Albert Camus once said that your life is “the slow trek to recover the two or three simple images in whose presence [your] heart first moved.”
Sebastian Moore recovered one of those images after he had wandered into church at vespers on the Feast of the Sacred Heart.
In his book, The Inner Loneliness, Moore describes that moment of awakening. It came one evening after lots of pasta, a lot of spaghetti, and a lot of wine. “As I entered the church, I heard the familiar words [in Latin] ‘One of the soldiers opened his side with a spear, and immediately there came forth blood and water.’ And I had what can only describe as a sense of fullness of truth. Somehow, everything that was to be said about life and its renewing was in those words. Somehow my life, my destiny, was in those words.”
The image that moved his heart became one to which he returns daily, as do I. For the piercing of the side of the helpless man hanging on the cross happened not just then and there at Golgotha; it happens here and there and everywhere when we torture our own souls or the souls of others because we, or they, have failed to measure up to what we expected. Strangely, it is in the piercing that brings blood that we are cleansed by the living water that pours from his side.
Do you see your life in the words and in the image of the spearing of his side, in the blood, but also the water that heals, restores and renews, flowing from his pierced side?
A second image came to me this week on a photography blog of religious architecture by Dennis Aubrey.
Read the Full Article
