Concentrate!

'It's Jeremy!' the cheery voice on the other end of the phone informed me, and it took a slight distance into the conversation before I worked out from the context that he was the priest from the Roman Catholic parish. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose, although along with a great many other people Jeremy had in fact drifted into my mind several times over the weeks since the lockdown began and then just as promptly drifted out again. 

All clergy, unless they are in positions where they are very busy, seem to be finding the removal of normal routines a challenge and once I worked out who my interlocutor was we talked about that. Jeremy lives next door to his church in Hornington and so unlike us Anglicans is allowed to go into it and hold solitary services (I don't know why nobody has asked ++Justin what he thinks of this unconscionable irresponsibility on the part of the Papists). Naturally for him this means a mass each day. 'I've started saying the Canon in Latin as I don't know it as well and it slows me down. It forces me to make it more of a meditation', he said. We spoke a bit about making sure the rhythm of fast and feast, the structuring of time, continues. 

I felt a bit chastened. Swanvale Halt hasn't been a daily mass parish for a generation so I don't feel obliged to offer my missa solitaria more often than once a week, keeping the spiritual pilot light of the church lit; in fact, being restrained about that seems to me to honour the sign of deprivation which the reduction in the Eucharist represents. But of course I have kept up the Office, morning and evening. However, although doing it on my own removes the strain of feeling that it's something I am leading for others, not having those others makes it more likely I will get things wrong, or my attention wander to the extent that I will start talking through with myself some extraneous issue which might be on my mind. In fact I became so annoyed with myself just before Easter that this damaging of the Office became one of the things I mentioned when I surreptitiously went to the church to make my solitary confession, the best I could do in the circumstances. 

I remember S.D. once asking me about my experience with the Office and we agreed how nigh-impossible it is to maintain absolutely mindful engagement with the rite all the way through. Human beings are quite capable of keeping multiple thoughts at different mental levels, and switching between one and another involuntarily. Closing down the mental noise is an important part of the spiritual life, but it isn't half a hard one to achieve. If I manage to do anything in the current restrictions, perhaps it could be making some progress on that.