Through the window

Among his many talents, Martin is a freelance photographer: http://martinart-photography.com/. He has a knack of seeing and capturing the unusual.  He brought some of his work to the MNDA Bake History coffee morning we had here on Saturday. I don't know how much he sold, but I liked this one called Window - so I ordered one of the limited edition. He brought it round today.

The sea and the sky really were that blue. Besides the interesting ruined walls (How many faces are hidden in the stones?), I love the fact that even through the small hole as well as through the roughcast "window" you can see the variety of life in the cliff-top flora and the sea breaking against the promontory. (By the way, any ideas of where the photo is?)

It's a sort of picture of the potential which still lies within human wreckage. You can still find beauty, and life and hope, even when all you yourself feel is a ruin. It's a matter of perspective. You can focus on the ruin or you can focus on the sun beyond.

Sometimes, however, even that view gets obscured by mist or rain. I've just heard today of an inexplicable grief. I have to confess that I have wept for those involved - and I don't understand it. Why does God allow hopes to be so sadly dashed? I don't get it. 

And yet, as I've written in My Donkeybody, I still believe that the sun shines behind the closed shutters. I just can't comprehend the total nature of that Love.

"I'm a failure"

I can do no better than copy this post from the iBenedictines' blog  today.

The Prayer of Incompetence and Failure

by Digitalnun on July 1, 2012
From time to time someone will ask how to pray ‘better’. When we tease out what is troubling the questioner, it usually turns out that he or she expects something to ‘happen’ in prayer; and when it doesn’t, feels a failure. Of course, something always does ‘happen’ in prayer, but not always what we were expecting or hoping for. Remember Naaman and his indignation at being told to wash seven times in the Jordan when he was expecting Elisha to come out and perform some quasi-magical ceremony for him? We can be like that in prayer. We want things to go according to our notions, but God has his own ideas and they are rarely the same as ours.

One of the first lessons any of us has to learn is to pray as we can. We need to keep in mind that God is in charge and rather keener on this prayer business than we are. Our enthusiasm tends to come by fits and starts. Not so God’s. He has been planning this moment of closeness with us from all eternity. That can be an encouraging thought when prayer seems dry and pointless, when all we experience is incompetence and failure. The secret is to keep at it, to go on trustingly with our prayer times. One of the lovely phrases George Herbert used to describe prayer was ‘the heart in pilgrimage’. Anyone who has undertaken a real pilgrimage, walked the Camino de Santiago, for example, will know that temptations to give up crowd in when one is tired and footsore, but one just goes on. So it is with prayer. Incompetence, failure, what do they matter when God has promised us his very self?
Note
There are some simple guidelines for prayer on our main website, here.

Jane tells me the guidelines on the website are very helpful.

I find it consoling that nuns, who I imagine are in the premier league of pray-ers, understand the sense of being a failure at praying. My father, I think it was, had a saying: "Pray, pray - and peg away."