Beside the River

Available for over a year

A reflection and prayer to start the day with Canon Simon Doogan Good morning. There’s a clachan or close of holiday cottages in the Mountains of Mourne lovingly restored from the 1600s, and with access to the Kilkeel River. Beside the water, a granite chair by renowned local stonemason Joe Rooney is carved with Seamus Heaney’s words: “You are everything you feel beside the river.” It’s from a poem called Casting and Gathering and it depicts two fishermen with very different approaches to their craft. One’s technique is free and unfussy; the other’s is taut and tetchy. Their contrasting styles reflect their personalities and even outlooks. They are friends despite holding fundamentally irreconcilable opinions, and the river represents the uncrossed line. In the water’s polyphony of sounds Heaney hears the river baiting and playing them, though as a friend of both he trusts their respective integrities, and can go with either angler’s temperament and worldviews. Yet in that moment, “You are everything you feel beside the river” points to something none of them can disguise about themselves. The voice in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism at the Jordan, comes from heaven rather than the river. But God’s You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased can only be read as one heart speaking to another. There is a directness in the sentiment, which, presumably, met with a correspondingly direct resonance in the one who received it - and the setting can’t be coincidental. If Heaney is right, and rivers do free us up physically and emotionally, surely they can open us up spiritually as well? Our Father, you know us and love us as we really are. Help us strip away the layers that separate us from one another and from you, and so discover our true identity as your children, brothers and sisters of Your Son Jesus Christ. Amen