Sermon 

St Mary, Bourne Street

1st May 2022

Easter 3

Fr Richard Peers SMMS

Mary of Nazareth

It was like music: 

Hovering and floating there 

With the sound of lutes and timbrels 

In the night air.

It was like waves, 

Beating upon the shore: 

Insistent with a rhythm, a pulsing 

Unfelt before. 

It was like wind: 

Blowing from off the seas 

Of other, far other 

Lands than these. 

It was like wings, 

Like whirring wings that fly 

The song of an army of swans 

On the dark sky. 

It was like God: 

A presence of blinding light, 

Ravishing body and soul 

In the Spring night. 

Clive Sansom

From Witnesses and Other Poems

Music

Waves

Wings

Winds

God

Quaker poet Clive Sansom in his 1956 collection The Witnesses tells the life of Jesus in the words of those who knew him. Here his mother, Mary.

In this poem four images lead us to God. Like stepping stones crossing a river we trip lightly in this beautifully constructed poem from one side of the river to the other. 

there is something perfectly formed, and perfectly structured about this poem.

It’s brevity adds to that perfection. Utterly simple and utterly profound. The Annunciation  described in the simplest possible language with the ultimate mention of God as the only religious language used.

People often ask me  how to pray, or tell me that prayer is difficult.

I am very fortunate because I was taught to pray as soon as I was taught to speak. It was my gran that taught me. An Irish Catholic she only had two types of prayer. Going to Mass and praying the Rosary. And since she prayed the Rosary through most of the Mass, perhaps really the Rosary was her only way of praying.

It is easy to be dismissive of such simple prayer. the lifelong repetition of the prayers of the Rosary. In the Sub Deanery I have thousands of books on prayer, or spiritualities, Benedictine, Carmelite,  Ignatian and many more. But I wonder if they have really brought me any greater wisdom or faithfulness than my gran had.

I was delighted to hear that the Rosary is prayed publicly here at Bourne Street once a week during Our Lady’s Month of May. If this is something you haven’t done before I really encourage you to join in and try it out.

The Rosary works on many levels and each of these contribute to its richness. It is physical, Scriptural, Doctrinal and Sentimental. And all of those are important and vital to the Christin life.

PHYSICAL – Mindfulness

Occasionally, praying the Rosary with a group I’ve lent my beads to someone else who doesn’t have any with them. It is terrible. The physical touch of the beads, the movement of them through the fingers is vital to praying the Rosary.

When our brains associate objects, movements with particular emotional states it can help trigger those states. Just touching my Rosary beads in my pocket can help me feel steadier in moments of stress. It brings me back to the heart of who I am as a person. I can’t imagine going into a difficult meeting or starting a hard conversation without my beads in my pocket.

the Rosary also works physically through the repetition of the prayers. I really recommend praying the prayers aloud when you can. we know that the movement of the lips and the sound produced by the voice has a stronger effect than thinking the words in our heads.

Its why we speak texts out loud when we want to learn them off by heart.

SCRIPTURAL

the Rosary is deeply Scriptural. It is a series of meditations on Scriptural texts, moments known as Mysteries. It is quite good in the early days of praying the Rosary to have a book in front of us with those texts set out for us to meditate on, when ether is time to read those texts out loud as part of praying each mystery.

DOCTRINAL

the Rosary is a great vehicle for orthodox doctrine. We repeat the words of the Apostles Creed at the start of every Rosary. The mysteries themselves teach us the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It would be impossible to pray the Rosary regularly and not be clear what it is we are to believe as Christians.

Because the Rosary is Scriptural and Doctrinal it protcets us from straying beyond orthodox teaching As St Louis de Montfort wrote:

“Never will anyone who says his Rosary every day be led astray. This is a statement that I would gladly sign with my blood.”

SENTIMENTAL

Clive Sansom’s poem Mary of Nazareth captures for me something that is so important for those of us who are Anglo-Catholics to recover. A proper place for sentiment in our Christian lives.

It was like God: 

A presence of blinding light, 

Ravishing body and soul 

In the Spring night. 

To be ravished, is to be embraced by something other, to be held in the arms of one who is not us. To be properly sentimental is to bring our Christian faith down from our heads deep into our hearts.

In the west we human beings tend to function as if our very existence is in our brains – there are even science fiction stories about preserving brains, or downloading personalities from a brain. But we are really highly embodied being, we exist in the totality of our physical existence – which is why the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is so significant for Christians.

for the eastern Orthodox tradition the uniting of mind and heart, the descent of the mind into the heart is the aim of the spiritual life. In the west St Augustine talks of the expanding of the heart.

The praying of the Rosary involves little intellectual effort. It requires the assent of faith, but more than that it depends on us being rooted in our bodies and centred in our hearts.

Finally, the Rosary is CHRIST CENTRED.

As St John Paul II said in his marvellous Apostolic Letter: Rosarium Virginis Mariae.

In the Rosary we remember Christ with Mary.

We learn Christ from Mary.

We are conformed to Christ with Mary

We pray to Christ with Mary

And we proclaim Christ with Mary.

If you have not tried the Rosary before, come along to the praying of the Rosary here at Bourne Street. Praying with others is the best way to learn it. But there are also apps, YouTube films and hundreds of books on how to pray the Rosary.

I learnt the Rosary with my gran. But it was with my mum that I discovered how vital, how life giving this prayer can be in the face of death.

Mum died just over two years ago having spent the last six weeks of her life in a beautiful hospice, St Gemma’s in Leeds.

Throughout those six weeks I was able to pray with her, almost daily. Occasionally celebrating Mass at her bedside but mostly praying the Rosary.

In my memory I now measure those six weeks, that ebbing away of her life, in her praying of the Rosary. Initially able to answer the prayers with me, each of us prayer half of the Our Father or Hail Mary; soon she just joined with me in saying the prayers. Eventually she just moved her lips as I prayed. In her last hours she cvould barely move her hand t ross herself and her lips moved just for the Amen at the end of each prayer. As the end came even that faded. She slipped away soon after I had prayed the prayer “Go forth from the world Christian soul.”

It was as beautiful a death as anyone could wish for, my brother and sister and I together with her, praying with her as she left.

Neither my mum or gran ever thought praying was hard or difficult. They never expected any mystical experiences, or the dark night the soul.  Probably neither of them ever read a book about prayer. But they proved to me that as St Francis de Sales wrote “the Rosary is the greatest method of prayer.”

What I learned from them is that Rosary is truly contemplative. Not as a technique for prayer, a forcing of contemplation, but as an opening up to that contemplation that is only ever a gift from God. resting in the divine presence without seeking or expectation.

Clive Ransom’s poem is both simple and dense. Like the Rosary it is beautifully structured.

like the Rosary it leads us from the very ordinary to the divine. And like the Rosary it is a model of true pious sentiment.

It was like music: 

Hovering and floating there 

With the sound of lutes and timbrels 

In the night air.

It was like waves, 

Beating upon the shore: 

Insistent with a rhythm, a pulsing 

Unfelt before. 

It was like wind: 

Blowing from off the seas 

Of other, far other 

Lands than these. 

It was like wings, 

Like whirring wings that fly 

The song of an army of swans 

On the dark sky. 

It was like God: 

A presence of blinding light, 

Ravishing body and soul 

In the Spring night.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote of the Rosary:

that it 

“is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; 

it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men; 

it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. 

The power of the Rosary is beyond description.”