‘Be aware.’ A strange remark,
wouldn’t you think, to make to a group of women heading to a café for lunch?
But these were not Lady Lunchalots. They’d just attended Mass
on the patronal feast of the order of Carmelites whose charism is contemplation,
who understand that these two words go
straight to the heart of things, implying another perspective, a gaze directed
more or less steadily through rose-tinted lenses at eternal realities. ‘Enjoy
yourselves,’ these women were told by another Massgoer as they left the cathedral,
‘but be aware.’
How precious is prophecy, specially on the way to lunch – so
good for the digestion! - and specially prophecy not in the accepted sense of foretelling,
but forthtelling: speaking God’s truth.
Years ago, suffering quite badly and undiagnosed from
post-natal depression, I clung for dear life to a little book by the Jesuit
Anthony de Mello. Awareness was given
me by my spiritual director and I hiked it around the world, together with ‘im
indoors and 4 year-old Rosanagh, on our first OE to Europe.
Awareness didn’t make me aware. I thought that was my fault but in
fact de Mello had already been the subject, in 1998, of a Notification by
Cardinal Josef Ratzinger and how I wished, after someone handed me Fire Within one day at the beach some
time later, that it had been the Marist Thomas Dubay’s masterpiece I’d toted
around the world. But it was probably a case, to quote Christopher Fry, of ‘the
lady’s not for burning’. The green wood of the soul needs purifying before it
can be kindled by the fire Jesus came to cast upon the earth.
De Mello said things like ‘true happiness is uncaused’. By
contrast, Dubay offers St Peter’s ‘joy so glorious that it cannot be described’
(1 Pet 1,8), deriving from God. The joy of the heights of holiness to which we
all without exception are called is an ‘advanced joy’ which as Dubay explains,
comes only from ‘advanced prayer’.
The woman at Mass that day was warning the lunch party not be
diddled out of that joy by enjoyment, getting sidetracked by treats meant only as
means to the end of union with God. Bogged in the daily grind, we’re often beguiled
by the good life but Jesus offers a better life, a best life where the only
concern is loving God and neighbour. If only we could get our snouts out of the
trough and go after it!
We need to lift our game. Recently I heard a priest (imported)
quote the Third Commandment. He said it’s a sin not to go to Mass on Sunday. I’m
told there are holy people in his parish. With such a priest, and access 24/7
to a Blessed Sacrament chapel, that’s entirely predictable and explicable.
To be aware, serene and truly joyful is to live like Blessed Elizabeth
of the Trinity, who knew that ‘everything that happens to me is a message of
God’s great love for me.’
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