Moments

The potential influence of particular moments on our understanding of ourselves, and of our journey is immense. That potential is roused from the apparently blank canvas of our lives when we first begin to notice these moments and give space to thoughts that they may have meaning for us. The potential is realized when their significance is no longer doubted, and when we begin to look for such moments in everything we do. They are - if we open ourselves to the possibility - one of the ways in which the Holy Spirit leads us towards the complete truth. We begin to live in the power of the Spirit when we are alert to such guidance and when we become capable of an appropriate and unhesitating response.

Such moments are scattered through our whole lives, and our childhood was almost certainly filled with them as part of the ‘first light’ which we had not yet totally lost amid the world’s distractions. The overall memory of wonder and innocence is, in part, the long-lived echo of those days of closer communication with God. Some childhood moments are clearly remembered as having significance; one such is quoted by Michael Paffard in his book, The Unattended Moment. Mary Antin, an American immigrant writing of her experiences as a tiny child in Poland wrote, “In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his plough. I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the bank for every turn. Suddenly he began to sing, a rude ploughman’s song. Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to fit it – a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. I sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention. I felt myself discovering things. Something in me gasped for life, and lay still. I was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me. For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat I knew, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me. We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later …”

The background influence present to me during my formative years did not become more than a peaceful presence, though its effect on my life, and on my whole way of thinking and of seeing the world, has probably been far greater than my awareness would suggest. Of the people whose great names have been carved into the monastic and mendicant orders they founded, however, it was not Benedict that became most firmly lodged in my childhood and in my slowly maturing mind.
It was the image of the man with birds on his hands and arms that sat most beautifully in my innocence. Sunshine, trees, flowers, birds and bees, timid animals rarely and fleetingly seen: did we not all long to be at one with everything around us in the way portrayed in that image? St Francis of Assisi was entwined with my childhood in ways that Benedict and other saints were not.
But one thing common to them all was that I actually knew very little about any of them, and that was how it remained for years. When I did open a book on one of them for the first time in my adult life, I was already a changed man. Something momentous had happened to me and faith had burst into the reality of my life; I was no longer a Christian in name only. The process of transformation into the person God wills me to be has slowly continued, but the impact of the early part of the journey was immense. When one’s accustomed state (with hindsight) is one of apparent immobility, any sudden forward movement is unnerving and breathtaking: it destroys all certainty and feelings of stability in the same way that even a small earth-tremor can strip away every thread of a person’s confidence in their strength and physical significance. In both cases - the one physical, the other mental, emotional and spiritual - the undoubted security of standing upon solid ground is pulled from under one’s feet.

I had developed an insatiable appetite for reading spiritual and religious books as well as the Bible, and when I did choose one on the life of a particular person it was not surprising that it should be St Francis, though the unsuspected force with which that choice would speak to me has left me wondering whether I was guided that day to that particular book, on that shelf, in that second-hand bookshop.
Cardinal Newman wrote of his own experience, “Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. … After a while, I got calm, and at length the vivid impression upon my imagination faded away.” (John Henry Newman. Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
The lasting impression for me has not been the reading of the book, (‘Saint Francis of Assisi’ by Elizabeth Goudge) and it is neither a particular chapter or passage within it, nor any detail of his life story; it is opening the cover for the first time and reading the four simple words printed on an otherwise empty page.

Part One

Francesco Bernadone

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I was immediately grasped by something touching me so deeply that I could not move on from that page. I believe it was the first time that truth, the deeper absolute truth, had really registered within me in all its power and utter simplicity. ‘Veritas’, with its Dominican black and white, confronting me in the stark form of ink on otherwise blank paper. No shades of grey, no room for discussion or argument, no compromise, no doubt. Just a brief statement of fact: an absolute truth of such simplicity but of awesome significance to me in that moment; a moment that lasted a long time. I was held captive by those words, and once I could see them again after the cascades of emotion welling up from within had receded, my eyes and mind flitted from one line to the other and back again, ... Part One ... Francesco Bernadone ... Part One ... while tears continued dropping onto the page. I had encountered something that demanded my attention, and the fullness of the demand was more than I could unravel; it was also something that would not release me from its hold, and of which I could not let go. I remained with that page for several minutes, until finally, knowing I could go no further, I closed the book. I stayed with my intensely focussed thoughts for a while longer before leaving it where it lay, and strolling in the garden with this young man Francesco, of whom I had not heard before. The birds seemed more numerous and their singing was nothing if not a song of praise.

I had opened the book to read about St Francis and had been shown an ordinary man.

I had been shown that St Francis could not have existed without that apparently ordinary man, that the end of a story is meaningless without the intricacies of the middle years, and, most importantly, there is no story to be told, there is no St Francis without the beginning. That beginning, that Part One, was the young man who had yet to think a single thought of his journey into life as Francis of Assisi: as the person he was meant to be.

The start of the life, the journey and the story was Francesco Bernadone; that same Francesco was the start of all we now know.

Whoever we are, and whatever we may have done or failed to do, we have the potential to become as God would have us be.

‘Meanwhile, let us go forward from the point we have each attained.’
(Philippians 3:16)