The Catholic in me (3)

Despite nearly eighteen months without direct reference to it, my involvement and affinity with the Catholic Church has not been hidden from view. My lifelong awareness of, and continuing attraction to Stanbrook Abbey and its community of Benedictine nuns has been mentioned more than once, and my use of quotations from scripture known to be excluded from the Protestant Bible (Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus/Sirach) have also pointed to my allegiance.
The Benedictine Order has influenced my life in an unbroken litany of harmonies from my very early years. Stanbrook was the start-point, and now, many years later, it is firmly embedded as an unobtrusive but constant link to both my past and my future. Overlapping with this for some forty years, and taking its place for much of that time, has been the presence and undeniable influence of Benedictine monks from the monasteries at Douai and Downside. Both as parish priests, and, while a pupil at Douai School, as teachers and extraordinary examples of what we boys had the potential to become, they have wandered quietly through my years leaving a trail of unsolicited and, for the most part, unspoken guidance. As my parish priests their value has been appreciated while they were with us, but where my schooldays are concerned it is definitely hindsight that speaks; it is not that I failed to value them at the time, but my realization of their example is very much the product of a mature person’s reflections. Even as I write this I am drawn into an undefined sense of quiet and contentment that has brought a half-smile to my face. I cannot quite unravel it, though that is because I never really try to do so: I know there is no need, nothing to be gained: at a deeper level I am aware that I already understand, and searching for a way to describe and somehow capture it is a futile and wasteful exercise. Knowing that my recognition of such example is only made possible through having matured in a way that enables me to see it, brings to consciousness an inbuilt awareness that the focussing and refining of that enabling was itself conceived in the very example I am now able to acknowledge. It is one of those slowly turning meditations on life that at first appears to be a loop; once recognized as such I relax into a knowing expectation of the curve bringing me round to the point where I can believe I know what comes next, and can settle into the repetition: a new mantra with which to ride the comfort of my days.
How is it that I never seem to learn that I should presume nothing in my journey towards my God, and in my faltering steps towards becoming the person I should be ? It is not a meditative loop; it is a contemplative spiral that takes my feeble grasp of The Holy Spirit’s work in my life on an effortless learning curve, riding a thermal of spiritual warmth that carries me from my low-level and gentle perplexity to a higher level of awesome grace-filled awareness.

No matter how often I see them, I find it difficult not to stop when I see a buzzard wheeling in the skies above me. I watch in admiration of the raptor in my sight, but my mind is always edging back to a pair of Golden Eagles in the Scottish Highlands.
My son and I watched in wonder as they circled not far above us just off the edge of a cliff, wings unmoving in their display of utter mastery of their element. Our presence, far from disturbing them, seemed almost to be their reason for the display, as though God had whispered to them, “Show them what you can do. Let them see what happens when my creation becomes what it was made to be.” And so they did. After a few minutes, and having begun to climb away, one of them angled its wings slightly and at once moved away from above the cliff in the direction of the mountains on the other side of the valley. In no more time than it takes me to speak the words, its speed rapidly increased, and without a single wing-beat, it continued accelerating away, receding to invisibility in an astonishingly short space of time. We remained spellbound, unable to say anything much other than, ‘Awesome!’ For that truly was what it was. Something deep within me still suggests that God made the air because He had already crafted the Golden Eagle.

Just as watching Buzzards reminds me of those Eagles, so remembering the Eagles leads me to dwell on God’s longing to lift us above all that weighs down our spirits: He would carry us on those Eagles’ wings into the unpolluted airs of faith, and hope, and trust, there to point us in the right direction, that we may fly as bidden in answer to our vocation.
We are all called in some way. The Benedictines who have influenced me throughout my years were called to the religious life and to the priesthood, just as others have been called to other monastic orders and to the secular priesthood, but each one of us is called to something.
You and I, thinking of ourselves as ordinary, unexceptional, unqualified, unworthy and incapable of making any real contribution to God’s work in the world, must learn to see ourselves differently. Every one of us has something to offer, something in our makeup put there by God and which is of value to His mission, His people and His Church. The laity are no longer to sit meekly in the pews, accepting and absorbing in their weekly routines without waking, and discovering and carrying their gifts into the light where they can be seen and recognized, and where they can bear fruit. Most people never sit in the pews today, and what possible argument can be found to persuade them to do so? How little of apparent relevance to their own lives is found in anything related to that word ‘Church’, and, in the tangled mass of different and separate groups all professing to be Christian, where on earth is the truth?

In his book, ‘Sing a New Song’, Timothy Radcliffe OP, then Master of the Dominican Order, wrote, ‘Western culture is marked by a profound suspicion of all teaching, since it is equated with indoctrination and bigotry. The only valid truth is that which one has discovered for oneself or which is grounded in one’s feelings: ’If it feels right for me, then it is o.k.’ But teaching should liberate us from the narrow confines of our experience and our prejudices and open up the wide open spaces of a truth which no one can master. ... Doctrine should not indoctrinate but liberate us to continue on the journey.’
That is what I have found in my church life. ‘The wide open spaces of a truth which no one can master’ have been opened up for me, not by the teaching of individuals, and not by the teaching of the Catholic Church; nor have ‘the narrow confines of (my own) experience’ yielded anything truly worthwhile other than a heightened awareness of the gulf between myself and that which I seek. The teaching has been there, but the power and the influence have more surely come through the learning: the awakened receptiveness to that un-masterable truth which has shadowed all who would follow Jesus, from the time when He walked the dusty roads of Palestine to the present day. That learning rests confidently on the Catholic Church’s adherence and united commitment to the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ: teachings that have been at the centre of its doctrine for two thousand years. I have been blessed with the freedom to walk along my path without a need for anything other than the truth: that truth which liberates us ‘from the narrow confines of our experience’, and from denominational differences. It is the truth which grants access to the meaningful experience beyond restrictive limits and rigid conformity: the experience of Jesus as a living friend, and the subsequently confirmed awareness of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives.