GLINTING RIPPLE, SLOW TIDE

Half-awake at 5 a.m. after a transatlantic flight is a good time and condition to reflect, meditate and pray. I had been reading Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God, which always enchants me by its simplicity and by the flavour it gives of the man -- Nicolas Hermann, a 17th-century Lorrain of little education, who became first a footman -- but, being large and clumsy, he broke things --, then a soldier, was lamed and then joined a religious order as a lay brother, working in the monastery kitchen for 40 years. A grander and more educated clergyman interviewed him on a number of occasions and wrote down Brother Lawrence's replies, as well as some things he'd heard about him.

The Practice, as the little volume of the interviews is called, radiates a perfectly simple faith. He knows that, left to himself, he is a wretched piece of humanity, and he keeps wondering why God has done him so many favours. and goes on doing so. But he refuses to worry about it, because that's up to God. So he goes about his daily business, constantly placing himself in God's presence, because that is all that really matters for our souls: even in a clattering busy monastery kitchen with everyone shouting for stuff at the same time, he does his work with admirable serenity. And if he fails at something, he says, he is never surprised, because if he didn't get constant help from God he'd be like that, perfectly useless, all the time.

So, pondering that at 5 a.m., I was taken back (and yes, slightly taken aback, too) to my experiences on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, with a sort of tide of immense peace creeping up the beach of my consciousness. And it occurred to me that in fact all one needs to do is to be completely open and receptive; because God is everywhere and always around us and asks nothing better than to be in us as well. Hardly a new thought; but for whom it happens to, a new experience.

Later, over EMT (Early Morning Tea), I read the passage about the "Journey to the Purity of Heart" in the admirable  Carthusian publication The Wound of Love, in the light of those considerations. The Carthusian points out that it will be a long and difficult journey, but that eventually Grace will complete the task for us. Well, I thought: did Brother Lawrence not find a shortcut? But the Carthusian did agree that we receive rather than achieve; only, he said (and this was the most useful point he made), it cannot be had cheaply -- I thought of T.S.Eliot: "a condition of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything".

Brother Lawrence, a soul of great and childlike simplicity to start with, paid the price in length of years. Some of the Carthusian Fathers paid and pay it, one assumes, in spiritual exercises. And for those of us in the world it may be paid in all kinds of experience, disappointment, suffering -- or, if the Lord keeps showering one with undeserved and unexpected favours, perhaps in years and (intermittent) constancy also. The low, gentle ripple creeping up my beach, after all, had taken more than five years to get there since, on my 70th birthday, I decided that rock-climbing, hiking the Pyrenees and crossing Europe on a motorcycle were not going to happen, I needed a new adventure proper to my age, and chose faith as the most suitable. Mmmmmm -- was it I who did the choosing?