In the early hours of yesterday morning I sent a lengthy email to a spiritual friend with whom I have not been in touch for more than a year; and during the day I had been preparing to post something here about such long gaps between contacts in my important friendships. That will now become my next post, as I have been washed over by a wave of confirmation resulting from a reply received late last night. This will probably be meaningless to anyone else as it is being posted for the same reason as last night’s short entry under the heading, ‘Wisdom & Prudence’: more as a 'reminder to self’ than anything else.
The words quoted are the first of a sequence of ‘O Antiphons’ as they are called, which began yesterday, 17th December. I have been vaguely aware of them in the past, but they have only now really come to my attention through being referred to in the email I received last night. I had given my already mentioned friend some of the details about what I have been doing over the last year, and those details included the names I have given to two other important persons in my spiritual life in a lengthy writing project on which I have been working. Those names are Wisdom and Prudence, and the reply email expressed delight not only at having heard from me after so long, but with those details and a further reference to what I had called “a wisp of Wisdom” being received on the day that the ‘O Wisdom’ antiphon was used. (Unlike me, she knows the liturgy intimately and follows it closely.)
The information delighted me, as such an apparent coincidence of timing is precisely the kind of thing that has occurred at various times through my own journey, and is therefore running through my present writings. All that I have been doing over the last twenty four hours seems to have returned to me as a confirmation that my choice of names for two friends is not only right, but given a strangely unexpected seal of approval. And I am once again reminded that I am that beggar with his ‘smile in the mind’: - the one who is the real writer of every word I have penned over the last twelve months.
My Benedictine messenger is also to be found in the same mass of words; and, as a final rounding up of all the real, living and essential characters in that part of my life, today is the 45th anniversary of my first meeting with ‘Providence’, who is not only in there too, but became one of the main reasons that I have anything at all to write about.
How could I possibly fail to acknowledge and appreciate such things!
