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Good Morning

Conversation is a room with many doors.  You open one, and move into a different room, and there you find more doors.  And so you wander, from room to room, opening doors for each other, sharing time and telling.

I learned about conversations at family gatherings around the kitchen table, squashed between aunties and cousins, where stories were told, and the teapot was constantly re-filled.  That’s where, as a child,  I  heard how a conversation moves, and turns in a moment from general to personal, from discussion to revelation.

That change, that moment of opening the door is what I always remember from conversations over the years: there was the night when a friend and I walked for miles in soft, summer rain, finding out about each other’s lives.  He was far from home and had been travelling for years. He’d settled down for a few years in Sweden, married, divorced, and moved on again.   I told him about my  younger brother who had died when I was 13. And then, after a pause, he began to think aloud about prayer.  Just quietly saying that he’d reached the point where he no longer believed prayer was about words, or asking, or thanking.  It was about absence of words, a respite from the sound and the distraction of words.   It was listening, waiting, feeling.

There was the moment of going through a door.  And something was shared which has never left me.  It’s why, when I read St Paul talking about not knowing how to pray, about ‘sighs too deep for words’, I remember my friend, and I try, again, now, to listen.  

I try again to hear.    To wait.    And to be still.

Amen