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We are challenged to leave aside guilt and become who God wants us to be. Seamus Heaney, a great poet of our age, wrote a long poem called ‘Station Island’. They say that as a young man he left Northern Ireland when it was suffering the agony of ‘the Troubles’. That left him carrying a secret guilt that he had deserted people he grew up with, who bore the weight of suffering, some of them dying violently. In the poem, he goes to Lough Derg on pilgrimage to cleanse his soul. That is an island where people go to do penance. They fast and have very little sleep for three days, and they do certain prayer routines called ‘the Stations’. The island is known as ‘Station Island’, and the poem is named after it. As he is coming back in a rowing boat and about to land, a gnarled, upright, old man takes his hand to help him from the boat, and he speaks strict, strong words. He tells him: ‘You have not fulfilled your obligation’. He tells him not to be so earnest and fond of the sack cloth and ashes; he is suffocating himself with guilt. Stop it! It is dampening the fire within. He tells him that guilt has caused him to fear; that has paralysed him. As a teacher of English Literature he is hiding behind echoing other people’s thoughts. He has to ‘sound his own note’. He has to go off at tangents when people go in circles, to stop using the language to explain old masters, and to use it to speak to his own time. He is to be a poet in earnest. As I reread it after many readings, I could hear Jesus saying the same to me. Guilt eats us up and wastes God-given energy on self-absorption. The Lord says: ‘it’s not yourself you should be centred on but me. Step out sing the song I have put into your heart; I have made you for a special purpose. Pursue it!’
Honouring Our Lady of Walsingham Our week at the New Dawn Conference - August 2024
Birds do it naturally, we humans have to choose to glorify God. In an earlier article, a poem by Seamus Heaney spoke of the moment he was emboldened to overcome his guilt and fears. He was told to ‘sound his own note’, and not be hiding in echoing other people’s successful voices. God gives us all a unique song to sing. In so far as we fulfil that purpose, we become whole. Many years ago, a friend gave me this poem she had written. It speaks simply of how God’s creatures achieve their purpose. Birdie, you sing so loud and so long. What is the reason for your song? I sing to the Lord in heaven above. He has filled my whole being with music and love. For us, humans, it is a matter of choice whether we let the song that the Spirit sings in our hearts come out and fill our lives.
Do you find yourself praying involuntarily when you take a rest? When I sit down to have a rest even for a few minutes and I am not thinking about anything in particular, I have noticed that I very often find myself breathing simple prayers in my mind, almost in my subconscious. Prayers like “Come Lord Jesus” or “Praise you”. I have wondered if this is what Jesus means when he says “Pray always”. I think it is one form of it. Is that what is meant by ‘infused prayer’? Well, what is infused prayer? I think it is where the Holy Spirit pours into our own prayer an extra facility. It can be for a moment, a period or permanent. I think the Spirit has too much respect for us to force such a prayer on us out of the blue; it will only come to a heart that is inclined to pray, or trying to. Of course all prayer, indeed all our activity, only comes because God our Creator is constantly enabling us, but we have free will, and every act of trying to pray, even if it seems empty, is part of our building up an inclination to receive the Spirit’s inspiration. Bit by bit, almost without us knowing, like water dripping on a stone and smoothing it, the Spirit transforms our prayer life. What is gradually happening in the depth of our spirits, that deepest part of us where we have intercourse with the divine, is that an uninterrupted conversation is going on, which will rise up through our subconscious into our consciousness when it gets the chance. It is part of what St Paul means when he says: “ The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God.” (Romans 8: 26-27) There is a hidden, deep-down process of God meeting our small efforts and blessing them, to build within us the “cry of the Children of God” (see Romans 8: 16). We need to grow a lot in trust and peace before we experience ‘praying always’ more consciously. But let’s not get downhearted at how slow our progress seems. We are children being educated by our Father and that takes years, but development is really happening. One of the good things about the term ‘infused prayer’ is that it stresses the activity of God rather than us. Getting anxious about our slowness is counterproductive, and ought to be confessed in the Sacrament of Reconciliation – We also need to confess that there are all sorts of hidden ways we obstruct God’s activity in our souls that we get comfortable about. Reconciliation is about asking for his light for the future as much as us shining a light on our past.