STOLEN CHILD
“Come up to me on the mountain, and wait there…” ~ Exodus 24.12
Come away o human child, to the waters and the wild…
“…WITH A FAERY, hand in hand, for the world’s more full of weeping, than you can understand…” I love the bardic melodies in the poems of the Irish mystic, WB Yeats. They feel to me as natural as the sea. Yeats’ words seem to dance like the notes and grace notes of a Gaelic reel, so free and yet so deeply laden with the hiraeth of a wandering soul that somehow walks the shrouded lines between catching a glimpse at something and the realisation that probably that something can never really be retold. The voices in the poems seem at once lonely and yet wholly befriended and befriending. In Stolen Child, the reader is called, through Celtic mythology, into contemplation and so to discover a more innocent wildness of being than the sad and disconnected world that has become the political and social landscape of our lives.
Lent is a call to our deeper selves, urging us into the deserts and wastelands of our consciousness, offering us the space in which we might remember or discover whom really are, beneath the layers of anaesthetic sold us so easily and enticingly by the philosophic traders in the material. “Come up to me on the mountain, and wait there…”, says I AM to Moses in our reading from Exodus. We are told the prophet stayed there 40 days and 40 nights. “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves”, remembers Matthew in the Gospel passage. On the mountain, in the wild, God shows what is real. For the one who will stop a while and steal a gaze into the mist and so be graced “eyes to see”, the one who contemplates by opening the heart and so finds a blessed descent from the noisy mind, who listens for the melody of the poet, for this one, and perhaps only for a moment, the veil of truth is lifted.
If all this sounds a bit exclusive, and Moses and the fishing-for-men big three does, doesn’t it – well, according to the Gospel, if the Gospel really is the Message of Jesus Christ, it is not exclusive at all! Every breath and every word on Jesus’ lips breathes and teaches that God wants to reveal God’s self to every single one of us! So, come on. Take some time. There is much going on in Gower this Lent, in churches and outside. Come with us or travel alone but anyway come away o human child, to waters and the wild…
Tonnau Duw ('God's waves') Fr Tim Ardouin 