Insecurities trumped by reverence and devotion

THE theologian, Dorothee Soelle, wrote about a French storyteller who joined a monastic order. But he struggles to remember the prayers and the chants and feels out of place.

He bares his soul to Mother Mary who encourages him to serve God according to his ability. In his case, it was to dance and leap. Consequently, while his fellow monks assembled for the daily devotions our brother monk danced and leapt in the nearby fields.

He is summoned to the office of the abbot expecting to receive notice of his expulsion. But instead he is told, “With your dancing, you have glorified God with body and soul, but may God forgive us all those lofty words that pass our lips without coming from the heart.”

I would have found comfort in the knowledge of this legend in the first year, 1981, of my stay at our seminary in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown).

One morning a fellow Capetonian approached me. He had sat next to me during the service and, while I was at the altar receiving communion, he had made it his business to look at the document I had tucked between my prayer book and the Hymnal.

It was a copy of Sechaba, an ANC publication, that had been passed onto me late the previous evening. I had to ensure it was returned to my contact by lunchtime so I read it during the pre-mass meditation.

With the inquiring look that Jesus might have had when he asked his disciples what people were saying about him, my fellow ordinand wished to know if I knew Jesus as my Lord and personal saviour.

He tugged at the thin veil of my insecurity. It had been there from the moment I had been told that I had been accepted to train for the priesthood.

“This does not mean that you will automatically be ordained,” cautioned a member of the Archbishop’s team, “It is part of the discernment process.”

My doubts were less about Jesus. By then I had some very clear ideas that he was black with an afro and would certainly have felt at home around the galley-fires in the backyards of my neighbourhood in Elsies River. But couldn’t see me as a priest.

It didn’t help that my girlfriend at the time had volunteered, “I just can’t see you doing those graceful, priestly movements with your hands during the mass”.

So, I answered my inquisitor with a two-lettered French-Cape patois phrase, confirming his doubt about my relationship with our Lord.

It was in that same year, on one especially cold winter’s morning that I laid in the cosy comfort of my bed just long enough to be almost late for chapel. I donned my cassock over my pyjamas and was seated in my stall just before the start of the 6.30am meditation.

Later, as I stood in line to receive communion, I felt a loosening of the girdle of my flannels, slowly it slipped down to my feet and I stepped out of it into a semi-commando state of vulnerability.

On my return from communion, I knelt, there where my pj’s lay crumpled, and carefully folded it and held it to my chest. Floris Anthony, my confederate from those days on, had witnessed the moment in all its detail. He later confided, “I had never seen such reverence and devotion”.

That is how we get along, Beloved; with the company of understanding friends, glorifying God in all our ways, as Mary told the monk. And, as she might have added, don’t take yourself too serious.