Then at ten-past-ten we go upstairs. Visiting teachers often prefer this space.
There is natural light and fresh air. Today, we sit on chairs only, gathered around close, with no desks in the way of us. His Grace works from a flip-book. A set-piece. He sits always gently bobbing – the quiet thrill of it. The flip-book has clearly seen previous use. And big Clarks shoes and fade-to-black socks… There is a quiet examination of consciousness. I confess… Then we say a Hail Mary. Some part of what the Archbishop says to us is this:
‘What I should like to do today is to pose to you possibly the most important question, which is this: How can we ready ourselves for the experience of Easter?
‘It’s a funny question, isn’t it? Because it’s something we’ve been doing all our lives. What can we do to get ourselves ready for Easter?
‘I have no doubt that through this Lenten season you have been meditating upon questions related to such as this. There are questions that relate to your own readiness for God, and no doubt these are pressing concerns each day for you.
‘I expect that you have been to confession, and I expect that this celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is a regular feature of your life in seminary. Quite a lot of what I’d like to say to you today concerns our sense of who we are, of who we are most perfectly meant to be, and what exactly we say sorry for when we go to Jesus, to ask for his forgiveness for all that we’ve done wrong. What I am really saying to you is that, perhaps we don’t quite know how to make a true examination of ourselves, because we are not quite like Mary, and we retain things, ideas about ourselves that we would like to bring to God, and for God to validate, rather than for God to take apart, so that we aren’t that any more, and can move on from those ways of not being to being ourselves.
‘I’d like to suggest to you that there is a call to extraordinary honesty for and within each one of us, this is to say, a call to honesty that is both within ourselves and thereby and therefore with God. I touched upon this set of questions yesterday at Mass, and I have just said it. It’s this question, really. It is or seems to be a very simple question, and yet I think this is a questioning of ourselves at its most profound level. It is this, then. It goes far, far beyond so much that many people including ourselves come to Mass for. Really it is sort of an opposite, or a weird way around the complications of who we are and what Mass offers us. And it is this: How do we allow ourselves to be taken apart by God? So that everything we think we are isn’t important any more. So that we are not hiding before this idea of who we think we are, hiding from God, and putting this idea of ourselves up between us and God. How do we ensure, not that God sees us utterly – of course, God sees us utterly – but that we, beyond mere passive acceptance, want and ask God to penetrate into us?
‘This, I would suggest to you, is very far from being an easy task, and there may be those of us who barely even begin to understand the nature of the task, or indeed that we even fail in this beginning through and through.
‘So often, people try so hard to hold themselves together, to think about who they are and who and what they are meant to be, that a kind of rage sets up in their ears, and so within that rage God’s call quite evades them. There are times when what we most need to do is to fall apart and simply to allow God to cradle us, to pick all our pieces up, bit by bit, and rock us in his arms, all our broken pieces. It’s when we most stop trying to prove an idea of ourselves we don’t even in our heart of hearts want to be that God puts us all together.
‘Picture Mary, as the Angel Gabriel comes to her. It is perfectly legitimate as Catholics, and so therefore we are as children of Mary, to ask ourselves how we might be were we in her position then. I think it is fair to say that our world would be broken apart. Of course, we can only imagine – and speculate as to this.
‘Who of us could do this? That is my question to you. Who of us could be like Mary?
‘I wonder if Mary survives the experience precisely because she is free of sin. But we are not. Our own conceit would break us. We couldn’t be like Mary. We would shatter. Our egos, these things we carry about in our heads, they would burn and shatter us. But we can ask God to do the best we can to imitate Mary. She became as nothing. This is Mary’s way. A yes to God is a way of saying and acknowledging our fundamental openness to God within ourselves: I am nothing in myself. Rather, this becomes a way of our saying: I am only insofar as I am responsive to you – to you.
‘As we go forward, I should like then perhaps to ask each of you, what do you hold onto about yourselves? Perhaps, what messages do you send to yourself about yourself, which are not in themselves the image of Jesus, in all we know about the life of our Lord, but which you cherish? I put it to you that, once you have identified these thoughts, these false prophets within ourselves, then you know something more of what you have yet to give to Jesus.
‘It is not the acknowledged sins – the sins you know you know you know about – that you take to confession; but rather it is the unspoken part of yourself that carries those sins to confession, which perhaps you have not yet acknowledged.
‘If I may put this to you, in simple, Catholic terms, there is a powerful question. Where are we not yet one with Mary? I suggest, each of us has something, a nagging part of ourselves that often seems to get left behind, which carries the rest to confession, but which always in its core self shies forth of confessing itself as it truly is. The bit we keep apart, as if we are separate agencies, ourselves alone doing the confessing, apart from God. When is it not God doing the confessing through us? The core piece of ourselves we fail to bring to God.’
