Thought for the week: Christopher Stokes’ sacred heart
‘These disabilities are beckoning me to a new way of living.’
Friends are fond of saying that the whole of life is sacramental. This is a colossal claim to make. If I define a sacrament as an event possessing a sacred or mysterious significance, and claim that every moment in my life is thus blessed, I may be deceiving myself.
One example will suffice. Three years ago I was blindsided by the sudden onset of viral labyrinthitis, an illness which began with a dizziness in which everything in sight spun like a high-speed fairground roundabout, and retreated into severe and irreversible hearing loss. During those long months of stumbling around the house, clinging to the furniture, completely disorientated and unable to venture outdoors, any thought of sacraments was far from my mind. Since then, the process of coming to terms with the invisible disabilities of deafness and vestibular dysfunction has not, on the whole, felt like a sacred experience.
But with the benefit of hindsight, I begin to realise that these life-changing disabilities are beckoning me to a new way of living which may be closer to sacramental than I might have dared to imagine. With my gregarious personality stifled by my inability to hear properly, I’m now an inadvertent introvert – and I’m finding that my innate sense of awe and wonder at the transcendent mystery of life is flourishing as never before. My precious early-morning walks in the countryside bring countless opportunities to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, and I feel like a treasure hunter in search of unnoticed beauty. My endless hours at home in lockdown offer beautiful opportunities for gazing at familiar surroundings with eyes of wonder – when I resist the temptation to surrender to distractions.
These thoughts are in my mind because I’ve recently read a remarkable new book by Jan Arriens, a Quaker of many years’ standing. Living in the Mystery challenges me to consider how a sacramental life could look.
Jan writes of the mystical glimpses and intimations of the truth beyond. These come unbidden and change the way we look at and lead our lives. They tell of the inner awareness or sense of presence that is with us at all times, although often obscured or dormant.
The book is an invitation to explore how such experiences can be cultivated and treasured in approaching the whole of life as sacramental. I find myself reflecting that severe labyrinthitis, and my long journey to accepting permanent hearing loss, had a sacramental quality which never occurred to me before.
These experiences – the most traumatic of my lifetime, taking me to the verge of a mental breakdown – are gradually being redeemed as I see them in this light. I am daring to sense that aspiring to lead a sacramental life may be my vocation now.
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