The wonder of my being

Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”

Today Danni and I went on a retreat called 'An Advent Journey with Mary', given by an elderly Carmelite friar from Ireland. Mary is Danni's focus for Awake the Dawn, not mine, so I am entering her territory in writing about the retreat. (This is rarely a sensible move to make - the last time such a thing happened, as I was finning through a coral lagoon twenty-eight metres down in the Red Sea, an indignant moray eel shot out of its hole to register a pointed complaint.) What I want to write about here is self-knowledge, the kind of self-knowledge that Mary possessed so absolutely.

St Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite reformer and mystic, realised that when she was at her closest to God she was at her closest to Teresa. We are accustomed to seeing God as a separate entity, the Almighty enthroned in the sky. If we could only understand that "this God is not 'out there', but intimately present to me, in the blood pulse of my life," as the Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows puts it in her book To Believe in Jesus, sinful behaviour would no longer seem so attractive. We would recognise it for what it is - self-strangulation. Anything that cuts you off from God cuts you off from yourself. You go against who you are, and that's the pain of it.

This was a kind of pain that Mary never experienced, as God preserved her from sin from the moment of her conception. The freedom and self-knowledge that resulted from this gift of God is made clear in the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a saint who has special meaning for Pebles as she almost certainly had autism. Among other things, Bernadette struggled notably with speech and language. When told by a teacher that she was too stupid to learn anything, Bernadette replied, "I know how to love God." Yet it's unlikely that this French peasant child from a desperately poor family, who grew up gnawing on candlewax to satisfy her hunger pangs and was practically illiterate, would ever have been recognised for her God-love if she hadn't received visions of the Virgin Mary in the filthy grotto of Massabielle. She was fourteen years old at the time.

Mary (or Aquero, as Bernadette called her) made no prophecies. She didn't make a bare rosebush flower when the bishop asked for this to happen as proof of the visions' authenticity. She spoke very little during the apparitions themselves. She did, however, reveal her identity to Bernadette in the child's own dialect: "Que seroy era Immaculada Concepciou."

I am the Immaculate Conception. I am the Immaculate Conception. Bernadette ran to the house of the local priest who had demanded to know the apparition's name, repeating the unfamiliar phrase under her breath to prevent herself from forgetting it. At the presbytery, the priest tried to adjust the odd phraseology. Surely the woman had said "I am Mary Immaculate" or something along those lines? But Bernadette remained firm. I am the Immaculate Conception. This was what she had heard, and this was what she maintained.

Mary's words to St Bernadette Soubirous, the girl to whom Pebles refers as 'the one everybody thought was stupid', are pregnant with knowledge of God and knowledge of the self. This is why the apparitions of Lourdes resonate with me in a way that the apparitions of Fatima cannot. Mary's simple statement of being, given in reply to the priest's demand for her name, reminds me of God's answer to Moses in similar circumstances: "I am."

This intensely personal knowledge of yourself, this assurance of your place in the universe, grows deeper as you grow closer to God. This is why the psalmist was able to write, "I praise You for the wonder of my being." But how many of us view our being as something wondrous? How many of us can sing those words from the psalm and really mean the song?

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars -
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
- St Augustine

If we really want to prepare a place for God in our lives, we must not pass ourselves by. We must remember God's reply to Moses, making it the basis of our preparation and our understanding - an understanding that was personified by Mary.

Moses said to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I AM has sent me to you.'”

The homecoming

Long have I waited for your coming home,
and living deeply our new life.

Tonight my church (St Wilfrid's, Preston) held a special service of reconciliation to mark the beginning of Advent. There was singing; a reflection on the blessings brought by forgiveness, read by one of the priests; and silent prayer before Jesus, truly present for us on the altar in the humble guise of bread. Throughout the evening there was the chance to go to Confession.

Confession is practised by Christians in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition. Sometimes it confuses Christians from other churches, who mistakenly think that Catholics are trusting in a priest to forgive their sins rather than God. In reality, God is the one granting the forgiveness. He is the author; the priest is just the pen. God understands human needs very well - that same desire for tangible reassurance, for His self given in nourishing bread, for His forgiveness spoken in a human voice, is answered in the Incarnation. But there are times when I don't want to face up to those needs, and tonight was one of them.

I've been doing something wrong over the past couple of months. Repeatedly. And I'd been trying - and almost succeeding - to persuade myself that it wasn't bad. It didn't feel like a sin, and I couldn't understand the rationale behind its prohibition. But secretly I knew very well that sins don't cause pain and difficulty immediately. If they didn't provide enjoyment at the time, who would bother with them? It's even easier to go against your conscience and your better nature when the sin's filthy core is fleshed out with fruit that looks ripe, rich, good. In spite of this deeper knowledge, I couldn't feel sorry. I went on trying to excuse myself.

But out of respect for my religious tradition and trust in my God, which I've never quite managed to suffocate, I prayed to want to repent. Sometimes that's as close as I can get to actual contrition. I asked Jesus to take this prayer and to do what He could with it. As a result, I found myself walking into the side-chapel this evening and making my confession.

The quiet and gentle old priest said nothing about the content of my confession, even though it's a custom to give advice. For my penance, he asked me to pray for all the people who were attending the Advent service. And that was when the feeling of liberation and sheer joy hit me like a lightning bolt, transfixing me, rooting me to the floor. Repentence, I saw, means returning to your rightful place in a community - your family, your college, your workplace, your church, the Kingdom of Heaven itself. Only it's impossible to savour the joy of homecoming when you're still standing outside the gate. The youngest son in Jesus' parable, returning home to his father's farm after squandering all the money, had a dreary and fearful expectation: he would be fed, lodged, and put to work as a servant. Instead, the father ran out to welcome him when he was still a long way off, ordered a banquet to be served, and celebrated the return of his son with feasting and dancing. This is what God is to us. We take one step towards Him, and He runs to us.

But sometimes it feels so much easier and less nerve-wracking to remain on the outside looking in - even though in our heart of hearts we want to push open the gate and be able to say, "I'm home."

The priest giving the sermon tonight said, "Forgiveness is peace. Forgiveness is gratitude. Forgiveness is generosity. Forgiveness is love." This characterises the nature of the homecoming. Peace is God's first gift, and it inspires gratitude in us. This gives birth to the kind of generosity that wants to reach out to everyone and include them all in our new life, which is perfect love.

Long have I waited for your coming home,
and living deeply our new life.