Quantcast
Channel: Bells of Norwich » silent prayer
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Breathing the Atmosphere of Love

0
0

Saint Luke JournalThomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.  Physically, of course, sometimes you can.  Sometimes the old homestead has not been razed and replaced with a parking garage or big box store.  But even if the old place still stands, you discover it is just not the place you remember.  The house is a different color.  The old snow sledding hill that was ominously high and steep is just a short, gentle slope.  That long walk to the toy store all the way across town is actually just three blocks.  The old place hasn’t changed, but you, of course have.

I’ve just had an experience like that, having happened upon an Abe Books listing for a copy of Saint Luke’sSaint Luke Journal Back Journal of Theology,Volume XXVII No. 3, from June 1984.  It contains my article, “Contemplative Anglicanism, A Gentle Stirring of Love.”  I hadn’t seen that article in decades, so of course I immediately ordered the copy, and it came yesterday.  The first thing I noticed, with pride I will admit, was that the volume also contained an article by the Very Rev. Urban T. Holmes, my seminary dean and one of the great contemporary theologians in the Episcopal Church.  It was one of his last papers written before his untimely death in 1981.

As I opened the journal and began reading, however, my excitement began to dwindle.  It was my article all right, written thirty years ago just after taking my Oblate vows in the Order of Julian of Norwich, three years after graduating from seminary.  It was my article, all right, and it was unchanged from the way I wrote it thirty years ago.  It even had the same ideas and insights I had back then, as far as they went.  But it wasn’t me.  I’ve changed quite a bit over the past thirty years.  There was an excitement of discovery in the words, long since mellowed by experience, disappointments, and other joys.  It expressed a simplicity of new found knowledge that for me these days is no longer so simple.  I had really wanted to scan the whole article and share it here.  But I won’t.  Because it is no longer me; it is a home to which I cannot return.

One thing that really did stand out, however, was a quotation from Evelyn Underhill, who of course even then was writing as an adult and not a newly graduated seminarian:

The true contemplative, coming to this plane of stillness, does not desire “extraordinary favors and visitations,” but the privilege of breathing for a little while the atmosphere of love. (1)

That sentence, even back then, pointed me toward a quieter, less academic, less evangelical, less liturgical direction in the stillness of prayer.  It was a gentle affirmation of so many of Mother Julian’s words: God, give me yourself, prayer oneth the soul to God.

 Mother Julian

Mother Julian

You can’t go home again if you expect it all to be the same, down to the myriad of tiniest details of memory.  But you can go home again if that home is the smallest particle of meaning:  the size of a hazelnut (chapter 5), or in a point (chapter 11), as Julian writes.  You can go home if you understand that all those words you wrote mean nothing, compared with breathing the atmosphere of love.

~ Fr. Will, ObJN

(1) Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, New York, E.P. Dutton, 1961 (p. 324)

(2, 3) Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Divine Love


Filed under: Julian of Norwich, My Thoughts, Prayer Tagged: Christian, contemplation, contemplative prayer, silent prayer

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 5

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images