Vade Mecum: September
The liturgical and season invitations of the month ahead - the Equinox, Hildegard, Mother Theresa, Leonard Cohen and Henri Nouwen all accompany us this month!
Oh friends, it is a good month! Not just the equinox, but inspiring saints and singers and peace-makers. It was such a delight to gather this Vade Mecum together for you. I love the idea that all these moments bring us together no matter where we are in the world or really what we believe. There is inspiration and wonder and challenge in the act of remembering.
I know these monthly posts are not short! Set down your phone now and go make a cup of tea or coffee to drink as you read, or bookmark it to come back to later. My hope is these are truly invitations - take them to your journal or bring them up in conversation with friends. Let the seasons and days keep inviting us to wake up to the sacred in the ordinary.
Liturgical Season: Ordinary Time (still!)
Yes, this season of ordinary time goes on. This month, I offer you this poem, ‘The Patience of Ordinary Things’ by Pat Schneider, published in her anthology Another River.
As you read the poem (perhaps copy it into a journal or a postcard that you can keep somewhere you’ll see it), consider the ordinary things in your life and wonder at the invitation they call you to.
If you want to turn this into a prayer practice, you might make it a kind of visio divina. In the place you are sitting, let your eyes roam around until one “ordinary thing” catches your attention, and then spend some minutes simply contemplating it without too much evaluation.
What do you see? How are you connected to this ordinary thing? Is there an invitation from Spirit that wants to be received?
Key dates in September:
5th: feast day of St Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997)
As a child, I loved Mother Teresa. When I was about 14, not long after she died, our history class at school was given an assignment: we were each to pick a historic figure, and we would imagine these figures were all in a hot air balloon that only had space for six (in a class of 30!) - we’d need to debate why our figure should be allowed a spot. I regret to report that I was unable to convince a class of non-religious teenagers that Mother Teresa was significant enough!
In 2007, ten years after her death, Mother Teresa’s personal diaries and correspondences were published in a book called Come be my Light. It revealed, for the first time, the depth of her own interior darkness, through a time when all the public saw was her faithfulness and joy.
Where is my Faith–even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness–My God–how painful is this unknown pain–I have no Faith–I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart–& make me suffer untold agony.
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them–because of the blasphemy–If there be God –please forgive me–When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven–there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul.–I am told God loves me–and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?
It provoked a huge amount of response - people trying to offer a theological framework for her experiences, psychological professionals wondering at the causes, atheists claiming she had lost faith but not been able to be honest about it. So many responses seem to want to tidy her up, put her experiences into a neat understandable box.
Maybe our best way to honour her - and ourselves - is to let her story be messy. Let there be inner contradictions. Let there be both acceptance and frustration. Let there be both joy and suffering. Let there be both faith and doubt.
What might it look like today to let your story be messy?
15th: September’s New Moon
Over the summer I found a fascinating secondhand book in an Oxfam bookshop called Celebrating the New Moon: a Rosh Chodesh Anthology. It’s a beautiful collection of essays, rituals and poems for Rosh Chodesh, the Jewish holiday that marks each month’s new moon. That holiday was established in Exodus 12:2, on the eve of the departure from Egypt. Susan Berrin, the editor of the book, writes,
“What we are asked to establish is not an astronomical cycle of months, but a monthly cycle of personal and community renewal. The renewing moon is a sign to the desert wanderers that God will renew the People. Are we not all, in some way, desert wanderers?... The moon became that covenant [sign] of hope.”
In the darkness of this month’s new moon, take some time to ponder that word renewal. What does it mean to you? What needs renewing in your own life, and in the life of your community?
Perhaps close by reading this Jewish Prayer for Renewal by Hillel Zeitlin.
17th: feast day of St Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
Last month I got to go to an event at Brorsons Kirke - a church here in Copenhagen, that has a new display of Hildegard’s artwork in their church and above the altar. The evening included talks about her life, performances of songs that she had written, and Janne Mark’s stunning songs inspired by her.
Afterwards, standing with two friends, surrounded by Hildegard’s striking visions, we wondered aloud what she might have become if she wasn’t still so bound by the heresy-fearing, crusade-making patriarchal religion of the time. She is both a product of her age and an incredible visionary.
I think when we look back at medieval writers and saints, we have to be really careful not to idealise them (not Hildegard or Julian or Teresa or John…). They were real humans, with complex lives in a very different time and place to us. And yet, it is beautiful to encounter in their works spiritual truths that still sing with inspiration and wonder. Like this, a favourite line from Hildegard, spoken by Wisdom:
“I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.”
21st: International Day of Peace / Birthday of Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) / Anniversary of the death of Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)
That this day marks these three separate events feels beautifully significant. Leonard Cohen was a musician who sought peace in his own life and that of the world, but recognised that accepting the brokenness was the first step to that. Speaking about his song Anthem, he said:
It’s no excuse… the dismal situation.. and the future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your job and your love. “Ring the bells that still can ring”: they’re few and far between but you can find them. “Forget your perfect offering”, that is the hang-up, that you’re gonna work this thing out... This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect. And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together, physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.
– from Diamonds in the Line
Similarly, peacemaking was central for Henri Nouwen, who said, “Nobody can be a Christian today without being a peacemaker." He attended protests and rallies. He left prestigious roles to work alongside the destitute and marginalised and learn from them. But like Leonard Cohen, who spent so much time in silence and stillness to resource his public work, Henri Nouwen argued that peacemaking started in prayer:
"Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking."
In prayer, we encounter the God of Peace, who disarms our hearts and teaches us how to love our enemies. We come home to our core identity as beloved, made in the image of the Divine, and learn to see every other person as a child of God.
Today, listen to some of Leonard Cohen’s songs - his famous Anthem and my personal favourite Come Healing:
And let them be a call to prayer, an invitation to encounter a Divinity that connects us back to one another, that reminds us of our belovedness and the belovedness even of our enemies, and that shows us the light flooding through the brokenness.
22nd: Autumn Equinox
Today, half way between the summer solstice and the winter solstice, the northern hemisphere dips toward darkness. Here is a blessing I wrote this time last year, that resists the impossible idea we should be finding balance in our lives and celebrates resting in the boundaries of your holy skin.
May you be released from the impossible demand
to pursue balance in your life.
May you let go of the need to be perfect,
to hold it all together.
May you embrace the seasonal shifts of your own life,
May you lean into both the spaciousness
and the fullness,
The receiving and the letting go,
The pain and the joy.
May you celebrate your limits,
Draw lines on holy skin of holy boundaries
Rest in the bounded expanse of your limbs,
The in and out
And in an out
And in and out again
Of your every breath.
May this autumn equinox remind you:
you know you are enough
And you are holy.
29th: September’s Full Moon
Return to your wonderings about the word renewal. What has been renewed in you in the last few weeks since the new moon? What feels full and abundant? What still needs the hope of renewal?
Coming up for Ordinary Pilgrim:
Two new Faith Shift groups begin mid-September and there is space for you. Find out more on my website, and do message me if you have questions or need a gentle nudge of encouragement!
I am off on pilgrimage this month! I will be taking five days to walk the St Cuthbert’s Way from Melrose in Scotland to Lindisfarne in England. I am so looking forward to the time away by myself in that beautiful sacred landscape. I am sure I will have much to share with you about the journey!
I start teaching a new cohort at the end of the month as part of the Encounter course at the London Centre for Spiritual Direction. I’m the lead tutor for the third (and final) year of the course and it is such a delight to journey in such an intense and meaningful way with those students. If you are interested, I believe spots for this coming year are now full, but there is a waiting list for the 2024 cohort.
Looking ahead - those in or near London save the date Friday 3rd November in the evening for an in person event about the feminine divine! More details to come very soon…
