THE PARISH CHURCH FOR LYTHAM

Last Updated 19/05/2008 22:34:12

Move Over and Make Room

Recently I had the considerable privilege to spend the best part of ten days in a convent in Oxfordshire. I had been asked to provide Individual Given Retreats for eight of the sisters over that time. Needless to say, I felt a little apprehensive and inadequate for the task in hand. These are nuns who are enormously experienced in giving retreats to others and whose lives are orientated around set times of prayer and spiritual reflection throughout the day, every day.

I was greeted by one of the Sisters who made me feel very welcome from the start. She sat me down and gave me a cup of tea which after a four hour car journey was most welcome. She showed me to my room and also gave me a brief tour of a small part of the convent which included the main chapel. It is a beautiful building with oak pews facing each other in collegiate style across the nave, facilitating the saying of prayers and psalms by alternate verses, one side saying one verse, the other side the following one. Facing each other for prayer in this way, is also a way of reminding the Sisters of the presence of Christ amongst them at all times. We looked closer and I was shown how the oak floorboards had been worn away directly in front of each of the Sister’s stalls or seats. Hundreds of nuns over the years kneeling during countless hours of prayer had worn down the wood in two places in front of each seat where the knees of the Sisters had rested. As a consequence, standing at one end and looking along the length of the stalls, I could see the floorboards appeared to undulate along the length of the chapel.

I was then shown a stone carving which is to one side of the chapel at the West end. It is a sensitive and beautiful work of art, completed by a previous Mother Superior in memory of one of the Sisters. The carving shows a mother with her head on one side which itself is resting against the head of a young child she is holding. It is in memory of Sister Rhoda who had just set out from the Convent on the first leg of her journey to India where she was going to work for a while. But shortly after leaving Southampton her ship was torpedoed in the Channel and began to sink. The passengers were helped into lifeboats. There was not enough room for everyone and Sister Rhoda gave up her seat in one of the boats for a mother and her child who survived as a consequence while she went down with the sinking ship.

There were many other moving images in the two chapels of the convent but these two were the first I came across, the undulating floorboards and the stone carving. They spoke immediately to me of a devotion to life that puts the service of Christ and others before our own needs and ambitions. And the more I got to know the Sisters, the more I understood that this is the way they all felt called to live. Most of them at some stage or other had prayed and lived like this not only in the convent but also while serving in parishes in challenging areas in this country or in demanding circumstances in Africa or India.

I suppose one of the principal differences between these good Sisters and many of us is that they have re-arranged their entire lives to accommodate this life of prayer. But while we may not be able to pray as often and in the same way as the Sisters do every day, we can nevertheless find ways by which we can seek out and celebrate the presence of Christ in the everyday. But the degree to which we find we are able to do this is likely to depend to a greater or lesser degree upon our ability to move aside our pursuit of selfish desires and ambitions and make room for our faith. In busy lives, it just is not possible to pray as much as we would like unless we are able to make major changes to the pattern of our lives. We can, however, learn how to find the presence of Christ in everyday things and in our dealings with one another where we have so many opportunities to pray as we go along. For prayer isn’t something we need necessarily to confine to set times and words. In essence it is about that divine dialogue that takes place between human and divine spirit which can occur through our speaking, looking, touching and thinking. And as we learn this new vocabulary of the soul, we come to discover heaven in our hearts and God as the basis of our lives.

It is not without significance that Our Lord was born in a stable because no-one would make room for him and his parents in the Inn in Bethlehem.[i] And he died on a lonely hill outside the city of Jerusalem because he asked the religious leaders to move over in the kingdom of God and allow the sinners in.[ii] Sadly, in a society rich in its own self-importance, Jesus was born a pauper and died a criminal. But the Spirit of Christ overturns the values of the world [iii] in a kingdom where wood is worn down by prayer rather than being shaped into an instrument of pain and where those who are warm and safe offer themselves in the service of the weak and vulnerable.

So while we will readily kneel in humble devotion with a holy family in unlikely surroundings, we can also use whatever opportunities we are given to help those around us whose lives are crowded with other concerns, to make room for the birth of Christ this Christmas.

Andrew Clitherow.