Horizons of the Heart
Barrie and Tish, two of our parishioners in their early fifties, bought a boat this summer and are now sailing for Turkey. It was something they wanted to do for a long time. It will take them a couple of years to complete the adventure. Their regular ‘Postcards from the Sea’ are shared in our weekly newsletter. Last week they reported the repair, at Marseilles port, of a smashed mast, and now Combava is sailing, once more, on its way across the Mediterranean Sea.
There are many ways of launching into the deep. There are moments in our lives when the yearning for radical change becomes especially intense. This insistent whisper may not be immediately recognised by everyone. But, given the divine source of our true essence, I suspect that it is always there. Something within us, maybe at the most unlikely times, and at our deepest and most hidden levels, keeps convincing us, and often with a relentless urgency, of distant but reachable horizons.
Is this what John Paul II was referring to when, before he died, he urged us to take risks? Duc in altum. Is it true to say that without this desire, whether faint or focussed, we are stuck in a stagnant religion, dammed up in a fairly infantile faith? So many believers are corralled into a programmed and seemingly safe way of being Christian. Yet, almost paradoxically, it is only in a deeply-rooted faith, that we find the source and summit of this silent yearning for a richer, and more risky way of following the call of our hearts. Our churches have still within them, faithful people who are burning with an unconscious longing to fly into other skies.
I’m a Capricorn. When I was small we built precarious tents high up in trees, and I remember one Sunday afternoon, when the workmen forgot to remove the ladders that led to the summit of our high-roofed church at home, full of sickening fear, I climbed to the very top of the spire. On my wall is a picture of a determined-looking goat halfway into a huge leap across a terrifying chasm. As I complete my current move to another presbytery, I pause before it every day. Because that’s where I find myself during these months of my life – looking for a place to land. At this point of the launching out into the unknown, to another way of ministering as a priest, the secret is in not looking downwards or backwards, in not losing heart.
In the transitions of our lives, there is a fatal attraction to the void below. There is such a safety about the familiar routines that provide us with a false identity. It is unavoidable, then, in our pursuit of authenticity, that our ego should spread anxious panic. But the felt fear only testifies to the risk we are taking and the courage we are embracing. We will always be tempted to doubt, to look down, to look back. There have been times in all the crossing-places of my own life when I battled with the cautious tapes of parents, teachers and priests. It was then that I wanted to return to the safety of the status quo, to retrace my steps back down along the slow paths of my recent ascent, where the embers of the previous evenings’ camp-fires were still warm.
When I listen to the hidden dreams of ordinary, healthy people I often wonder whether this persistent compulsion for greater and finer things burns in every human heart. (A recent review reveals that millions of Britons – over a quarter of all 30-50 year olds – are currently considering such an option, even though in most cases it involves a decrease in income.) All kinds of counter attractions, loss of nerve, negative judgements and jealous comments, can numb out and dumb down that first God-given spark that is always waiting to be fanned into a fiercer flame. But that spark, I believe, can never be extinguished. God’s imagination is incarnate within us. It is not easily overcome. ‘Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training,’ wrote Anna Freud. The anthropologist Mary Daly reminds us that the creative potential itself in human beings is the enfleshed restlessness of the deities. It is important to believe that we all carry within our bodies and hearts, God’s own dissatisfaction with the closed, lukewarm and safe ways of living. The whole thrust of every moment of Jesus’ life was towards a passion for the possible.
I have come to believe that when we struggle to discern the pros and cons of making a leap into the unknown, there is a sense in which some part of us has made the move already. Something, in fact, has already happened upfront at the boundaries of our life where the burning is brightest. A part of us has already crossed over into that as yet unknown space. It is waiting for the other parts of us to catch up. ‘You must give birth to your images.’ wrote the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter into you long before it happens.’
We have always carried the vague shape of a potential destiny somewhere within us – in our memory, in the unconscious, touched on in some of our more profound experiences. In an ultimate sense, I suppose that this is nowhere more true than in the intimations of our immortality that may strike us during these November days. We suddenly and fleetingly sense that a distant homecoming has already happened.
Is there, I wonder, something of immense importance hidden in the least of the aspirations of our lives? Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet wrote, ‘Anyone who moves onwards, even a little, walks, like Jesus, on the water.’ Yet my own experience of walking on water resembles more the embarrassing misfortune of Peter rather than the quiet elegance of Jesus! To step out of the boat of our secure lives on to a precarious surface that may not hold our weight, is a very foolhardy thing to do. Crossing a new terrain, to do a new work, is never a safe option. But once you begin to know yourself, to feel the shape of your soul, to have one courageous conversation with your true essence, then you have no choice. We are divinely created for growth; fashioned from the very beginning to become like God. That is why, to have heard the whisper of that call coming to you, like a far wave, is already to have answered.
When I take the risks of change, when I jump out of the boat like Peter, in spite of the grim, relentless tapes of caution that spool around in my memory, something deeper is there too. It is an intimation that I am always safely held. Our God-created nature guards us well. I take and hold the one hand that I know belongs in mine. So did Peter. And so did Jesus. Everything sustains your courage when your reach exceeds your grasp; when you step where you have never stepped before.
This is when, in the words of the Yorkshire poet David Whyte, we place our identity at the edge of discovery. It is time to move from an old life, before some kind of numbness sets in, making transition impossible. We die too soon when our work has no grace in it, no surprise, no inspiration; when it only maintains and bolsters up a soulless system. When our work is creative, the invisible becomes visible. But of this be sure: it will not be easy and others will not understand. You must follow your own star. I wonder if the seas are kind, and the stars are bright, for Tish and Barrie tonight.