“Go out in the fresh air for 15 minutes every day”, says she, from the pulpit at the Knock Novena. She, the Woman at the Pulpit, didn’t say a thing about God or Prayer or such holy things – it seemed the focus was to be on sitting in Nature.  And I did. I found a spot, a rickety chair and sat.

I don’t know about you, but from the moment of my sitting, boredom took over. Wouldn’t I be better off doing something useful with my time.  Walking perhaps, trying to build up the 4,000 steps required for a healthy me. “What a wretched man I am”, said Paul, the Apostle, well over 2,000 years ago. I could identify with that state of wretchedness.  For when I sat, I wanted to stand and when standing I wanted to sit.

Strangely though, after a while, the birds began, a robin or two, then a blackbird, a curious rustle of leaves, an angry-looking cat meowing at me and the hum of the traffic in the distance. But did the birds always sing so sweetly and did the leaves always chatter to each other so? I had heard the cat many times – mostly an unwelcome sound, knowing, as you do, what cats do to a lawn!  But how could I have missed such sweetness of sound?

I found an answer to my questionings in the poem Postscript by Seamus Heaney, as he says:

“You are neither here nor there…

A hurry through which known and strange things pass”.

But something has happened to him to: – “Catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

“O that today you would listen to his voice, harden not your heart,” said an anonymous sacred poet well over 3,000 years ago.

Today there’s a sound of someone chopping wood. Is that the voice of the Carpenter from Nazareth, I wonder?

So much for the Woman at the Pulpit! She said some other things as well. About Pope Francis writing to me.  A letter, she said, to me. Not to the learned and the wise, not to the theologians, not to the great and the good, but to me

But that’s for another day. In the meantime, I might find another woman at the pulpit!

Attracta Tighe
Western Province