Bairbre Cahill
The past few weeks have got me thinking about Lent as a spiral journey. I’ve written before about how we learn in a spiral rather than a straight line, how we come back to things to understand them more deeply, to gain a new perspective on them or simply to be reminded of what is important.
Prayer is not always easy. Sometimes it feels more like a chore. St Ignatius advised that when prayer is dry we should pray more not less – which is a great idea but isn’t always easy. I generally pray with scripture, usually the gospel of the day but for a good while I had been getting little pleasure or inspiration from it. It felt like I was doing little more than keeping the engine ticking over.
One day the gospel was the woman with the haemorrhage (Mark 5:25-34). Now I’ve often prayed with that piece of scripture before and found it rich in meaning and inspiration. This time however the image in my mind was of being stuck in a crowd, at a distance from Jesus and, being rather short, finding it impossible to work my way through the crowd to him – frustrating.
Ignatius advises us to go back again to pray with scripture which has provided us with some consolation, insight or challenge. Ignatius understood the spiral. I found myself going back to the image of this woman with the haemorrhage, not because I wanted to but because the image stayed with me. Some days it was the image of just about holding on to the end of a tassel on Jesus’ cloak. Other days it was of holding a thread in my hand – a reminder that there had been times when holding on to his cloak had come easily to me.
Ash Wednesday coincided with us getting some work done at home. The place was upside down and I found myself sitting down to pray on a couch we had moved into the kitchen. It is strange how things come together. Being Lent I had decided to go off Facebook and the news updates on my phone so that morning I had none of that social media noise buzzing in my brain when I sat down. Praying in the kitchen reminded me, I realised later, of being in Loyola Hall, the Jesuit retreat centre in Liverpool. I had spent a lot of time on retreats there often staying in a little cottage with a couch in the kitchen. It was a place where I had experienced prayer and the presence of God in a very powerful way. Somehow, I reconnected to that in my own kitchen – there’s that spiral again.
At Mass later in the Cathedral, out of nowhere, I had an image of not just being close enough to hold on to Jesus’ cloak but of being wrapped up entirely in it, his arm around me, pulling me close, reminding me of his presence. What had shifted me through the crowd, moving me from frustrating distance to wonderful closeness? That gospel story kept drawing me back in, despite my frustration with it. Physically being in a space which reminded me of times when prayer was rich and meaningful sparked something within me. Stepping out of the buzz of social media created space in my mind and my body. I know that Facebook and a constant diet of news messes with my equilibrium. I know that and yet I seem to need to learn it again at regular intervals.
So, you can see why that image of Lent as a spiral journey makes sense to me. It gives us space to remember, to understand, to reconnect. For me it’s a couch in a kitchen and a woman trying to catch a hold of Jesus’ cloak but what is it for you? What is the place, the Gospel, the image, you need to rediscover this Lent?