It is that time of year when, in the absence of snow and ice, and all things displaying and speaking of winter’s dormancy masquerading as death, and even as non-existence, the countryside is filled with a wonderful air of expectancy. The inhospitable grip in which it was clenched during December has relaxed and trickled away, to leave us dangerously close to believing that winter has gone. The mornings and evenings are lightening noticeably; and yesterday, with the sun shining, and the wind and rain having left the sodden, twig-strewn ground to sparkle and shine its fully washed – if not half-drowned – surface into the light of a brand new day, every tree and bush, every hidden bulb and root, seemed possessed of the same excited consciousness that filled the suddenly so exuberant birds.
The feel of the day had been just as clear when colours were barely discernable. I walked across the garden at dawn, and as soon as I had stepped from the house, the chorus captivated me. The dangerous hope that spring had come was being shared by the life all around me; so vulnerable if and when winter looks back at us from wherever it pretends to have gone, and decides to revisit us. Among the other choristers three Robins loudly proclaimed their territories, to East and West and North of me, and having distanced myself from them as I walked toward the South, a fourth built song from its drowned-out throat until it became the loudest of all, singing from a Hawthorn tree, mere feet away, as though it sang for me.
In one way or another, my thoughts are mostly in the countryside even when my body has to spend time in cities or wasting miles on motorways. When spirit and mind and body all find themselves walking together within its folds, I am immersed in something I know and love; I am where I am meant to be, and I am close to the reality of the person I was born to be. I am, at the same time, both at the very edge of something immense, wonderful, supremely natural yet not entirely comprehensible, and fully enclosed and immersed in it – hand and heart; mind and spirit; ear and eye; tooth and claw. It is part of the blossom which turns to fruit in solitude.
The morning reminded me of something I had read in John O’Donohue’s book, Anam Cara. A story about a monk named Phoenix, who stopped reading his breviary to listen to the song of a bird. He listened so purely that when he returned into the monastery he no longer recognized anyone there. The monks found mention of a monk named Phoenix in their annals who had mysteriously disappeared.
I find that potentially so real. Stories of time lost through encounters with fairies are the stuff of imagined enchantment and dreams, but here there is a tale that whispers of some indefinable possibility not too far removed from truth.
Being deeply immersed in something: having knowledge of it, understanding it at a level of awareness that can only come from a deep and continuing involvement born of a desire to be involved in it; that is where total immersion comes from. The willing plunge into its life-swallowing depths perpetuates and further deepens the desire for a continuation of this utter dedication to whatever has so completely grasped our attention.
A recent short but (as I found it) powerful sermon brought this form of transformation to life for me in a way that had not occurred before. The context of my deepened awareness was Baptism; and my thanks are due to the priest of St Joseph’s Parish, Upton upon Severn. His talk of a sword being plunged into water to harden it permanently as its maker had formed it to be, and of cloth being dyed by weavers: being totally immersed in water to take on the depth and intensity of the predetermined colour of the dye: the colour required for its part in the completion of the woven cloth. These, as well as his reference to mistakes made by a BBC commentator during England’s Ashes winning cricket match: mistakes which would have been impossible for someone truly immersed in their subject, really brought home for me what the total immersion of Baptism is all about. We do not use total immersion in the Catholic Church, but the deeper impression made on me by Fr Dominic’s words has made sense of my long-held but suppressed attraction to the idea of being buried in that way so as to be “born again by water and the Holy Spirit”.
I was baptized as an infant, and I was confirmed at much too young an age. One of my recurring patterns of thought has for a long time revolved around a belief that we need a mature ‘confirmation’ of our having been confirmed; an entirely voluntary, but fully understood event that makes our youthful statements of conviction and involvement a meaningful reality. Jesus had thirty hidden years of learning, preparation and discernment before he was ready to begin his work. It was only then that He rose from the waters of the Jordan to be greeted by the Spirit of God descending on Him. Whatever is it that makes us believe we and our children are ready to proclaim anything in our early or mid teens? My own thirtieth year has long gone, but if it had not, I have little doubt that I would be seeking a quiet and unhurried total immersion somewhere; not as any form of desertion or protest, and certainly not for some sort of amusement, talking point or memory. Even my wish to remain unnoticed would be overruled by my desire to give expression to my own matured longing to be one of God’s adopted sons; one of Christ’s disciples. I am a self-proclaimed sinner who needs the Holy Spirit in my life, and who will do whatever He may ask of me. It would be me, declaring to God, to those around me, and to myself, that I am irreversibly and longingly part of Christ’s Church; a proof of my knowing that He has called me by my name.
Rachel Denton ( www.stcuthbertshouse.co.uk ) writing in the Redemptorist Sunday Bulletin for 5th December 2010, caught my attention with her words, ‘... one of the “fruits” of solitude is this much-heightened receptivity to experiences.’ She was not writing particularly of the many apparently insignificant little things, coincidences, paths crossed, fleeting glimpses and words, that seem to come my way at times, but those words did make me realize that there is a very real connection between those moments and my love of solitude. How much I would have missed if I had never learned to take my place within its caress. I shudder to think that I may not even have noticed a single note of birdsong accompanying yesterday’s dawn.
And it had been the 17th of January, the feast of St Antony of the desert – at the very edge of which I had ‘heard the sound of God walking in the garden’ once again.
