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Sheltering Walls |
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Out in the wilds of the west of Ireland, where his family owns a farm, poet and priest John O'Donohue describes a curious feature of the landscape: There are stone walls out in the mountain fields.
Hardly so curious, you might think. Anyone visiting New England can see fields separated by stone walls. But the walls O'Donohue describes are not between fields, separating fields. They are within fields - semi-circular walls of stone, sitting in the middle of fields.
These, O'Donohue writes, are "sheltering walls." There is little natural shelter in the bleak landscape of those hills. When a storm blows in off the North Atlantic, the walls provide a place where the cattle in winter pasture can take shelter until the storm blows over.
For O'Donohue, the sheltering walls are a metaphor: "When you invoke a blessing, you are creating a 'sheltering wall' of rest and peace around a person." A blessing may not stop the storms of life, but it can provide a spiritual place of shelter until the storm blows over.
Using another metaphor, O'Donohue writes, "A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen." Much as we use the word foreshadow, "we could say that a blessing 'forebrightens' the way." Elsewhere he writes, "In the light and reverence of a blessing, a person or situation becomes illuminated in a completely new way. In a dead wall a new window opens, in dense darkness a path starts to glimmer, and into a broken heart healing falls like morning dew."
Anyone can pronounce a blessing on others. When we enter into a caring relationship with another, our blessing can create a space for the Spirit of God to move.
- Bill
Source: John O'Donhue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, Doubleday, 2008, xv, 198-203. |
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Silent Walls
How many times have I walked into an old historical building, ancient castle, or medieval monastery and remarked, "If these walls could talk!" Indeed. The stories they could tell! The walls would reveal facts and fantasies, victories and failures, joys and sorrows, consolations and desolations. I've often wondered what stories the walls at the Alamo would tell. But those walls are silenced now.
We build walls of silence in our relationships when we cease affirming our beloved. When our affirming antiphons of gladness, blessing, and joy crumble into selfishness, resentment, and passive resistance, then walls of impenetrable stone arise in the relationship. Subhash Puri, in Silent Separations: Broken Hearts in Unbroken Relationships, "examines mental separation, which is more painful and more prevalent than many of us care to admit."
Marriages and other committed relationships are very much like the Alamo. The Alamo was originally sacred space, the chapel of an early San Antonio mission, later turned into a fort in the Texas Revolution, 1836. Many marriages begin on holy ground, then because of emotional distancing, become ground for relational battles.
Perhaps each of us is a mason. Building a sheltering wall requires stones of loving affirmation and mortar of open and humble communication. The soul guides the work of the mason. Puri writes: "The mind personifies love; the heart feels it; the soul purifies it."
--by Jan
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