A Salutary Thought

Reading Brother John’s homily over the last two weeks,( a gentle  Benedictine at Turvey Abbey), I find that his words begin to echo in my blog entries, (I shed a tear for myself on last week’s “a day which lay sly”) .  Terminality is no respector of feelings and tears come with an almost insupportable splash, blinding till one gets a grip and a sleeve.

However yesterday’s post of  lamp lit ,fire lit,  the liturgy of the years end, does in fact, echo his words. The calling and the chosen has a certain uncertainty about it.  Am I called to my individual plight and more to the point do I choose it, or how I choose to live it? An existentialist thought if ever. Do I will the living of it? Yes I do - raise praise in days that remain, keeping ones lamp lit. 

 There is a link here to First Friday Nov 4 (between the laurel and the yew……. a burnt offering, a sacrifice ?

And somehow the beginning of the previous week’s homily has crept in at the end of,  “Smitten by Leaf Fall” . The tassel slips between the deckle edges of the page, as the book closes, gently. The tassels have merely changed place,  from missal to deckle edge, not plagiarism really, just a chime of words within my head. Isolated words which stick.

And then the deep sweep of memory jogs my soul. In the harsh winter of  1962/3,then one of the coldest on record, as a poor church student glaciated among tall buildings, I had  a cloak paid for by my parents. You needed a cloak in chapel that winter.  I remember a Carthusian brother who came to study with us. He was, to say least of it, frugal in his needs. He had a bookcase,  a prie –dieu and a bed and no carpets. He seemed to drive that bed round the room at night, skidding over the floor, in his sleep. “ Benedicamus domino”, found him at the opposite side of the room from “Nunc dimmittis”.

  And would you believe it he wore  sandals in the snow. That man really did believe in penance.  

However, I think someone provided him with a cloak.

Of your charity pray for the Carthusian wearing sandals in the snow.

Strange thing the memory pull one corner and out comes a ball of string as in this childhood memory.

"For we are very lucky with a lamp before the door

And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more

And Oh! before you hurry by with ladder and with light

O Leerie see a little child and nod to him tonight!"

Robert Louis Stevenson "The Lamplighter" A Childs Garden of Verse"

JL and others Nov 10 2011