Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

And maybe she’s right, about a prayer’s answer being not what you want but what you need.

It made me wonder what forgiveness actually is, or means.

‘We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.’ Simone Weil.

Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour.

Afterwards, I heard an American professor say on the radio that his nation’s racist history was a reckoning in waiting, and that this need for reckoning would never fade. He said it was like something from mythology, from a heroic quest, it was the thing that must be confronted for the kingdom to be well. The more you run from it, the more you run into it,

read somewhere that Catholics think despair is the unforgivable sin. I think they are right; it’s malign, it bleeds and spreads. Once gone, I don’t know that real hope or faith – are they the same? – can ever return.

‘And yet. Those are my two favourite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak. The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass.’ Elie Wiesel.