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.’
Jesus has performed the second miracle of the loaves and fishes, following which the Pharisees have come to him, demanding to see a sign from heaven to prove that he is the Messiah. Jesus rejects and departs from the Pharisees, and now warns his disciples to be wary of them [ … ]
The Carrefour will be open, where I can buy nuts for the red squirrel, who lives in Campo Grande. The red squirrel is Valladolid’s best bit. Even as a child, I had never seen one before, apart from in picture books. It was last term’s discovery. The most beautiful encounter. I didn’t know it was there – in the park. A complete surprise. The tiny little thing bobbled and hopped, as it received in its little hands a nut from the man’s hands. Each surprising instant – it was childlike. I whispered: ‘Oh my wow.’ I walk toward the El Cortes Ingles. There is, for now, that settled feel of friends in bookshops. Though a null-affect, neutral day – it won’t glean, it is not to be scratched at. The queues are long in the Carrefour. Though, as it might be, on relatively modest incomes, many people live centrally. Their behaviours neither pinched nor stark. Yet the shop so busy while the street so empty… An error in the simulation, a glitch in the code. I potter about the aisles, which are pleasant enough, then at the tills I flinch at how expensive a little bag of up-sold nuts can be. Nonetheless, I queue for a packet of almonds. Two English men queue directly ahead of me. They are stocky, and have gay voices, their wheelie-bucket piled with soft drinks and party food, while they bitch to one another about the obviously terrible party they’re going to. The air heaves relief as I wander up the way to the broad plaza fringing Campo Grande. This is a place to see – a piece of Spain. There is a tourist information office, though unopened. At these fountains, three girls take selfies. Pompous-looking buildings, the military offices aside, line the park’s nearest vicinities. Hotel-bars have their patches. Liveried doormen idle time, for there are no paying customers, in and out the doorways’ shadows. A mixed group of kids play at the hoops on the pedestrian boulevard, and two boys practise on skateboards, working the thing out. I pass by them, touched by the thought, and happy that they are there. Wistful, I smile at the odds of the ball spilling over to me, and play in mind the agreeable scene of a fleeting connection. Then I am through the park gates. An air now – of humanity become self-selecting. Modestly understated. Understatedly modest. Campo Grande is nice but it isn’t grande… I walk slowly, and very soon hear for a second time English voices. Not them – it is an English family, just a little way ahead, a Dad and a Mum and a younger boy and an older girl, and theirs are Midlands accents. Dad seems to have been here and to know the place. He gestures panoramically. Mum wants her lunch. The girl at a difficult age. She carries a balloon-on-a-stick. Though she is sprouting – yet wears a loud dress. Then leggings, trainers. Her hair is nice… Maybe she is being okay about it. And not horrific. It’s okay once they get into it, but those months… Yet then, they mostly blossom, if they come from a good home, and become rounded personalities, entering into their womanhood. It was that… when yet they weren’t… I shudder to think of it. They walk toward the pond, and I trail, and would follow had I not been going that way. I wish I could say something so they might hear I am English too. (Fake a phone call?) How my voice might sound – there’d be all college hurling around in such matter I… a demented thing, ludicrous blurt – of Henry, Geoff, and all of them – not to mention the personal predicament. Maybe they’re a nice family. She is letting him explain what he needs to explain. And it would blow his fire, me being English. Mum and Dad. You’d probably see them all having their lunch in a little while. All sat round the table. With napkins and the menus out. Dad looks safe. I look into the pond. Terrapins live in there. But not today. I walk toward the join in the paths where the squirrel lives. There, I crumple the packet of almonds, making noise. I peer and I squat and crouch – chewing a mouthful. All the peacocks have perched right up in the trees’ branches. That never looks like something they should be doing. It’s disappointing that the squirrel isn’t here – but then the not-knowing-if is a part of it. Now, next, my visit to the National Sculpture Museum is an obligation. Canon Peter stood literally aghast when I hadn’t heard of it. Mortified, I made resolute promises. Though a few weeks have passed, it isn’t just any old something I could do on the hoof. A great commitment – it must command a known and prepared and anticipated not-just-any-old-time. But, rather, the sort you must wait for – and listen for. [ … ] Beyond Plaza Mayor, there would be a brief series of old-town alleyways. The National Sculpture Museum would be – just up there, this archway, this next…They are bleached and forgotten-looking walls, and the smoothed paving could be medieval. Not that it is making Tomàs anxious – I follow the map. A kind of place – uneasy credit-cards, and modern vaccinations, and a phone, might not help much. I fancy I feel the back-wall of a church, and that – fancifully – pressure-release drawn out of me. Only I am playing games in a nice way – making play-scared on the uncertainty – with only myself to see. The National Museum is there, modestly signed on stencilled plexiglass stuck to the stone wall. A uniformed lady sits just a little way inside the doorway. She reassures me there is no money required, and directs me over the courtyard into the planned route, showing me where I can pick up a free map. I get my […]
Pope Saint Leo the Great situates the Sermon on the Mount within the wider pattern of salvation history. Christ’s ministry begins with acts of physical healing that attract crowds, but these serve as a preparation for his deeper teaching. The miracles are signs intended to draw attention to the doctrine that heals the soul. Thus, Leo highlights the shift from outward cures to inward remedies, presenting Christ as both healer of the body and physician of the heart [ … ]
