GRACE AND MERCY AWAIT

 

On September 2nd 2017 I wrote in my diary that Shankill gave birth to me in a great impulse of love by which God delivered me to Hastings where He has given me a home and haven. A place of refuge until another great moment of giving birth to love arrives.

And now it's the 18th of November, 2025,  a week since I left Hastings, and I think this must be the beginning of that other great moment of giving birth to love. What it will be I have no idea but I am here. 

And I am resting

And I am waiting 

And I am at peace

As always for a new period in my life I ask God for a Word that will somehow define what lies ahead.  And what has come is the a line from Wisdom chapter 3, verse 9 which was in the first reading at Mass on my first day at home. It says, "grace and mercy await those he has chosen."

Grace and mercy await! 

So if I am waiting, then Grace and Mercy await me too.

On my fourth day at home I woke up thinking about unfinished business, things that I had left undone in Hastings. And I had to make a very quick decision not to allow that to disturb the peace. These thoughts must not be allowed to disturb what God has given, what the people of Hastings have ultimately encouraged, even though it's not what they wanted. Theirs is the love that lets go. And as Judy said to me, I also must relinquish the parish. There is nothing I can do now about what is left behind. They will manage because God is with them and He is in charge.

First days at home were marked by reading the messages and the cards - the many, many messages and cards given to me on my leaving. They are very moving and I had quite a lot of tears.

These messages are filled with such a wonderful love. And the call for me again is to receive this love, to let it seep into me, to take possession of me, to fill me. To allow myself to soak in it and to absorb it. 

And yet this is sometimes so difficult because there is in me a caution, a restraint that goes right back to my childhood. I think it has something to do with our training, that we were as children never allowed to go into other people's front gardens or into their houses without my mother's permission. It was a matter of respect. To a fault, I respect other people's spaces. I hold back. Too much at times.

While in the past there was the limitation of the wall and the gate into somebody's garden, the limitation of the door into their house. The withheld permission. I sense now that the limitations are within myself, that the fences and the walls and the gates and the doors are inside me, and somehow I am not yet free enough to fully enter in to the love that's being offered or to fully let it into me. And so that's something that needs to be dealt with in these days and months - peacefully, calmly. Unhurriedly.

Unhindered too. That is a Word that has resonated with me from the Bible and the Liturgy over the past week.

Unhurried and unhindered.  

No obligations, no deadlines. 

Only precious times with my two sisters and my brother. Apart from them I have hardly met anyone since coming home.

The doctor's secretary phoned back the other day to offer an appointment on the 18th of November at 9:30. I had no hesitation, no need to consult a calendar or a diary. Just nothing. So I was totally free for that. That fact alone excited me. It's a lovely way to be. Not to have to consult the diary. 

I got up this morning, this beautiful, beautiful morning and headed off out of here at about 8 o'clock and decided to walk part of the way as far as town, whch took about thirty five minutes, down by Loughatalia, which of course on a morning like this is just really, really something special. 

The calmness of the water, the sun rising over it, reflected in it. The stillness of a heron standing on the edge of a rock, swans burying their heads in the deep. A commuter train slowly making its way over the bridge into the station. A train bursting with people making their way to work.

Dr Dan is the one I chose because we have known him since 1998 when Maura worked with him in the surgery after he took over from Dr Conway McGee. He has been very good to us from that time. Shared in our sorrow. So he was my natural choice to go and talk to. I know no other doctor in Galway and, besides, I trust and respect him. Having come from England, getting to see a GP is quite a special thing. 

It went very well. He gave me loads of time, focussing on my heart, referring me to a cardiologist in the Clinic. So that's in place now. And I put it in the hands of God.

From Salthill, it was back to town on the 401 and a trip to Easons in search of a book by Niall Williams that I had seen on the shelf of Dr Dan's office. Time of the Child. Niall Williams was a favourite of mine back in my Provincial days.

Armed with my book, I went off then to Paschal's off Edward Square, for a coffee and a scone, something that I dreamed about doing years and years ago - the idea of just going to town, having a book, going for a coffee and sitting there. And town itself has it's own quiet magic on a weekday morning. Like it belongs for a while to the few rather than the masses that throng it at other times. But the throngs too have their own magic in their way and time.

The crash and clamour of café's is often a challenge to my head but Pascal's is suitably quiet, with a lovely, lovely girl serving - a rather serious face and yet very kindly in the way that she spoke to me. 

Then I took off down to the Abbey to go to confession.  You go into the side aisle on the left, facing the Sacred Heart, and there are a few people in the queue ahead of me. Queuing for confession is always interesting. I've been so blessed for the last eight years, having my neighbour and friend as my confessor. It was always just a matter of going to his house and having confession there in his living room. 

So here I am, one of a few old fogies waiting to have our sins absolved and I like that idea of being in the ordinary queue of life, being part of that ordinary desire of simple people. 

And then, of course, as always in a church, there's a little group saying the Rosary a few pews ahead of us. Mostly women all of an age. We are, all of us, of an age and it is our time of day. The young are occupied at work or study or whatever is their calling.

This group of women remind me of the new President, Catherine Connolly who is, of course, from Galway. It's as if  their voices are her voice. Same accent. Same generation. A chorus of President Catherine Connollys saying the Rosary. 

I don't know, but I think that this is not where Catherine Connolly would be using her voice, though I could be wrong. I don't think this would be her scene, but I pray for her anyway because she is so strongly present in my mind.

The other thing that crossed my mind was how she spoke of being an inclusive President, representing all of the people, which is what every president seems to say nowadays.

I wonder how much the voices of those ageing Catholic people would find a hearing in Áras an Uachtaráin, or in any presidential place in the modern age, I just wonder about that. Whose voices actually get heard in the world of politics and power?

I suspect that maybe some or most of those people saying the Rosary would have voted for her, because she's a local woman, she's one of them in that sense. A humble person from Shantalla and the Claddagh, pure Galway,  ordinary places of ordinary working people. Her simplicity and down-to-earth-ness  is something I admire.

The people praying the Rosary are, of course heard by God, which is the most important hearing of all. That's why they're there. That's why we are here.