23/03/2018

Good morning.

To my shame it was my wife from Tunbridge Wells
who introduced me to the Percy French song loved around the world:
“Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea”.
At least one of the nuns at her convent school must have been Irish.
Yet it was a proud moment when I introduced my wife
to the actual Mountains of Mourne,
particularly the tallest of the range Slieve Donard
which at 850 metres is the highest point in Northern Ireland.

I suspect the contours and coastline would have looked largely the same
to the saint Donard
who impressed his name on the peak in the fifth and sixth centuries
and whose traditional feast day falls tomorrow.
Called to the life of the hermit,
Donard made his home on the side of the mountain,
in fact in an ancient hagiography of St Patrick
a curious paragraph describes Donard’s cell:
“there is always a leg of mutton with its accessories,” it states,
“and a vessel of ale before him every Easter”.

Mountain-top Divine encounters run all through Scripture
and certainly Donard was neither the first nor the last
to scale physical heights for God.
The spiritual attractions of an anchor-hole at altitude aren’t hard to see.
A sense, first and foremost, of ascending to God.
Nothing to do with nearing cloud level,
everything to do
with leaving behind the embroilments of ground level living.
And yet no one who takes praying and fasting any way seriously
can spend the whole time looking up…

Lord of heaven and earth
it’s in the looking down you make it plain
what we are to pray about and fast for.
Still us today, to let the landscape around us reveal its need
and to tune our hearts to the cries and groans Christ alone can heal. Amen