"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.."

Neatly coinciding with the current thundery breakdown in the hot and sunny weather, comes our annual vacation. Of course, it's off to the Vendée for a few weeks'.... not rest, exactly .... but regrouping and recharging - physically, emotionally and spiritually. 
This year will be different, of course, with the walking pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela coming up during September, but it's always possible to tell when one is in need of a break: one's patience becomes shorter, and irritability too often triumphs over charity or a sense of humour...

As for the state of the Church.....? 
It will be good to take a break from the intractability both of our theological, political and personal divisions, which seem to be ever widening, and perhaps, even more so, from the sheer attrition of trying to proclaim good news afresh to an over-stimulated and increasingly excitable world, but nevertheless a world which seems (unsurprisingly, perhaps) to have grown cynical and suspicious of the medium by which that good news is conveyed. 
It will also be good to escape, even for a little while, the febrile ecclesiastical atmosphere which seems obsessed with the latest 'liturgical' gimmick or hastily constructed organisational panacea with which 'they' hope to address the problems of numerical, spiritual and intellectual decline.
More and more in this context I find myself agreeing with T.S. Eliot that  "the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action."  The only tried and tested way to be faithful (as I was reminded again this morning in an article in August's New Directions) is to strive to practice the 'science of the Saints.'

But the last word before the blog goes quiet for the summer has to go to Eliot again:
"....There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business..."

Back (briefly) at the end of the month - enjoy the summer!

Sa nuit d'été, a setting of Rilke from Nocturnes by Morten Lauridsen