Brushstrokes

Author(s): Sr Nan McKinnon

Source: The Furrow, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Feb., 2005), pp. 111-113
Published by: Furrow
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27665097
Accessed: 30-12-2015 06:29 UTC

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 NEWS AND VIEWS

- and spiritually. Some painfully

physically, psychologically
honest self-examination may be called for here.
This is not planned penance imposed on our normal daily life. It
is very much integral to our daily life. It refers to something we
may spend hours on every day or night. And, whether we like it or
not, admit it or not, itmay well be turning us into a different type
of person from what we were before we started giving so much
time to it. Especially with Internet use we need to be very careful
not to waste time and money on it - and above all, not to become
addicted to it. Lent could very well be the time for logging off of
virtual reality and booting up on the real thing: life with others.
Perversely perhaps, may I suggest that for Lent we feast our
mind and spirit on good, inspiring and worthwhile reading? Why
not buy a book or two on the Bible, on prayer, on spirituality, on
theology, some worthwhile novels? If we want to understand the
faith we have been blessed with then we need to study it, think
about it, question it, apply it to life, grow in it and with it.We need
to be able to see it as others see it - both those who have it and
those who don't. That is not possible without our own effort.
Lent, then, could be a time for buying and reading good books to
our minds.
energize
It could also be a time for listening to good music - to music
that can soothe our troubled spirit, that can switch off our constant
internal monologue, that can make time stand still and raise us to
a level of bliss and expectation we rarely dream of; music that
refines and inspires us, that tells us something about ourselves and
our journey through life that we can't hear any other way, that
conveys the sense of the sacred, the divine, in a way that thoughts
and ideas just can't do. If we have cut ourselves off from such
-
possibility we are the poorer for it and so is everybody else.
Lastly, if Lent is a preprandium for the Easter celebration of
life, then let us enjoy nature, the great outdoors. Let us learn to
'waste' time with God in nature. Away from the unrelenting
demands of ever-higher production and profits, away from the
irritating congestion of city life, away from the sometimes oppres
sive intimacy of those we love, let us breathe fresh air, enjoy the
deafening silence, hear the birds and smell the flowers. Call it
pleasure with a purpose. And if this can enhance our life, freshen
and invigorate us, remind us that God lives and not a thousand
miles away, then why look for penance to do the same thing?

Brushstrokes. Sr Nan McKinnon, RSCJ, 2B Callan Crescent,

Armagh BT6I 7RH, writes:
Sometimes one can get a new perspective on the scriptures by
taking up one's metaphorical paint brush and giving a few dabs of

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THE FURROW

extra colour here and there. I have been doing that recently with
the story of the shepherds in Luke's corner of the picture and it
was fun.

Shepherds of Bethlehem, rough and tough we are told, hard

headed shady characters sceptical about most things and possibly
of criminal bent are however not beyond experiencing a sort of
celestial son et lumi?re out there on the hillside. Whereupon, thor
oughly scared and with eyes seared by the sudden vision, they did
what a friend of mine who, knowing nothing of the niceties of
grammar or tense but a great deal about humanity, invariably
terms Tost the head'. Abandoning sheep, lambs and logic, off
those shepherds go heiter skelter to Bethlehem to find the Lamb
of God. Of course that was their job, looking out for new-born
lambs.
Here Imust point out that our shepherds are not aware of the
nature of the picture in which they find themselves. No one has
told them that they are racing across a canvas which is in reality a
dense web of connections and interconnections, and that here
nothing or almost nothing is what it seems. Their path winds
through a sort of exegetic minefield. But that need not worry us
and it certainly does not worry them.
On their arrival at what seemed to be the right place I think they
must simply have fallen silent and ruminated, an activity (if one
can call it an activity) to which shepherds are notoriously prone.
And talking of ruminating I am reminded of a television docu
mentary I watched recently on the mysterious prehistoric mega
liths of Stonehenge. One of the geologists there, a shaggy, bearded
man rather like a shepherd himself, was turning over in his hand
a fragment of the rare blue stone of which the inner circle of
trilithons is formed. He was, one felt, searching into the heart of
that miraculous crystalline chip. His brain was probably echoing
to the crash of ancient meteoric collisions and cybernetic storms
and the bubbling of molten matter seething in a cosmic cauldron.
Whatever he saw there must have rendered him speechless. He
was silently ruminating. Which was probably all he could do
considering the unimaginable provenance of that chip of stone.
Itmust have been something the same with the shepherds. No
great talkers at the best of times, when they found themselves
bending over the tiny chip of humanity in the manger they too
were bereft of speech. But being no Einsteins, they didn't try to
tell themselves or anyone else that here they had found their God
cradled in the curve of the space-time manifold. And I'm sure
they didn't even think of Adam or Abraham or Moses or David.
No, they were probably thinking that the birth of any baby beg
gars the tongue, but to be born a Saviour and Christ the Lord,

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 NEWS AND VIEWS

maker of the universe and everything in it, including oneself, is

right off the map. The language the shepherds needed doesn't
exist. So very wisely they just stood there, bent their shaggy heads
and ruminated.
I don't know how long they ruminated. One can't measure such
things. But after a time, across the living silence of the cave, they
would have begun to distinguish as from a distance, the muffled
chime of sheep bells, and the chilly bleating of new born lambs
shivering in their little silken fleeces. Then the shepherds did what
everyone who has found the peace of Bethlehem must do. They
turned and went home, back to their cold hillsides, their dumb
flocks and the humdrum of their less than perfect daily life. Itwas
only later facing the radiant dawn that they found their tongues
again. 'Glory and praise to our God' they sang at the tops of their
rusty voices.
Here I have a question. What did the shepherds hear that night
in the cave? Joseph was saying nothing though he was probably
thinking hard. Mary was saying nothing. She was pondering in her
heart. The shepherds themselves had fallen silent. And the baby,
being a real baby, was certainly not talking. Not a word from any
one. How did the shepherds know they were in the right place?
But apparently they did know. They were absolutely sure about it.
This was the manger. This was the lamb they had come looking
for.

Still, Imust admit before I tidy away my paints that this little
lamb can pose a bit of a problem, at least for some. Not for the
shepherds. They have made the connection. They have suffered
the light. They have 'lost the head' and found in the manger the
solution to all problems. But there could be a problem for those of
us still blundering about in semi-darkness and a welter of mixed
metaphors, and who might happen to trip over it or rather bump
into it in the course of our dim speculating. To tell you the truth
I'm not even sure myself what the problem is. Perhaps it's so big
that one has to get on to another plane to see it at all. Maybe it's
a bit like Stonehenge. You get amuch better view of that from the
air, they say. But then perhaps it's just a baby in amanger, a small
fragment of divine humanity. I don't know. But I do know that if
there is a problem for any of us we're not going to solve it in the
dark. That's for sure. And if we want to try to solve itwe'd better
do something about it, like get into the picture with the shepherds
where the light is blinding. We need to abandon logic and go
where tense becomes irrelevant. We need to have 'lost the head'.
And ...? The future is always a surprise they say. So heaven
knows where we'll all end up. Ruminating probably!

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