5 March, Lenten Pilgrimage II: down to the sea in ships.

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.

Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!
Let them exalt him also in the congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders.

Psalm 107:23-31.

This Lent we will be sharing reflections on the rather loose theme of ‘Pilgrimage’.

The description of the merchants on a storm-tossed ship will resonate with anyone caught in a Channel gale, held outside the walls of Dover Harbour until our ferry could safely enter. The ships in biblical times were smaller than those monsters, smaller even than this Cal-Mac ferry to the Scottish Islands, seen here in her ‘desired haven’, her home port of Mallaig. These ferries venture out in all weathers, as a friend and I found many years ago. We were crossing from Gourock to Dunoon; the waves were crashing around the quay, but there was a small army of workers on their way to the Navy depot on Loch Long. Their calm meant we were not at our wits’ end for long.

May we endure all the storms that await us this Lent. By our air of calmness may we encourage our fellow pilgrims to be calm too. And may we cry unto the Lord in our distress, and always praise him for his goodness. AMEN.

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20 February: The Shell

Beach-combing. Turnstones are adept at it, turning stones and scraps of weed and plastic to find food. Mary Webb, here writing in romantic mode, never came across the detectorists, sweeping the sands for coins fallen from tourists’ pockets, though my daughter, digging in the sand rather than flipping pebbles, once found enough to buy all the family an ice-cream! A red letter day. So what did Mary Webb find? A casket of the sea; a shell.

What has the sea swept up?
A Viking oar, long mouldered in the peace
Of grey oblivion? Some dim-burning bowl
Of unmixed gold, from far-off island feasts?
Ropes of old pearls? Masses of ambergris?
Something of elfdom from the ghastly isles
Where white-hot rocks pierce through the flying spindrift?
Or a pale sea-queen, close wound in a net of spells?

Nothing of these. Nothing of antique splendours
That have a weariness about their names:
But–fresh and new, in frail transparency,
Pink as a baby’s nail, silky and veined
As a flower petal–this casket of the sea,
One shell.

I think this shell came from Portobello beach in Scotland, just a short ride from Edinburgh. That’s one story a shell could tell: what’s your name and where do you come from, but Mary Webb turns hers over in her palm and gives us a little hymn of praise. Laudato si’.

Stella Maris supporting seafarers in Ukraine

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Source: ACN via Independent Catholic News

Global maritime charity Stella Maris has announced that it has resumed regular ship visits in the port of Odesa in war-torn Ukraine, after almost a year of not being able to do so due to security and safety concerns.

On Tuesday, 24th January, the charity’s port chaplain Fr Alexander Smerechynskyy, and assistant chaplain Rostyslav Inzhestoikov, were granted special permission to go on board ships. With a military escort at all times, they were able to pay very welcome visits to seafarers who have been alone on their vessels in Odesa for many long months.

“Rostik and I are delighted that Stella Maris has been granted permission to visit ships once again in the port of Odesa,” said Fr Alexander.

Stella Maris is physically present and actively working in Ukraine to support seafarers and their families.

During the months that they were not allowed to visit ships, Fr Alex and Rostik have been supporting seafarers in many other ways, including ensuring the delivery of food parcels to seafarers trapped on ships in the Black Sea. They have been providing spiritual and pastoral support remotely to Ukrainian seafarers on ships around the world through messages broadcast via social media.

Through Stella Maris’ Centenary Emergency Fund, Fr Alex and Rostik have also been providing tens of thousands of pounds in urgent life-saving grants to hundreds of Ukrainian seafarers and their families in need of immediate assistance as a result of the war.

They also ran a soup kitchen to help families of seafarers in Odesa and helped organise safe places of refuge for Ukrainian seafarers finishing contracts overseas and their families fleeing the country.

Late last year Stella Maris launched a psychological support service for seafarers and their families in Ukraine. The programme provides medium to long-term support from professional psychologists in Ukraine, and delivers remote, ongoing psychological support for those most in need.

Stella Maris is the world’s largest ship-visiting network. The importance of a personal visit from the charity’s chaplains and volunteers, and the impact of the human touch on seafarers’ mental health and wellbeing cannot be over-estimated.

Seafarers, especially those working in conditions of heightened anxiety and stress, appreciate seeing a friendly face, ready to offer support and a listening ear. It reminds seafarers that they are not forgotten amid the horrors of the war

90% of world trade is transported by ship. However, the life of a seafarer can be dangerous and lonely. Seafarers may spend up to a year at a time away from home, separated from their families and loved ones, often working in harsh conditions.

Stella Maris’ chaplains and ship visitors provide seafarers and fishers with pastoral and practical support, information and a listening ear.

For more information visit: www.stellamaris.org.uk

Facebook: www.facebook.com/StellaMarisOrg

Twitter: @StellaMarisOrg

Instagram: www.instagram.com/stellamaris_uk/

20 December, Advent Light XX: a slow motion dawn.

Margate Beach on a Grey Day

Fr Tom Herbst OFM, an early supporter and contributor to this blog, died on 8 November. Here is one of his Advent reflections, well worth reading again and appropriate for the Solstice. RIP, Fr Tom, and thank you!

Here, well up there in the Northern Hemisphere, the approach of the Church’s great winter feasts is met by ever shortening days, grayish sunsets subtly shaded with pastel colour, and the gathering shadows of storm-rattled darkness. Even now, as I look out from the giant bay window in my flat toward a slate gray sea, it feels like a slow motion dawn rather than what the clock prosaically states is high noon. And the Church, in her time-tested wisdom, has properly situated the purple cloaked season of waiting and hoping within a test mirrored by nature herself- will the Son of Man ever return; will I ever witness the eastern blaze of a 5:00 AM springtime dawn seen through the very same bay window now shrouded in a feeble mist? One can hope, but for now all I can do is walk my two bemused dogs in the bookended darkness of a seven o’clock dawn and four thirty afternoon sunset.

I have had critics of the Church, harboring grave suspicions of pagan flashbacks, point out the total lack of biblical witness for the date of Christ’s birth, the unlikely probability of shepherds out in the fields in the dead of winter and, far worse, the close congruence of the decadent Roman Saturnalia with the newly minted Feast of the Nativity. Shopping frenzy beginning at mid-November and a near-universal expansion of waistlines don’t help- as a kindly Jehovah’s Witness picture framer said once, utterly confident that I would agree. It seems, though, as if the whole point has been missed. It is the ritual celebration of Christ’s birth and the expectation of God’s promise fulfilled – born of an indestructible hope- that are being celebrated and the vast stage of nature herself hosts the drama. Yes, the shortening days followed by the magic threshold of the Solstice, when that longed for flicker of light begins to wax stronger, formed the reason for the Saturnalia but this has been embodied by the small child laid in a manger; the hope for Emmanuel realized at last.

TJH.

17 September: I will remember this.

I was wondering why I had heard nothing from Eddie Gilmore for a while. Well, he has been to Korea with Yim Soon, to mark their thirty years of marriage. Congratulations!

Eddie posted this account of his holiday, which got off to an inauspicious start in and around various European airports, but turned into a great treat for the soul. Let’s rejoice with Eddie and Yim Soon, and before the memories fade, be grateful for the blessings of the summer that has now brought us to autumn, a time of reflection and new beginnings. At L’Arche Kent we’ll be planting bulbs for a start!

Here’s an extract from Eddie’s story:

Having left home on the Friday I finally landed in Seoul on the Monday. It was hot and humid, the monsoon season had just begun, and I was exhausted: hungry too, since you don’t get fed on planes the way you used to. After a couple of nights with Yim Soon’s eldest sister Son Ja, whose apartment was mercifully close to a mini-mountain with wonderful views over the city, we were picked up by Son Ja’s daughter Son Young for the three-hour (if there’s no traffic, otherwise it’s seven hours!) drive East to the Sorak national park. It’s a place that holds special memories for me: good walking, beautiful waterfalls, also its close proximity to the East Sea, where we had some fun times on the beach, partly due to the mountains being closed to the public due to the heavy rain. Thankfully they were reopened for our day to Daechongbong and Yim Soon and I were on the trail at 8 a.m. having dropped our bags at the temple where we would be spending the night. We were on the top at just after 2 p.m., having almost given up a couple of times on what seemed impossibly steep sections. I’m glad we pressed on and we were rewarded with stunning views over the lower peaks and all the way to the sea. We made it back down to the temple just in time for the final check-in at 6.30 p.m. but having missed dinner! No matter, we were both too tired to eat but what a good fatigue it is that comes from extreme physical exertion. There was a ‘full Korean breakfast’ on offer at 6.30 a.m., the only condition being that we had to wear the ‘temple robes’ that had been assigned to us on arrival which were grey trousers and a yellow jacket. I’ll wear anything for a good meal!

And things kept on getting better!

Thank you Eddie, as always.

20 March: On not reinventing the wheel.

Two young mothers pushing their babies on Margate prom. Their buggies double up as shopping trolleys.

The discussion drifted to mobility and the challenges posed by diminishing powers in later life.

Jane had struggled with herself to adopt a walking stick, and then a walker with a seat and shopping box. ‘But that was silly of me, because now I can get down to the shops and the promenade.’ The thought of not seeing the sea, though living so close, had steeled her to swallow her pride and try the aids.

‘I can do so much more now’, she says.

Reinventing the wheel or even the walking stick seems excessive, but many of us learn the hard way. Jane would tell you how its tempting to be too self-reliant, too independent. In the 1980’s people in big mental hospitals were released into ‘the community’ to live independently; often in a one bedroom flat somewhere completely unknown to the person concerned who would have been incarcerated for decades.

‘The community’ did not exist for them unless someone made an effort to befriend them.

Jane’s first walker trolley was given to her by a fellow member of the exercise group, who had another that suited her better. The group is a little community, even when meeting by zoom.

What can we learn from this little story? To accept help or advice graciously, to admit that no man (or woman) is an island entire of itself, not even me! So we are all responsible for each other, and are diminished if a neighbour suffers; we are, or should be, involved in mankind, conscious of each other’s needs and gifts.

No Man Is An Island by John Donne

No man is an island, 
Entire of itself, 
Every man is a piece of the continent, 
A part of the main. 
If a clod be washed away by the sea, 
Europe is the less. 
As well as if a promontory were. 
As well as if a manor of thy friend's 
Or of thine own were: 
Any man's death diminishes me, 
Because I am involved in mankind, 
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee.

13 February: A Motto to live by.

Philip Doddridge D.D.

How are you doing with those New Year’s Resolutions? Read on for some encouragement!

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell are in Skye, made very welcome by a local chief, but unable to move on because the weather was too bad for sailing or rowing, and of course Calmac steamships had not yet appeared. Here is Boswell describing one of their conversations. Doctor Doddridge was a non-conformist minister and hymn writer who died in 1751, 22 years before the friends’ tour of Scotland. More of Boswell’s idiosyncratic spellings.

Dr Dodridge being mentioned, [Johnson] observed that ‘he was author of one of the finest epigrams in the English language. It is in Orton’s Life of him. The subject is his family-motto, Dum vivimus, vivamus*; which, in its primary signification, is, to be sure, not very suitable to a Christian divine; but he paraphrased it thus:

  Live, while you live, the EPICURE would say,
  And seize the pleasures of the present day.
  Live, while you live, the sacred PREACHER cries,
  And give to God each moment as it flies.
 
  Lord, in my views let both united be;
  I live in PLEASURE, when I live to THEE. 

(from The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell)

*While we are alive, let us live!

11 January: Brownings XXV and silence by the shore

In her long poem, The Soul’s Travelling, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is by the sea as well, though not at Broadstairswhere we were yesterday. In a previous stanza she described a hollow where she could hear, but not see, the ocean ebbing and flowing across the beach. Broadstairs is a bit more open than that, but in the next bay after the pier I used to snatch a few minutes of silence in a hollow at the foot of the cliff. The curlews and other sea birds were calling right through winter, but the silence was still all around.

Except that sound, the place is full
Of silences, which when you cull
By any word, it thrills you so
That presently you let them grow
To meditation's fullest length
Across your soul with a soul's strength:
And as they touch your soul, they borrow
Both of its grandeur and its sorrow,
That deathly odour which the clay
Leaves on its deathlessness alwày.

from The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume II.

Another beach for silence in the sounds of the sea is Aberdaron in West Wales – follow the tag to read more posts about it. The church is at the top of the beach and the sea’s singing accentuates the message embroidered on this seat runner. You don’t need external silence to be still; the Lord is on your side wherever you are, you vessel of clay, holding his treasure! (2 Corinthians 4:7)

WT

January 2, Tagore XVI: My day is done.

My day is done,

and I am like a boat drawn on the beach,

listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening.

from “Stray Birds” by Rabindranath Tagore

And very gentle music it was, this winter’s evening in Margate. At the turn of the year, let’s pray that we may enjoy such evenings in this life, with a warm home to return to.

And may He support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last.

Amen.

John Henry Cardinal Newman

Apologies that the Tagore’s numbering has got out of sequence.

9 November: Only the surface is wrinkled.

Looking towards Llyn

This is an old man’s poem: short and bitter-sweet, but nourishing. I came to it in Jim Cotter’s Etched in Silence collection, Canterbury Press, 2013, which Cotter presents as a pilgrimage through R.S. Thomas’s poems, one for each week of the year. This is allocated to week 45, this second week in November.

I look out over the timeless sea
over the head of one, calendar
to time’s passing, who is now open
at the last month, her hair wintry. 

Am I catalyst of her mettle that,
at my approach, her grimace of pain
turns to a smile? What it is saying is:
“Over love’s depths only the surface is wrinkled."

R.S. Thomas, ‘I look out over the timeless sea’, in Collected later poems, 1988-2000, Bloodaxe Books 2004 p72