Skip to main content

Companions

We have not spoken in months. He posts a comment and I see that we're still at it, keeping pace; keeping, almost exactly, the same step in what we are thinking and even what we are reading.

We both laugh aloud at the unexpected pleasure of seeing each other.  She tells me she's reading Dylan Thomas; I am reading Malcolm Guite but the poems which have pulled us both up short cover the same ground. Another one added to our long list of synchronicities.

I read his news from the other side of the world. The wisdom he gives to others answers my own question for the day. I notice that the issues in his Buddhist community are the same ones wracking my Christian one.

There is no need to ask, for I know what she will want, but I do anyway, just for the reassuring sound of her voice. She makes a joke which renders me helpless with laughter but which I doubt any other person would notice. We plan, with unspoken agreement, the day ahead.

There is a trajectory to my life; a pattern which I see in retrospect more clearly than in prospect. I know this line when I am diligent in making it clear to myself; which is when I take the time every morning and every afternoon to do the simple, but not easy, task of sitting still for long enough to abandon all questions and all attempts to find the pattern. I am not the only one who is following this long arc. I have companions: those with whom I break spiritual and emotional bread. And, as often as not, the edible kind as well.

Companions are discovered - I don't have to seek them out. New companions appear often, Unexpectedly, and in the most surprising places, but the ones who speak with greatest clarity into my soul are those with whom I have been walking for many years.

An ancient metaphor: As I walk up my assigned path on the mountain others are walking also, on their own paths. As I draw closer and closer to the top, the paths of others get closer to mine. As long as we keep following our path; as long as we are moving towards the goal set for us, we will naturally draw closer to each other.

Companionship is one of the ways in which the path makes itself known. As we work out our shared life, especially in those relationships which time or birth or commitment have established as unbreakable, my companion and I are doing spiritual work. But, always, the path we are each walking leads to something far greater than each other, and if the fascination of our togetherness takes over our attention we will begin to meander and, ironically, end us further apart.

Or, another metaphor. When we walk the labyrinth we take, each of us, the same twisting convoluted path towards the centre.
At various points in our path we find others who are walking in parallel with us. At other times we find other travellers who appear to be close, but who are actually far from us or even outside of the labyrinth altogether: their connection is illusory and temporary. With those on the path with us, we draw close, and pull away and draw close again. We recognise each other's journeying and rejoice in our community, but will find that deep companionship which is one of our heart's great desires only in the centre.

Or another metaphor. Or perhaps it is a sacrament. On the Camino, of the thousands who start the path with me there are a few, a dozen at most with whom the bonds of the road become deep and firm. These are the ones with whom I share bread and drink wine. These are the ones with whom, night after night I share a roof and day after day I share the path and the sky. We find each other because we walk at the same pace, and like the same kinds of stopping places, and eat the same kinds of food. Mostly, perhaps, because we instinctively recognise that we are carrying the same kinds of burdens.
Camino del Norte. Companions on The Path of Miracles. 
French, Italian, German, Kiwi, French, Spanish and 
another Kiwi pressing the shutter button. 
No common language, but deep understanding and acceptance



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more