4th St John Vianney of Ars

While I was thinking about today’s saint the Vincent van Gogh picture of ‘The Potato Eaters’ came to mind. The background and people have the colour of potatoes .... the colour of the soil .... the garments of toil. Yet they were united around a table, eating as a family, several generations together, sharing what they had. There is more hope in this apparently dull picture of poverty than in pictures of over-dressed young men and women at dalliance in a beautiful landscape.

The mornings are much duller now and I am no longer greeted by the circling gulls when I scatter their scraps of food in snail-shell pattern on the grass. Yet when I turn round, having scattered seeds for other birds, there the are. This morning there were three herring gulls. One may have been this year’s hatchling, small and mottled, with an older sibling from the previous year, and either mum or dad. They are lovely to look at, and gentle among the gangster gulls.

Do you know, it is not only spiders who form their own thread to make a web or to reach a place of safety. Had I not noted two instances in the last few days I would not have believed it myself. Our greenhouses have bobbly plastic sheets to prevent too much glare, and also to provide insulation in the winter. There are always plants there. Last week I saw a slug attached by its latter-end to the roof insulation sheeting, hanging as though it were just about to let go and fall. So I lifted it down and put it on the grass outside. This morning I saw another slug dangling on about two feet of ‘thread’ from its own body, over some remnant of food, and I helped it down, too. How wonderful ..... after long a long climb up a tasty plant - or what-ever - the slug can form a ‘thread’ - like a spider - and descend slowly without using the same muscles. I wonder how many other species can do that?

Yesterday was a wonderful day and I wandered in the garden with my old (non-digital Canon camera) and tried to catch the beauty of the summer. The moon was full, and touched by the rays of the rising sun, glowed pale gold. Today it looked like filigree ice, and there was no flying gull golden in the early sunshine.

I have been reminded of Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of Basil of Caesarea, who lived in the fourth century AD.. He married as a young man but was closely associated with his brother’s monastic life. He was deeply interested in the spiritual life and based his insights into prayer on the life of Moses. Moses, having murdered an Egyptian who was ill-treating a Hebrew slave, escaped into the desert. He married, and looked after his father-in-law’s flock. One day he saw a glowing and shining bush - a real bush, as we sometimes see aflame with colour and light in our garden - and saw flames leaping from it without scorching or consuming the bush at all. Intrigued, he approached it, and a voice told him not to come any nearer without first removing his sandals. For Gregory of Nyssa the sandals represented the dead skin of animals .... the skins in which Adam and Eve had been clothed by the Lord God when they were sent out into the wilderness of thorny bushes.... Some years later, after this vision of God in a burning bush, and the awesome mission he was given to lead the captive slaves into freedom, Moses was called up a volcanic mountain, covered by a cloud, for a more awesome encounter, in a more fearsome darkness. And out of the flaming darkness at the very top of the mountain, God spoke to him again ..... Moses was led from light into darkness, from the use of the rational mind into the mystery of the unconscious - to the place in which the hidden God can speak to us without revealing His Face.

For those who are aware of the mystical dimension of the spiritual life, this dazzling darkness turns into a calm but intense encounter. Was this what Our Lord experienced in the Cloud - which a fourteenth century English mystic called "The Cloud of Unknowing"? Words lose their meaning at this stage.

13th August

The scent of white gardenias in my cell is wonderful. As the flowers age they turn into delicate cream-yellow roses. Later the petals are edged in brown, before the whole flower withers. The gulls have lost their black balaclavas - preparing for winter on the waves? Not at all: for winter on land and food on the lawn.

I started preparing for my next contribution to the international "Light for our Path". Mine is scheduled for the second week of January 2011. (The texts are translated into many languages - for non-Europeans, so the preparation really does take a long time.)

My topic for 2010 was SILENCE. now it is: PAY ATTENTION!

Part of the Introduction: The writer became a mediator of the Word to other ‘beginners’in 1976. She then realised how different our responses are to the Word of God. He speaks to us individually, through circumstances, through emotional and spiritual chaos, always offering us the seed of Life with infinite patience. His ‘language’ varies as much as our circumstances: we have to listen with our inner being - our ‘heart’ which is our own reality and truth. The Scriptures may be mediated by the people we live with, by events which trigger off reflection, and through those rare encounters when God’s love bathes us in a fleeting human glance.

"Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you... (Rule of Benedict)

There is a recent increase in people practising "lectio divina" - which centuries of Christians of all denominations having been doing anyway. It simply means carefully, thoughtfully and prayerfully reading scriptural texts and then applying them to oneself. On some days the text may not have a personal meaning: on others one knows that the ‘word’ has touched ‘the heart’.

Both God and the Lord spoke of themselves in the present tense: I AM. So they are always present in their relationship with us: the mercy of God is not only found in the past!

15th August

In thirty-minutes our postulant will be Clothed as a novice .... she looks very happy. I still haven’t decided what my short talk will be about ....

Jean has become Sister Gregory, taking Saint Gregory of Nyssa as her patron. He was one of the Cappadocian Fathers, and the brother of Saint Basil. Gregory married young and never became a monk but he was closely associated with Basil’s work. Both were fine theologians. Gregory wrote a spiritual treatise based on the life of Moses, and he believed - from his personal experience - that the spiritual journey tends to move from light into darkness. God is so mysterious that there is no way of perceiving Him with the senses. Moses was attracted to the light of the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:1-12), and learned that God was eternally NOW: I AM. having received his mission to free the Hebrew slaves, he then had to encounter God in the cloud over a volcanic mountain (Exodus 19:9). There he received the Ten Commandments, which were the basis of civil and social law for many centuries - and for the Jewish people and Christians they remain fundamental. After that, Moses desired to see God face to face, and to talk to Him as though He were a friend. In the high mountain account this was denied him .... despite the wondrous theophany. Moses was allowed to see the back of God - and Gregory wrote that once we meet God it is our vocation to follow Him.

23rd August :Here and Now

The trees are moving in the wind, like moored boats on choppy waves. Colours, at the incredible hour of transition between dawn and incipient sunrise, glow with vitality. The usual unremarkable tawny patches of fur in Goldie’s coat gleam with a light of their own, while the red roses and dahlias pulsate with energy. Then it all fades again into "the light of common day" - as Wordsworth expressed it!

Half the meadow was cut with a strimmer on Monday and there is a glorious smell of hay. I saw my first young frog of the year amid the stumps. Colin left the small patches of wild flowers, so they are tiny islands of colour and seed-heads. The small apple trees are heavily laden with fruit, some of which falls and is enjoyed by slugs and birds.

Saturday. Last night, in a Catholic Newspaper, I came across a few lines written some 700 hundred years ago by the Persian poet Hafez entitled "We Should Talk About This Problem". In it, God addresses a wounded soul:

There is a Beautiful Creature

Living in a hole you have dug....

And I often sing, but still, my dear,

You do not come out.

I have fallen in love with Someone

Who hides inside of you.

How often do we hear God singing to us? Perhaps he will do so TODAY.