to be prepared to be open: we have to be prepared to see others as they are for themselves, and not as they might potentially serve our own needs.

The Principles of the Third Order of St. Francis state: “Members of The Third Order fight against all injustice in the name of Christ, in whom there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for in him all are one. Our chief object is to reflect that openness to all which was characteristic of Jesus. This can only be achieved in a spirit of chastity, which sees others as belonging to God and not as a means of self-fulfilment…” We are called, as Christians, to battle in prayer, as Ephesians 6 in particular explains—but we can only do so as long as we are pure in heart (Matthew 5:8) and keep ourselves from the lust (and here I mean economic, social, political lust as much as sexual) that views others as means to our own ends, and thus blinds us to the empathy that God has placed in the heart of each of us.

We are all sinners. But Christ died for each one of us, and so far as we love him, he will heal us. We have just to turn to him concealing nothing, and by his Holy Spirit he will restore us, giving us his own pure heart for our stone one, opening our blind eyes to see the brokenness of our sisters and brothers, opening our ears to hear their crying, and giving us his own Name in which to pray…

Of and with the poor…

We can no longer be satisfied by simply being the Church for the poor from our position of establishment.  We must realize that sometimes that very generosity, that very attempt to be good to other people, has kept us in a position of power and superiority.  Somehow we must be of and with the poor, and then be ready for some mistrust and even criticism.
Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), the holy Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, said it so truthfully, “As long as I fed the poor, they called me a saint.  When I asked, ‘Why are there so many poor people?’ they called me a communist.”

Richard Rohr, April 2010

As Franciscans, I think it is crucial that we face this question. The First and Second Orders, by virtue of their vocation to the Evangelical Counsels, live it out in common with their sisters and brothers in other religious communities—but we as Tertiaries need to examine ourselves rather rigorously on this point, I feel. Though, as our Principles state, “we possess property and earn money to support ourselves and our families,” we must consider how Rohr’s words here question our own vocation.

I don’t have an answer, of course, to these questions. The path God has somehow laid out for me has brought me closer to the way of poverty than some of my sisters and brothers, but this is through what might be called (if you leave God out of it!) force of circumstance: I can claim no holiness, or acuity of discernment, for myself. All that life since the farm accident that stopped me working some years ago has done is to give me a different perspective, a way of seeing that I didn’t have before; a cure, maybe, for a blindness common to so many educated people of my generation, who have not had to live frugally amid abundance. But it has not shown me any specific advice for anyone else… Maybe each of us has to plot our own course through this land of inequalities—it would be so hard to offer advice without appearing to manipulate, or to offer criticism.
One thing I do know. As Franciscans we must look clearly, with wide open eyes, at the poor who live among us, quite as much as at the glamorously poor of what used to be called the Third World. (I am using deliberately provocative language here!) We must set aside the dark glasses of prejudice, the tinted lenses of class, and look, really look, into the eyes of the Big Issue sellers, into the bundles of rags under the city bridges, into the doors of the temporary accommodation dotted even among the prosperous and leafy villages of Dorset, and allow them to ask their own questions of us, of our own vocation to the Third Order of St. Francis…

Nothing we could ever hope to own...

In the Franciscan Third Order we are called to a life of simplicity (see The Principles, Days 10-12), even poverty. In our Western, 21st century life this is an odd thing to understand. I am only just beginning to get a handle on what it might mean, and this only by means of God's showing me its implications in ways that don't allow me to take credit for anything, still less act the hero as I might otherwise be inclined to do.

I am coming to believe that my 20-odd year obsession with Romans 8:28 is actually central to our understanding of the Franciscan way in these odd and troubled times. God does truly work in all things for the good of those who love him, and who are called according to his purpose. In many ways our poverty lies in this, our giving up of our own ambitions to self-determination, self-actualisation, and our abandoning of ourselves to God's grace, his sheer unconditioned gift. Our hopes and dreams are not ours really, not our own to bargain with, to lay plans for, as though we had our future at our own disposal.

I watched an extraordinarily moving film clip today (thanks Dria) of Market Street in San Francisco just days before the earthquake of 1906. The street was full of people, horses, traffic going about their own lives, following their own plans - so full of life and hope. I dare say Port-au-Prince looked much that way on the morning of January 12th.

We cannot know our lifetime. Our next breath is a gift we cannot deserve, and the one after that. We have this moment in which to love God, to love our sister, our brother, the cat who lies against the keyboard, the birds we feed in the garden. In all these things God works for good beyond our imagining, even when they seem so frail, so tragically able to be hurt. Like Jesus in the garden, we are called to an unthinkable trust. That is our poverty, all our riches, nothing we could ever hope to own.

The love of Poverty…

The most honoured parts of the body are not the head or the hands, which lead and control. The most important parts are the least presentable parts. That’s the mystery of the Church. As a people called out of oppression to freedom, we must recognize that it is the weakest among us—the elderly, the small children, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the hungry and sick—who form the real centre. Paul says, “It is the parts of the body which we consider least dignified, that we surround with the greatest dignity” (1 Corinthians 12:23).

The Church as the people of God can truly embody of the living Christ among us only when the poor remain its most treasured part. Care for the poor, therefore, is much more than Christian charity. It is the essence of being the body of Christ…

Like every human organization the Church is constantly in danger of corruption. As soon as power and wealth come to the Church, manipulation, exploitation, misuse of influence, and outright corruption are not far away.

How do we prevent corruption in the Church? The answer is clear: by focusing on the poor. The poor make the Church faithful to its vocation. When the Church is no longer a church for the poor, it loses its spiritual identity. It gets caught up in disagreements, jealousy, power games, and pettiness. Paul says, “God has composed the body so that greater dignity is given to the parts which were without it, and so that there may not be disagreements inside the body but each part may be equally concerned for all the others” (1 Corinthians 12:24-25). This is the true vision. The poor are given to the Church so that the Church as the body of Christ can be and remain a place of mutual concern, love, and peace.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

St. Francis saw this so clearly: it was only by “focusing” on the poor to the extent that he embraced their poverty for himself, embraced it as closely as a lover, that he was able—without, at least to begin with, even realising what he was doing—to cleanse the corruption that threatened to destroy the Church in his day.

But how do we, in our own time, come anywhere close to this? I have always wondered how we might truly follow this part of our vocation as Tertiaries. The Third Order of the Society of St. Francis was founded by Francis himself in order to provide a way to live as radical Christians in the world, rather than by walking away from it. As the Principles state (Day 4): “When Saint Francis encouraged the formation of The Third Order he recognised that many are called to serve God in the spirit of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience in everyday life (rather than in a literal acceptance of these principles as in the vows of the Brothers and Sisters of the First and Second Orders). The rule of The Third Order is intended to enable us in the duties and conditions of daily living, and for us to carry them out in this spirit.”

This is all very good; but where, in our own lives, does the rubber hit the road? It would be so easy to fudge the call to simplicity, or to let it stand as a merely external exercise. Where is the reckless love Francis had for his Lady Poverty?

Richard Rohr has some thoughts:

God calls all of us to take the demanding and liberating path of our own inner truth (John 8:31-32) [Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (NIV)]—and that means taking responsibility for everything that’s in us: for what pleases us and for what we’re ashamed of, for the rich person inside us and for the poor one too. Francis of Assisi called this forgiving the leper within us and Therese of Lisieux called it “The Little Way.” It is always the way of courage and utter trust, recognizing both light and shadow within us.

If we learn to honour and claim our inner inheritance, we will grant others the same divine donation. If we learn to love the poor one within us, we’ll discover that we have room for compassion for all “outsiders” too, because we now know that we are all the same. Human solidarity now comes naturally.

Those who have enough space within them to embrace every part of their own soul can receive the fully human and fully divine Christ. And the good news is that Christ himself will lead us on this path.

Adapted from Simplicity, p. 174-175

I confess that I’m really quite excited about Rohr’s words here. If the discipline of interior prayer can lead us directly into the love of inner—and ultimately outer—poverty, then at last we have a handle on our calling, and a real understanding of why prayer is so central to our vocation. Certainly my own experience seems to be bearing out all that Rohr says.

I’ll try and write more on this as it (hopefully!) becomes clearer…

Freedom!

The Church is the people of God. The Latin word for “church,” ecclesia, comes from the Greek ek, which means “out,” and kaleo, which means “to call.” The Church is the people of God called out of slavery to freedom, sin to salvation, despair to hope, darkness to light, an existence centred on death to an existence focused on life.

When we think of Church we have to think of a body of people, travelling together. We have to envision women, men, and children of all ages, races, and societies supporting one another on their long and often tiresome journeys to their final home.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think this is why any model for the Church other than Christ’s is bound to fail, and fail by causing the greatest misery to those who try to find God through it. We are called by Christ out of those bondages—how then can a church do Christ’s will that imposes them all over again?

This is why St. Francis was so insistent on poverty, chastity and, yes, obedience: only so can we be free from the chains of obsession the world puts about our feet. As Tertiaries we live, as The Principles state (Day 4), in the spirit of those Evangelical counsels, but if we do so we are no different really from any who follow Christ, who are called out of the bondage of wealth, lust and self-will that the world peddles as the greatest good, yet which the young man who came to Jesus seeking eternal life would not be liberated from… (Mark 10.17ff)

Rediscovering Christ…

Emerging Christianity seems to be willing to recognize that it is at the energetic level, the life level, the love level, the lifestyle level that the living mystery of God and Jesus is passed on. It is not just getting the words right, and making a verbal affirmation of your belief in words and creeds. Verbal belief systems ask almost nothing of us in terms of actual change of mind and heart and lifestyle.

The broader Jesus scholarship that we are now enjoying widens the view to include previously neglected perspectives: the essential Jewish lens, the feminist/womanist lens, the lens of the poor, the unique lens of every minority, and the lens of sincere secular seekers, who often point out our own blind spots to us. You cannot see what you were never told to look for from inside.

I personally do not think Jesus ever intended to create Christianity as a new or separate religion. I think he was trying to reform and restore the Jewish religion, and in that he offered us the criteria by which to reform all religion forever…

The contemplative mind is really just the mind that emerges when you pray instead of think first. Praying opens the field and moves beyond fear and judgment and agenda and analysis, and just lets the moment be what it is—as it is.

We really have to be taught that mind. We now are pretty sure that it was systematically taught—mostly in the monasteries—as late as the 13th and even into the 14th century. But once we got into the oppositional mind of the Reformation and the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the contemplative mind pretty much fell by the wayside. The wonderful thing is that it is now being rediscovered across denominations, and there is no select group that holds it or that teaches it. Catholics still use the word “contemplation,” but usually have not been taught the practice, even monks and nuns and priests…

The contemplative mind does not need to prove anything or disprove anything. It looks for wisdom by saying, “What does this text ask of me, what do I need to change in me?” Not, "how can I change others?"

The contemplative mind lets the terrifying/wonderful moment be what it is and primarily ask something of me, not always using it to convert others.

The contemplative mind is willing to hear from a fresh beginner’s mind, yet also learn from the old and solid Tradition.

The contemplative mind has the humility and patience to think “both/and” instead of “all or nothing.” We call this non-dual thinking. It easily leads to a “Third Way” mentality, neither fight nor flight, but standing in between where I can hold what I do know together with what I don’t know. And then I let that wonderful mix lead me to wisdom instead of easy, quick knowledge which largely just creates opinionated people instead of wise people.

Richard Rohr, adapted from the CAC webcast, Nov. 8, 2008:
“What is The Emerging Church?”

I can’t help but feel that Rohr has put his finger here on something very important for us to realise as we look at the Church at the beginning of the 21st century, shaken by internal strife and the rumours of schism, increasingly threatened from without by the minions of political correctness and jobsworthery, yet strangely full of new life and hope on the level of individual fellowships, congregations and groups.

The political model of doing church, just like the Thatcherite business model of running public services, is beginning to fall apart at the seams, showing the creaking framework of false assumptions that holds it all together. We are rediscovering Christ, after all these years!

The Principles, Day 5, reads: “The [Third] Order [Society of St. Francis] is founded on the conviction that Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of God; that true life has been made available to us through His Incarnation and Ministry; by His Cross and Resurrection; and by the sending of his Holy Spirit. Our Order believes that it is the commission of the church to make the gospel known to all and therefore accepts the duty of bringing others to know Christ, and of praying and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.”

That is our simple calling. If we do that, if, like Francis himself, we drop everything and follow our Lord, taking him at his word, then all else will fall into place, and as the Lord commissioned him, we will help rebuild his Church. What Rohr calls “the contemplative mind” is in many ways just that: being prepared to look from within outwards to the suffering and broken world with the eyes of the indwelling Christ, who said, “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17.20ff NRSV)

Francistide Area Day at Hilfield

It’s been a long day, but a marvellous one, at our TSSF Francistide Area meeting at Hilfield Friary. The midday Eucharist in Chapel was, as usual, incredibly moving, incorporating as it did our annual renewal of vows in the company of my dear sisters and brothers from across the Blackmore Vale Area.

We spent much of the day discussing the role of the Third Order in relation to the rest of the church, and to the First and Second Orders, and it was remarkable to see the way the Holy Spirit led the different groups—yes, group discussions!—to similar and interlocking conclusions. More of this later, when the results of this consultation throughout the Order are published…

Bedtime now – I’m tired in the best way!

Embracing Lady Poverty...

How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich? Poverty has many forms. We have to ask ourselves: "What is my poverty?" Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner, lack of security, lack of safety, lack of self-confidence? Each human being has a place of poverty. That's the place where God wants to dwell! "How blessed are the poor," Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty.

We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it. Let's dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This is interesting. Certainly Nouwen is right when he speaks of God blessing us in our weakness. As Paul said (2 Corinthians 9.10 NIV) "That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." But so was Francis of Assisi when he spoke of his love for Lady Poverty, and so is our TSSF Rule when it says, "Tertiaries seek to live joyfully a life of simplicity, humble service and self discipline after the example of St Francis."

Our poverty is more than an absence of physical riches; but it is not less than that. The TSSF Principles (11) state that "[w]e as Tertiaries, though we possess property and earn money to support ourselves and our families, show ourselves true followers of Christ and of Saint Francis by our readiness to live simply and to share with others. We recognise that some of our members may be called to a literal following of Saint Francis in a life of extreme simplicity. All of us, however, accept that we avoid luxury and waste, and regard our possessions as being held in trust for God."

It's not that money is the root of all evil, it's that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil (I Timothy 6.10). As William Wordsworth said, "The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"

But God can use even this. Our place of greatest weakness is the place he reaches out to with Christ's pierced hand, the hand that set the stars in place. That is the strength of the weakness of the Cross, of the Christ "who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing." (Philippians 2.6-7 NIV)

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8.28 NIV, emphasis mine)

Hiddenness revisited…

The largest part of Jesus’ life was hidden. Jesus lived with his parents in Nazareth, “under their authority” (Luke 2:51), and there “increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). When we think about Jesus we mostly think about his words and miracles, his passion, death, and resurrection, but we should never forget that before all of that Jesus lived a simple, hidden life in a small town, far away from all the great people, great cities, and great events. Jesus’ hidden life is very important for our own spiritual journeys. If we want to follow Jesus by words and deeds in the service of his Kingdom, we must first of all strive to follow Jesus in his simple, unspectacular, and very ordinary hidden life.

Hiddenness is an essential quality of the spiritual life. Solitude, silence, ordinary tasks, being with people without great agendas, sleeping, eating, working, playing… all of that without being different from others, that is the life that Jesus lived and the life he asks us to live. It is in hiddenness that we, like Jesus, can increase “in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people” (Luke 2:51). It is in hiddenness that we can find a true intimacy with God and a true love for people.

Even during his active ministry, Jesus continued to return to hidden places to be alone with God. If we don't have a hidden life with God, our public life for God cannot bear fruit…

If indeed the spiritual life is essentially a hidden life, how do we protect this hiddenness in the midst of a very public life? The two most important ways to protect our hiddenness are solitude and poverty. Solitude allows us to be alone with God. There we experience that we belong not to people, not even to those who love us and care for us, but to God and God alone. Poverty is where we experience our own and other people's weakness, limitations, and need for support. To be poor is to be without success, without fame, and without power. But there God chooses to show us God's love.

Both solitude and poverty protect the hiddenness of our lives.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I said a while ago:

All this stuff about prayer boils down to this. What I am really doesn't matter. There isn't any holiness in me. Of myself, I really am not, truly, anything more than little, and ordinary; and anything praiseworthy about me only consists in the extent to which I am prepared to acknowledge that, and to live in the shadows, quietly, like the ivy I love so much. All my health and growth depends on accepting that.

There is no struggle in this now, but a blessed hope, and a kind of love that wells up and catches my breath, and fills my eyes with tears. Most of my life I haven't really known what love is, and still I don't; but in me now Jesus loves, and all I feel are the eddies of that deep current.

It's time to let go of a lot of things; and yet it isn't a time for heroic gestures, grand austerities, but for little turnings to that hidden track that leads out between the trees, away from the lights and the music and the excited voices.

It feels odd to be writing this in such a public place, somehow, rather than in a letter to a close friend or spiritual director. I have thought about this; and it's not an appeal for warm, supportive comments - I honestly am trying to think this through.

It’s even more true now. I couldn’t have known, over a year ago, how prophetic those words were going to turn out to be. Much of that “thinking through” has been done for me by circumstances beyond my own immediate control. The protection of solitude and poverty calls to me more and more strongly, to the point where it’s an eagerness, a longing, a hunger really, at the very centre of who I am. I know that it is only in that solitude, that hidden simplicity, that I can draw as close to God as my heart yearns to do.

Very wisely, the Principles of the Third Order, Society of St. Francis, state in today’s reading:

We as Tertiaries desire to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, whom we serve in the three ways of Prayer, Study, and Work. In the life of the Order as a whole, these three ways must each find full and balanced expression, but it is not to be expected that all members devote themselves equally to each of them. Each individual’s service varies according to their abilities and circumstances, yet as individual member’s our Personal Rule of Life must include each of the three ways.

The need to give the Way of Prayer priority among the various bits of my life just grows stronger by the day. Pray for me that I may be able to be obedient to it…