I realised this morning it’s twenty years since the astonishing Other we often call God met me in an unexpected place (in a stranger’s home in St Albans), and told me I was going to be a priest in the Church of England and through me changes would come to the Church that were in line with the deepest cry of my heart. I could never have imagined the path that encounter would lead me on or where it would lead me to and at times I’ve howled and wrestled like a wild animal trying to escape from a cage – I still do at times – at the unpredictability of the uncharted terrain I have had to cover.
David Whyte, poet, speaker and writer, is a supreme guide to the art of following your heart’s call. He has written extensively about it and I have found so much comfort in his ability to articulate its mystery: the dance of past and future, push and pull, starting out and arriving, like the rhythm of a mystical accordion. After Christmas I shared his poem Santiago with some friends who are setting out on a year of huge life events. This and another similar poem, Finisterre, are the best companions (I can hear you say ‘apart from Jesus’!) I could give them for their adventure. It feels as if the writer has covered similar heart-call territory several times, enough to describe it from memory.
I feel I’ve only just gained enough enlightenment to own ‘Santiago’ for myself. It’s an allegory of the life of faith based on the pilgrim’s walk to Santiago di Compostela in Spain. It describes the way the path you follow is now seen and then hidden, how you can feel you’re walking on thin air and then somehow you’re supported… It describes how the quest will break your heart, because in giving yourself to it so utterly you’ve given it the power to hurt you. It suggests the call we follow comes to us from way before our birth and meets us at our arrival. And it contains the heart-stopping phrase (remembering he has in mind as the destination the world-renowned historic cathedral city of Santiago) you were
‘more marvellous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach’.
Like the word ‘magnificent’ I pick up on in the previous post https://tinahodgett.net/2024/01/mm-1/ the word ‘marvellous’ lavishes startling praise on the pilgrim. Not for reaching the end goal, or making a brave attempt, just for wanting to find a way to reach it in the face of everything that might distract or de-rail or discourage her. There is huge encouragement in this for everyone who is taking a risky road to a sketchily glimpsed destination and an implicit confidence that as we walk in our ‘rags of love’ we are carried not by our skill, education, knowledge, position, finances, family connections or any other worldly thing, but by the will and mysterious agency of the One who put the desire in our heart in the first place.
Watch David Whyte perform his poem here (his voice and manner may bewitch you!):
