The first occasion was the funeral mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh to mark the passing of Brother Roland Walls. A remarkable man who founded the Community of the Transfiguration at Roslin near Edinburgh and who acted as a guardian, advisor and spiritual director of many. He was a wise and invaluable guide and friend to the Community in its founding years and during our annus horribilis year back in 1998. A remarkable, godly man whose life, prayers, writings and friendship had a profound influence upon the established church and religious communities. Hundreds of people attended his funeral mass and moving homilies were made by his lifelong friend Brother Jonathan (who is Trevor’s spiritual director), a former moderator of the Church of Scotland and a young, German Benedictine monk. Roland spent his final weeks cared for by nuns in an Edinburgh convent and made thorough preparations for his funeral which included his Epitaph:
Keep therefore LOVE to be praised, shewn, and treasured in silence – bring all things, all mankind, all circumstances into the Light of that Love. Keep to the poverty of LOVE which is the secret of joy, and by which you will make many rich. So great is this calling that I leave you that to fail in it is worth more than success in any other. Keep to Love as LOVE keeps you and still keeps my poor soul that in earthly life so often betrayed HIM whom it loved.
May He who transfigured by LOVE, transfigure us all as He brings us to GLORY. AMEN.
Roland was brought up within the Anglican church and became a Catholic intentionally bearing in his heart something of the pain of division and a lack of sacramental unity between the Catholic and Protestant communions.
A remarkable man and as I sat with Trevor, Andy Raine, Ronnie Morrison, Colin Symes and others during the service, we knew that we were there not only to pay our own respects but to mark the Community’s thankfulness to God for this truly remarkable man. I made my way to the altar unable to partake because of acnon law but nevertheless we received a blessing.
A few weeks later and in another capital, London, where I was attending the revamped Renovare Board meetings, there was time early on Saturday morning for a walk along the North bank of the River Thames and up through Pimleco before returning to Great Peter Street in Westminster. Passing by Westminster Cathedral, I popped in to say Morning Office in one of the many side chapels. As I made my way to St. Patrick’s Chapel, I noticed that Mass was going on and at the appropriate point, rose from prayer and went for a blessing at the altar. Accustomed with the protocol of non-Catholics, I stood before the presiding priest, bowed my head and folded my arms across my chest awaiting a blessing. I was disappointed to receive what felt like something very perfunctory but was immediately blessed as I walked past the nun serving the chalice (from which I wasn’t allowed to partake) who gave me a beautiful smile and mouthed the words, ‘Bless you’.
Setting aside the barring from the communion, which is a nonsense and a tragedy, why is it that something so meaningful in the ritual of blessing another human being can be conducted at times in an empty, religious and meaningless way when in contrast that moment could be vested with such grace and thus become a real “sacrament” of the present moment and a means of great blessing. I returned to St. Patrick’s Chapel, prayed and made my way out of the Cathedral. I was going to put something in the offertory plate on the way out but in view of the cold indifference of the priest, gave my offering instead to the Big Issue seller outside the cathedral. Walking back to where we were meeting, I chuckled to myself at the absurdity of some church practices and the nonsense of certain ecclesiastical protocol but thank God that despite such, I was blessed. Some of my Protestant friends would be horrified by my attendance at mass but the two visits to mass reminded me that God is bigger than my own prejudice, sorry conviction and certainly broader and deeper than my own personal experience of him. Of course, God is bigger than any of the systems; he won’t be boxed or confined to man’s description or prescription, not even the Catholic church!
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