A baking day in August hoping to encounter life’s purest.
The car parked with difficulty.
The hot walk as a tourist.
The air car fumed and gritty.

Then through the doorway, now no longer rushed.
Into the cool of the Basilica Di Santa Chiara.
Now all is hushed.
To seek sainthood’s tiara.

We descended the stairs into the church’s cavity.
To pause awhile before the tomb.
To wonder at this radical attachment to poverty.
Here now, but not in life was she in gloom.

We emerge again in not too much haste.
And join the tourists in a welcome gelato taste.

Unless a wheat grain falls to the ground and dies.
It remains only a single grain but if it dies it yields a rich harvest.
If we proclaim the truth about death there are no lies.
We simply do not know what will happen with our eternal rest.

But this we know, we have to die to move forward.
So death of this body is no frightening thing.
But it frightens me, I’m sorry, I’m just a coward.
The clock moves forwards remorselessly, the hours time hourly. Ting, ting.

Will this body pass into total annihilation.
Will my essence be reborn in another human body’s soul.
Will it come to heavenly resurrection.
But anyway, that’s the end for this frail body of all toil.

I wish I had the courage of St Laurence.
But I do not, I remain a man of too little sense.

My sorrow is so great.
My mental anguish so endless.
Endless indeed is our battle to escape fate.
Sometimes our sadness seems friendless.

Watching a film about the monks of St Bernard in Leicestershire.
One monk saying he did not pray, his whole life was a prayer.
Emotions play on our life as on a lyre.
But we can offer them up to him as a fanfare.

The word is in the wind.
His touch can be gentle or strong or even still.
But if we remain outside the city in our search we can find.
We are like a child trying to look at the world out of a high window sill.

But if we do not see him, if him we refuse to discuss.
He is definitely looking at us.

This vision is for its own time only.
Eager for its own fulfilment it does not deceive.
We are impatient but all will come right slowly.
We should wait patiently for what flows through time’s sieve.

We imagine he will come in a moment.
Him or joy or Sadhana.
But pause and think, revelation may come as a trickle not a torrent .
Instant victory may be sudden but not lasting as at Cannae.

You come slowly without reason or rhyme.
Or if you prefer you come by degrees.
The truth or your truth will come in their own good time..
It can come in a rush or as a tease.

But what you are or what you believe depends on your own sight.
And all is equally right.

Woe to the city soaked in blood.
Whose plundering know no end.
I was reading this from the prophet Nahum out aloud.
How they did Nineveh rend?

Once, years ago, I stood at the prophet’s tomb.
It lies in the villlage of Alqosh, fifty kilometres South of Mosul.
Already we could see the shadow of violence loom.
All the villages south witnessed of Yazidis and Christians a fatal cull .

It is said there are ten times more stars in the Universe than every grain of sand on earth .
With countless different views of religion and truth can we not learn respect for each other.
My views wander constantly seeking but being denied any single berth.
I even wonder if even the one could have created so many stars or why we cannot love our brother.

It is not logic or teaching or law that convinces me more or less.
It is that indefinable sense of something else.

“In a Resplendent Cloud the Holy Spirit appeared.”

DON’T WORRY

It’s not what you believe or what you do that will get you to Heaven’s gate.
It’s whether you try that will open up Heaven on Earth.
There’s no set of rules that have to be obeyed that will for this appointment make you late.
You can indulge yourself in sadness or mirth.

You don’t have to have a view of what comes next to reach the Sun.
We cannot know how many lives I have had or just this one.
This is not a race to be run.
We just have to hope and the crown will be won.

So do not be disheartened, just continue to seek.
What you are is just fine.
You are utterly unique.
To you one day will be given a wondrous sign.

Read, meditate, dance or pray.
Live this life and enjoy.

Now the slow lorries trundle north.
Impatient the drivers curse silently behind.
There is a distinct lack of mirth.
As the line of sight vanishes into a dip, I can’t overtake, what a bind.

But slow down awhile and look at the great skies.
The huge views in this vast undulating Lincolnshire landscape.
A land of distant copses, pylons and gentle rises.
Far flung villages in tree shaded guise.

And think of this dreary asphalt as the stone clad Ermine Way.
A Roman legionnaire, plodding forwards.
Fully laden at thirty miles a day.
His work on the Northern frontier of empire taken onwards.

And then a mighty bend around a runway goes the road.
To take Cold War Vulcans, bearing an altogether heavier and deadlier load.

Memories of the church in the Jubilee year I had visited.
The Roman summer’s suffocating heat.
But duty done, the Holy doors of all four great basilicas entered.
Grateful for the cool after the hot street.

It was August, We did not know of its name as Our Lady of the Snows.
During the Consulate of Liberus on the 5th August snow fell.
The wish of the Roman patrician John for an heir granted , we suppose.
Whether the legend is true or false we cannot tell.

But we remember those words, you have great faith.
Let your wish be granted.
We all search for one thing that escapes like a wraith.
Let’s just rejoice that John’s wish was obtained.

But we pilgrims and tourists just wander, gawp, and gawk.
Another piece of Roman architecture done and we carry on our walk.

Despised as a scholar with no promise.
Rejected at first as a priest.
Accepted not for knowledge but devoutness.
He refused from his vocation to desist.

Your priest, O Lord, shall be clothed with justice.
Your holy ones shall ring out their joy.
In the obscure village of Ars en Dombes, he was just as us.
They were slow at first to trust this poor boy.

Such was his poverty, his honesty as a preacher and orator.
He would spend eighteen hours a day in the confessional.
He refused any promotion or any honour.
His ability to understand people’s fears and regrets was exceptional.

He tells us that careers’ achievements can end in tatters.
It is what we are not what we do that matters.

But as soon as he felt the force of the wind, he took fright and began to sink.
Men of little faith, why did you doubt?
What between them and me is the link?
I will not let my doubts be rooted out.

If my faith was just as heavy as a feather,
I would float on a Galilee sea of calm.
But my faith is like a sinking stone and not strong like leather.
I reason, I doubt, I sink out of God’s realm.

None of us will ever walk on water.
We have not the courage or even sense to try.
We are held in doubt as by a reasoning halter.
About this we cannot lie.

But this man Peter too who sank
One day the rock became one of faith’s highest rank.

Oh come to the water all you who are thirsty.
Why spend money on what is not bread?
I was thinking in the early stages of meditation asking for mercy.
The first is to overcome habitual fears, the second to ignore the ego into which we are bred.

We met the walkers on the lonely path today.
They loomed large, chatting in clear good shape.
And now on our return by a different way they were far far away.
Tiny dots in the huge wheat in stubble landscape.

The bread we seek is such a small quantity.
Not enough to satisfy the hunger for life
But by his power, its power grows in constancy.
Till it satisfies all craving and strife.

And even the scraps left over.
Would satisfy even the most ardent life’s lover.

A gentle man of great learning.
He wore it lightly.
Composer of the carol Tu Scendi Della Stella, still singing.
Living with the poor of Naples daily.

But above all a lover of beauty.
Musician, poet, author, and painter.
Master of interior life but not as mere duty.
Taking the Gospel to the poor, Redemptorist founder.

Opposed to sterile legalism and rigour.
Said such rigour should never have been practised in the Church.
Can we not also welcome all to communion’s succour.
Can we not put more stress on mercy, less on rules as we search.

Let us put humanity and the person first.
And rejection because of lifestyle last.

The feast day of St Ignatius Loyola.
Founder of the Jesuits, author of the Spiritual Exercises.
Pilgrim of the church from Espanola.
Soldier turned priest and with him hope arises.

I recall our own family pilgrimage to Inigo’s birthplace Aspeitia.
Driving through the verdant Basque Country.
Six children in tow, visiting all his sites, in a kind of race.
I was inspired, perhaps they were just hungry.

At the battle of Pamplona, glory enticed.
The shattered leg, and to a military career and disorder.
The end of romance reading and commitment to Christ.
And the foundation of the Jesuit Order.

But I will never forget doing the spiritual exercises at St Beuno’s retreat.
A spiritual feast, the genesis of a book and a not to be missed treat.

PSALM 146

Lauda, anima mea.
Praise the Lord O my soul.
An outstanding preacher, St Peter Chrysologus looked deep into his own anima.
He drank deep out of poverty’s bowl.

But only a few fragments survive.
Lauded in life his works are largely lost.
So what we write will be lucky to end up in a forgotten archive.
But who cares, we do it for pleasure despite any effort cost.

In Ravenna there survives a portrait, a marble fragment.
Peter, a man of golden speech.
Can we those lost works lament.
And ponder him out of time’s brief reach.

A distant echo from a dissolving empire.
All rises and falls into fate’s quagmire.

Feast of St Martha