Meditations given by the Rev, Bede Jarrett, O.P., during the Novena preached in the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in preparation for the celebration of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Apparitions at Lourdes, February 2nd - February 10th, 1933
On a journey, there is a sense of unsettlement; everything has more or less to be improvised. You have got to make the best of what you have got. You cannot allow yourself to think over desires and seek to satisfy them. When you are settled at the end of the journey you can do that. But while you are on a journey to a large extent you have to lay your desires aside.
You know there are two ways of getting through life more or less happily. One is to have your desires: "First I want this, and then I want that, and again there is a third thing that I want” — to spend your life trying to get them. That is one way, and a very insecure way it is. There is another way of living here happily, and that is by saying, "Well, what have I ? I must make the most of what I have. These at least I can enjoy.” To do this is to go through life using the things that are to hand. Especially is this true on a journey. Because we are all of us travellers and pilgrims, we have to take life like that. It is always unsettled. You think now that when you have got to a certain stage in your life you will be able to settle down. But never! There is always something happening to you. Right till old age you are on the march. And you know how easily old people are put out. They have their regular regime. Everything follows by rule. If a day is disturbed for them, if they have to do things at a different time of day, or to do things differently than usual, all their day is thrown out for them. But that is life, it is always suffering unsettlement.
We say now as we look back thirty years ago, "Ah, those were happy days, when people lived much more evenly and quietly; when they lived always in the same house where their fathers had lived before them, when they settled somewhere definitely, and everyone knew what district they came from. Men seldom moved aside. Life moved pleasantly and evenly. "Those days,” we say "will never come back.” But they never really were like that to those who lived in them. By contrast to us they seem even and quiet days. Every generation looks back and says, "Ah, but the old people were more steady.” Well, they did not think so. They thought that life even then was full of change and alteration. If you read their books they thought their times stirring. Speed may grow faster as the years heap up, but unsettlement and change are the very conditions of our life. It cannot happen otherwise. We live in fluid conditions. We are creatures of time. Here we are pilgrims. We have no abiding city. We seek a city. We are on a journey and we pass.
And again, another secret of the good traveller is never to lose his heart on the way. It is so very easy on a journey. You meet people, you see perhaps a good deal of them, and at first it breaks your heart to leave them when the end of the journey comes. And then, as you get more accustomed to travel, you get more accustomed to remind yourself when friendships are forming, "Now, I must not forget that this is a travel, a journey. We meet but we shall separate; it will then be all over and done.” You see a country, a place that charms you, and you say, "Well, now, I would like to stay here a little while.” Stay, but remember you are on a journey. Do not dig yourself in too securely. You must leave one day and pass on.
Now all this is true of our life. Here it does not do to settle down too absolutely to life. Something will happen, and your heart will be broken. Enjoy what you have, what you see, but do not have any lust to own all you see. Enjoy? It is a dreadful thing to discover that there are people who cannot enjoy a thing without burning to own it. How sad to have that greed? They see something beautiful. They are not content with seeing and remembering. They want to own. Are not there men and women the world over who are buying pictures for the pleasure, not of enjoying them, but of owning them. That is paltry. That is just a lust to possess, to own, to say, "It is mine.” Poor people indeed they must be who cannot enjoy what they do not possess. Better it is surely to enjoy all that your eye lights on, but not to want to own it. These others would buy the sunset if they could. But to see the beauty of the sunset and to cherish it in your memory is to have unceasing joy. To see a wide stretch of country and to enjoy gazing at it and to let it haunt your memory, that is a blessedness! To get endless pleasure, not from possession, but from mere sight, and the memory of sight is to be well stored with wealth, to be rich. To walk down a picture gallery and see a picture that attracts you, whether artists consider it good or bad does not trouble you, you like it, it gives you pleasure — is to be able to carry that pleasure with you always. Those who can do this are free.
You know how children act when you take them out walking, and you go through the woods in the summer or spring. They pull the wild flowers and carry them, and after a while in their hot hands the flowers die, and they are tired of carrying the flowers and throw them aside — well, we are like children. We gather and own and possess. We heap up things for the mere joy of possession till we grow tired of them, burdened by them. How poor! How paltry! That is hardly the way of Christ. The way that He set is the way of a traveller, someone on a journey. Enjoy things, but do not want to have them. Learn not to envy, learn to do without.
You take your children along the seashore, and they gather the shells till their pockets are heavy with these beautiful treasures, and then they ask you to carry them. They have got more than they can carry. We are all children like that. We heap up our treasures, till they are a care, a burden, a menace to our peace.
Do you remember how our Blessed Lord speaks of the need of seeking only those treasures which no thief can get at? Fancy possessing things that must always put you in terror of losing; the menace that someone might break in on them and steal them! There is trouble enough in the world in every man’s life without adding to our own trouble by the burdens of the treasures we house. To collect beyond our need is only adding to life’s troubles. What our Lord suggests to us is a much freer, happier way of life. To enjoy what we have and let the rest go by us, to be master of our lives, and not to allow things to master it for us; to be able to get along with as little as may be; to need little; to cut down our desires. Our Blessed Lord does not say that we must give up everything, but that we must be free from everything. We must be able to get on with the least possible amount in our life.
That, at least, was the way He went. Why, He had not even where to lay His head! He does not ask that of us, but think of the freedom it gave Him. He came and went as it pleased Him; He took the life He found. They say that those that have begun to wander find it dreadful to live again in one place. There is something strangely, unbelievably attractive in the free wild world, in life in that world. The Arab, with the desert around him, feels the freedom of it. Men of civilised cities are caught by the attraction of the desert, its absolute freedom, its width, its openness, its far horizon. In it they feel free. Well, spiritually, that is where we should be: we can be so by remembering that we are travellers, but again to remember that we have a home: "We seek a city.” We are not just wandering anyhow. We are wandering, seeking a city. There is somewhere where a home awaits us.
Now, what makes a home? What is your home? Is it the house you live in? Is it not people that make a home? You look back to your childhood, and you say, "That was my home.” Yet you can go back to the house now, if it is standing and feel that it is not your home. There is a certain romance to you still about it, a romance if you go inside the door. Stories keep starting up from the rooms, from the staircase, the attic. Old dead memories come drifting back. Ghosts of the dead walk. The garden brings back so much to you, and the bushes in it round which you played, where you hid from the wild Red Indians of your imagination. It all comes back to you as a living thing. But despite this it is not a home now to you. It is empty now of all that really made it home. You go back, but after a while it is with dreariness that you see it. The people have gone. It is people that made it home for you — our family, our friends, our lovers, — fashion our home.
Here then we are pilgrims, travellers. Death comes to us, touches this one and that. Out of our great pilgrimage they pass. Death calls them, this one and that one. Older than we, younger. Those that might deceive us into thinking this our home dwindle year by year. Year by year there are more on the other side and less on this side that hold us. There they seem gathering and waiting for us. They never fall out of the group that passes over. They dwell there, abide.
That is home. And the centre of the home? "We seek a city whose maker and builder is God.” "After this our exile, show unto us the Blessed Fruit of thy womb.”
On a journey, there is a sense of unsettlement; everything has more or less to be improvised. You have got to make the best of what you have got. You cannot allow yourself to think over desires and seek to satisfy them. When you are settled at the end of the journey you can do that. But while you are on a journey to a large extent you have to lay your desires aside.
You know there are two ways of getting through life more or less happily. One is to have your desires: "First I want this, and then I want that, and again there is a third thing that I want” — to spend your life trying to get them. That is one way, and a very insecure way it is. There is another way of living here happily, and that is by saying, "Well, what have I ? I must make the most of what I have. These at least I can enjoy.” To do this is to go through life using the things that are to hand. Especially is this true on a journey. Because we are all of us travellers and pilgrims, we have to take life like that. It is always unsettled. You think now that when you have got to a certain stage in your life you will be able to settle down. But never! There is always something happening to you. Right till old age you are on the march. And you know how easily old people are put out. They have their regular regime. Everything follows by rule. If a day is disturbed for them, if they have to do things at a different time of day, or to do things differently than usual, all their day is thrown out for them. But that is life, it is always suffering unsettlement.
We say now as we look back thirty years ago, "Ah, those were happy days, when people lived much more evenly and quietly; when they lived always in the same house where their fathers had lived before them, when they settled somewhere definitely, and everyone knew what district they came from. Men seldom moved aside. Life moved pleasantly and evenly. "Those days,” we say "will never come back.” But they never really were like that to those who lived in them. By contrast to us they seem even and quiet days. Every generation looks back and says, "Ah, but the old people were more steady.” Well, they did not think so. They thought that life even then was full of change and alteration. If you read their books they thought their times stirring. Speed may grow faster as the years heap up, but unsettlement and change are the very conditions of our life. It cannot happen otherwise. We live in fluid conditions. We are creatures of time. Here we are pilgrims. We have no abiding city. We seek a city. We are on a journey and we pass.
And again, another secret of the good traveller is never to lose his heart on the way. It is so very easy on a journey. You meet people, you see perhaps a good deal of them, and at first it breaks your heart to leave them when the end of the journey comes. And then, as you get more accustomed to travel, you get more accustomed to remind yourself when friendships are forming, "Now, I must not forget that this is a travel, a journey. We meet but we shall separate; it will then be all over and done.” You see a country, a place that charms you, and you say, "Well, now, I would like to stay here a little while.” Stay, but remember you are on a journey. Do not dig yourself in too securely. You must leave one day and pass on.
Now all this is true of our life. Here it does not do to settle down too absolutely to life. Something will happen, and your heart will be broken. Enjoy what you have, what you see, but do not have any lust to own all you see. Enjoy? It is a dreadful thing to discover that there are people who cannot enjoy a thing without burning to own it. How sad to have that greed? They see something beautiful. They are not content with seeing and remembering. They want to own. Are not there men and women the world over who are buying pictures for the pleasure, not of enjoying them, but of owning them. That is paltry. That is just a lust to possess, to own, to say, "It is mine.” Poor people indeed they must be who cannot enjoy what they do not possess. Better it is surely to enjoy all that your eye lights on, but not to want to own it. These others would buy the sunset if they could. But to see the beauty of the sunset and to cherish it in your memory is to have unceasing joy. To see a wide stretch of country and to enjoy gazing at it and to let it haunt your memory, that is a blessedness! To get endless pleasure, not from possession, but from mere sight, and the memory of sight is to be well stored with wealth, to be rich. To walk down a picture gallery and see a picture that attracts you, whether artists consider it good or bad does not trouble you, you like it, it gives you pleasure — is to be able to carry that pleasure with you always. Those who can do this are free.
You know how children act when you take them out walking, and you go through the woods in the summer or spring. They pull the wild flowers and carry them, and after a while in their hot hands the flowers die, and they are tired of carrying the flowers and throw them aside — well, we are like children. We gather and own and possess. We heap up things for the mere joy of possession till we grow tired of them, burdened by them. How poor! How paltry! That is hardly the way of Christ. The way that He set is the way of a traveller, someone on a journey. Enjoy things, but do not want to have them. Learn not to envy, learn to do without.
You take your children along the seashore, and they gather the shells till their pockets are heavy with these beautiful treasures, and then they ask you to carry them. They have got more than they can carry. We are all children like that. We heap up our treasures, till they are a care, a burden, a menace to our peace.
Do you remember how our Blessed Lord speaks of the need of seeking only those treasures which no thief can get at? Fancy possessing things that must always put you in terror of losing; the menace that someone might break in on them and steal them! There is trouble enough in the world in every man’s life without adding to our own trouble by the burdens of the treasures we house. To collect beyond our need is only adding to life’s troubles. What our Lord suggests to us is a much freer, happier way of life. To enjoy what we have and let the rest go by us, to be master of our lives, and not to allow things to master it for us; to be able to get along with as little as may be; to need little; to cut down our desires. Our Blessed Lord does not say that we must give up everything, but that we must be free from everything. We must be able to get on with the least possible amount in our life.
That, at least, was the way He went. Why, He had not even where to lay His head! He does not ask that of us, but think of the freedom it gave Him. He came and went as it pleased Him; He took the life He found. They say that those that have begun to wander find it dreadful to live again in one place. There is something strangely, unbelievably attractive in the free wild world, in life in that world. The Arab, with the desert around him, feels the freedom of it. Men of civilised cities are caught by the attraction of the desert, its absolute freedom, its width, its openness, its far horizon. In it they feel free. Well, spiritually, that is where we should be: we can be so by remembering that we are travellers, but again to remember that we have a home: "We seek a city.” We are not just wandering anyhow. We are wandering, seeking a city. There is somewhere where a home awaits us.
Now, what makes a home? What is your home? Is it the house you live in? Is it not people that make a home? You look back to your childhood, and you say, "That was my home.” Yet you can go back to the house now, if it is standing and feel that it is not your home. There is a certain romance to you still about it, a romance if you go inside the door. Stories keep starting up from the rooms, from the staircase, the attic. Old dead memories come drifting back. Ghosts of the dead walk. The garden brings back so much to you, and the bushes in it round which you played, where you hid from the wild Red Indians of your imagination. It all comes back to you as a living thing. But despite this it is not a home now to you. It is empty now of all that really made it home. You go back, but after a while it is with dreariness that you see it. The people have gone. It is people that made it home for you — our family, our friends, our lovers, — fashion our home.
Here then we are pilgrims, travellers. Death comes to us, touches this one and that. Out of our great pilgrimage they pass. Death calls them, this one and that one. Older than we, younger. Those that might deceive us into thinking this our home dwindle year by year. Year by year there are more on the other side and less on this side that hold us. There they seem gathering and waiting for us. They never fall out of the group that passes over. They dwell there, abide.
That is home. And the centre of the home? "We seek a city whose maker and builder is God.” "After this our exile, show unto us the Blessed Fruit of thy womb.”
