PRIUS DEI SERVUS

The Magnificat

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
and my spirit exults in God my saviour;
Because he has looked upon his lowly handmaid.
Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me blessed,
for the Almighty has done great things for me.
Holy is his name,
and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him.
He has shown the power of his arm,
he has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.
He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his mercy
—according to the promise he made to our ancestors—
of his mercy to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.”
Luke 1:46-55 Jerusalem Bible

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord

Who is this Lord whom we proclaim as great?

I do not think of him as a person in any physical way. I cannot form a picture of him in my mind’s eye as an artist might. I do not imagine him in a physical way as I might say imagine an image of my own father when he is not in the room. I cannot contemplate him in a way in which I might conjure up in my mind an image of Michaelangelo’s statue of David. He is not “physical” in the sense that I can imagine walking up to him and putting my arm around his shoulder.

The closest I get to him is at the emotional highs and lows in my life.

I am sure everyone has had an experience like this: you are walking alone through the middle of a crowded market. In the distance you catch the sound of a busker. Because of the noise around you, you cannot hear the music distinctly. You catch snatches of it wafting across the hubbub. But it does something to you inside. You are alone in a sea of strange faces but you have this burning desire that you wish you could share the moment with someone whom you love. Later you always find it very hard to describe to that person exactly the feeling you had. It is simply “a great moment”. We call it joy. That is like the presence of the Lord.

I find him in another place – when I am sad, lonely; in distress or despair. (I count myself as fortunate because I haven’t needed to meet him in this place too often in my life.) Have you experienced how, when you cry out in such a situation, your voice either bounces back at you or rides off to nowhere. No one hears you. If you are in a room, its acoustic changes to that of an echo chamber. If you are out of doors, your voice is swallowed by the universe and makes no impression. You feel small; insignificant. And yet, at some indefinable instant, something changes: you cry out in your despair and you know someone has heard you. You can feel the comfort of an answering “presence”. That “presence” I liken to the Lord. At that moment I feel he is truly great!

During my teenage years my parents owned a hotel in a country town in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. For most of the year I was away at boarding school. One Christmas holidays I can remember it had been particularly hot and the previous year hadn’t seen much rain.

In those years we still had manual telephone exchanges. I think it must have been through the gossip between the operators at the various towns through the wheatbelt that news was passed up and down the line. Or it might have been through the telephone connections between the stationmasters along the railway line. One of the vital alarms that was always passed along these networks was the imminent arrival of a duststorm. The immediate concern was that the women had to get the washing in off the line. But there were others. In our situation I can always remember my mother being whipped into a frenzy with the news of an approaching duststorm. In a two storey hotel there wasn’t only the washing to be got in – there were about 95 doors and windows that we had to make sure were securely closed. As the kids of the house, my brother and I were sent off to make sure this was done.

When this task was completed, we used to assemble on the top floor verandah. We’d look out across the plains to the east and you could see the storm approaching. It was like a solid red wall that was somehow awesome and magnificent to watch. It cared for nothing in its path. We felt insignificant before it. We knew our town too would shortly be swallowed by it. Like a cyclone, it spelt power and destruction and, at the same time, it was also somehow majestic.

When it hit, we’d retreat indoors and watch it from behind the safety of windows. Then it would pass. The air would be calm but everything out of doors would be covered in fine red dust. This is when we would go downstairs and stand on the footpath. We knew that another spectacle was about to follow. Very soon the rain would come.

One day I can remember standing out on the footpath. I must have been about twelve. It was following the duststorm that had broken the long hot summer. All the people who had been drinking in the bars of the hotel also came out. There was a big crowd. And there were all sorts of people: country bumpkins, cockeys (farmers), the local lads, some of the more prosperous business people, me mum and dad and my brother and I!
And then came the rain. At first in big drops that landed in the dust and made cow pat plops. Then the heavens opened.

To this day I can still hear the voice of one of the cockeys as he raised his glass to the heavens: “Send her down, Hughie!”, he proclaimed to everyone and to no one. His voice was as earthy as the dust at which we looked. In my juvenility I thought he was talking to one of his mates. I have reflected on the words of that cockey many times since.

Today, that is how I think of my Lord. He is: Hughie, my “best mate”.

He is also a great mate. When all your other mates have left you, when there is a drought or a famine, when times are tough, he is always there to give you comfort. He is also there in the great times. He doesn’t always do what I want him to do but I can be bloody sure that the challenges and obstacles that he places in my path of life have been put there for a reason. I cannot always see that reason but all I have to remember is that there is a reason and that reason is important. I don’t have to know what the reason is; I don’t have to know what the end of the lesson is, all I have to do is listen to that quiet voice in my soul – that bidding from the subconscious which is the voice of Hughie.

If I could bundle up all the things I have learned in my life into two small gold ingots of wisdom, the second of them would be: follow that quiet voice that comes to you in stillness and, whatever else happens in your life, you will be contented and at peace.

The Israelites used to call the Lord “Yahweh”. It meant the name that couldn’t be said. To me, Hughie describes the same thing: that mate for whom I have more love and respect than anybody and yet who, at the same time, I hold in such deepest awe that I have never yet been able to look him in the face. I’ve called him a bastard a few times in my life but he knows that, as an Australian, I don’t mean it literally. He is there in the grot times and in the great times.

He is whom my spirit exults in.