Putting the messiness of life in perspective

‘You’re trying too hard,” he said as we walked into the night. The sun had just set. A herd of cows was silhouetted against the sky on the hill behind us.

It was the eve of St Patrick’s Day and I had travelled down to see the Abbot. Everyone needs someone to keep them on the straight and narrow and the Abbot has been my man for the past few years. My monthly spiritual pit stops involve B&B at the monastery and, at some point, a slow meander along the back roads of Kildare to bring him up to speed on my life.

He is a great listener and says very little. Somewhere along the line, I made a conscious decision to trust this man. I realised I needed someone who could keep me grounded and honest with myself.

I had been telling him about my practice of mindfulness and about all the other stuff that was happening. “Too much doing Tony and not enough being,” he said straight out, as he stopped and turned us for home. “Lighten up,” he smiled, “and let yourself be.”

He said all this without a trace of sentimentality.

“The thing about mindfulness,” he said, “is that it’s not something you can think your way into. It’s a matter of the heart rather than the head. It’s about being in the flow of life.”

“So how do I get out of my head?” I wondered.

"Stop trying to fix who you are," he said. "We are often afraid to be with ourselves because when we think of facing the truth, we assume it's going to be something bad. But the truth is that while we are a mess, we also have within us a capacity to forgive, to be generous, to love and to live a useful life."

Spiritual practice
Mindfulness, or prayer, or any other spiritual practice, as he saw it, was about opening to this truth so that we can keep the messiness of our lives in perspective.

I’ve been saying something similar to myself for years, but from him it sounded fresh. I got it. At least, the penny dropped a little further.

When we got back to the monastery, we stopped for a while in the car park. It was dark. He stood out in his high visibility fluorescent coat. I was virtually invisible in my old black winter coat. I said our chat had felt like a confession. And he said: “So would you like absolution?” I thought he might be joking but his tone was deadly serious. “Sure,” I said. It had been more than 25 years since my last confession.

Standing there on the newly laid tarmac, on that cold dark night, he laid his hand on my head and invited me to make an “act of contrition”.

For the life of me I couldn't recall even a line of that prayer, which had been a pillar of my childhood theology. "Just say whatever you're sorry about in your own words, in your own way," he suggested. So with as much sincerity as I could muster, I improvised.

Absolution
He, in turn, spoke aloud in a solemn voice and gave me absolution. I listened to words that had been muttered, probably in Latin, through a wire-mesh grill, a thousand times in my childhood; words that I had never heard or understood, until now.

For my “penance” he recommended that I go easy, and get out of my own way.

We parted and I went off to bed. It was a Saturday night. I felt safe and at peace with the world. It reminded me of those Saturday nights in my childhood when I was given my weekly bath, towel-dried by the fire and tucked into bed. I pulled a duvet up around me and slipped into Great Silence.

Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health