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!’