Peregrinatio, Weeks 3 and 4

The boat-build is at the fitting and fairing stage. The internal frames are tacked into their spaced slots in the strongback. Here is a picture I paused to to take while trimming the frames closer to fair, shaving by little shaving. As the week ends, I’ll start to attach the chine and shear battens (the lengthwise pieces.)

The pace is fit for prayer and paying better attention, or so I can only hope. Someday in the future I hope it can be a pace at which people can show up at the workshop, work along, learn, and share conversation that helps pay better attention. Over such work I find that truthful, soulful conversations are uniquely possible.

So, in that spirit, here from this workshop, I offer you:

How are you three weeks into this Lent?

What are you noticing, making room for, in the whole of life?

I don’t think that Lent 2021 invites us to relent in the disciplines and structures that help us to pay attention to life, the voice of God, and to purify our intentions. A relaxed discipline, a simplified discipline, yes. But with the grief, the loss, the confusion, the rages of the past year, the suffering of so many, and also the exploitation of the pandemic by profiteers, all of this requires that we pay attention, and purify our intentions.

Notice your troubles, your tears, your unexpected gifts, and joys. Take note of the ‘evil thoughts’, the harmful spirits, the pre-occupations and over-allocations of attention that have troubled or harmed your soul.  

Notice moments of inner quiet, clarity and consolation. Or, moments of tearful remorse that lead to new impulses of greater love.

Lent, a whole season of 40 days, like a journey in the wilderness, is not in our control, and God’s work in and around us proceeds at its pace.

Is this season of wandering, this peregrinatio, aiding you to better notice and receive?

I was out getting some gardening supplies this week, and noticed this hazel. Catkins and buds. Amazing how varied the shape, patterns, energetic gestures of tree buds are.

And with St Patrick’s day upon us, the hazel is good to think and pray with. St. Patrick is an emblem of the tradition and christian discipline of exile, of wandering, of peregrinatio. A roman citizen and briton, Patrick was stolen away as a slave to Ireland. (He may have actually fled there to escape his burdensome duties back home.)

Whatever the reason, he was able to leave Ireland, only to return later as a missionary bishop, having come into contact with the desert traditions of Egypt brought to Gaul by John Cassian and others. This missionary journey entailed a drastic loss of status and power for him, going from a place where he possesed citizenship and office, to a place where he was a total outsider, and subject to hostility, ridicule and plots on his life. This journey into unknown places was a chosen exile, a wandering. It belongs to a tradition and broader practice of peregrinatio for which the early Irish saints are especially remembered.

He didn’t voyage in a boat like Brendan and others. But a literal boat in Patrick’s missionary exile is also a currach of animal skin (and hazel rods?) In it Mac Cuill, who tried to murder Patrick, was set out to sea as a penance. The holy Spirit guided that unsteered craft to the Isle of Man, where the one-time conspirator received forgiveness, training, and began to walk this way of wandering in God’s love.

Do you experience Lent, or recent life, as an exile, a penance, a season of wandering, or a peregrinatio?

What place of rest and forgiveness might be rising as a grace beneath you?

What energy, consolation and nourishment are you receiving, or better aware that you need?

Please continue to pray for the sick, those who care for them, and those on whose labor our life depends.

And I pray that this lenten peregrinatio may renew you and I in the ways that help us pay attention, purify our hearts, and respond to God’s sometimes overwhelming outreach to us with courage, and a patient readiness for the day before us.

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 Collect for the Third Sunday in Lent

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.                          Amen.

Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.                Amen.