The result has been that every year, the same thought arises – What might this day bring?
This year, as the day drew towards its close, with anticipation having dwindled away and the date almost forgotten, I was given a piece of news about someone I have admired greatly since first meeting him, and whose departure from my home area some years ago stirred in me an unexpectedly deep sense of loss. In fact, he was the last in a sequence of three whose leaving had disturbed me to a surprising extent.
Strangely, but of no particular relevance, it has only been since hearing the item of news that I have learned – more than twenty years after his leaving – that the first of these three was born on 17th January.
Receiving that particular piece of information sent me through a sequence of thoughts and feelings which came and went with remarkable rapidity, leaving me still numb, much sorrowed, and somehow hollow: emptied; but with just the one continuing and persistent train of thought: an unanticipated and inexplicable concern for his wellbeing. A sense that there is far too much at stake here to allow myself to sweep all the good that has gone before into some far corner, as close to oblivion as I can manage.
And yet ... How can this be? Not the news only, but also my seemingly contradictory reactions to it?
With no graspable threads of explanation or mitigation, or suggestions of misunderstanding, or merest hint of mistaken identity or false accusation – all such have apparently been annihilated by his own admission – how can my present underlying feeling be one of concern for him?
However impossible it can sometimes seem, we are called never to withhold our forgiveness, just as we would hope never to find ourselves utterly unforgivable, whatever we may have done. I have no deep wish to forgive where others never can, but I do have a longing that I might become able to forgive, and in time able to truly exercise that ability.
My concern, however, is not dependent upon my being able to forgive, nor on any feeling of forgiveness.
I am so far removed from the person in question, and from every aspect of the news I received, that my sense of forgiveness or otherwise has no bearing on the situation other than in my own mind.
What does have a bearing on all of this, for me, is that soon after life-changing events that occurred on and around 17th January twenty years ago, I first found myself wondering what it might be that I was being called to do. I still have my scribbled notes made at the time, clearly showing that my thoughts have been remembered correctly. Two possibilities in particular were highlighted, for reasons that were more obvious to me then than they are now. The one was working with Travellers, almost certainly in Ireland.
The other was working in some way to help struggling priests: to assist in the provision of support for those in need but for whom, for themselves, there may appear to be no such prospect.
Suddenly, those same possibilities had been placed before me again; each of those whose leaving had troubled me so much was either a Traveller or a priest. And all three have always had and still have so much to offer.
Wherever he may now be, I pray that the one about whom I received word last Tuesday has a reliably safe haven in which to dwell. I doubt that taking to the road again will suit his declining years; and he has too much that is good within him for it to be allowed to fade away in isolation.
But I am incapacitated. I can do nothing but place him, and all who have been in any way involved or otherwise disturbed by what they have heard, into God’s own hands. There is no other place where judgment, justice, forgiveness, truth and peace can be adequately weighed and distributed, retained or forgotten.
My own confusion has already been laid out at His feet. I must make no move to take it up again.
‘Then he betook himself into the vast deserts ...’
(The life of Saint Antony - ascribed to Athanasius. Breviary: 17th January)
