A fresh look at the ‘kingdom of heaven’

Weeks three and four of Aidan Mathews, online Lenten retreat focus on Matthew’s gospel passages about the kingdom of heaven, comparing it both to a hidden treasure and a pearl of great price – both hidden.

These images prompt the former RTÉ producer, poet and playwright to engage in his own anamnesis and this re-membering is rich pickings for those who would lke a Lenten retreat with a difference.

” I knew nothing about pearls, except that it named a psycho-geriatric Presbyterian down the road who had given me three Victorian pennies for my coin collection, each with a different image of the long-lived Queen, from debutante to dowager through mother of the bride,” he writes in week four, continuing, “My own mum’s pearls, which lay among pin-cushions and aromatic haberdashery in a forbidden basket, were palpably paste al dente, so the pearl of great price in the Revised Standard Version was a theological enigma, even if my helpful father showed me snapshots of submarine Ainu divers on Okinawa, with nothing on them at all and hardly any hair where there should be, in the slick centrefold of a National Geographic magazine”

To pray these two weeks’ gospels with Aidan, click on this link »

For those of you just joining in this retreat now, Aidan, in his introduction to the it kindly warns the potential retreatant:  “If you are looking for clarity and hygienic clear-headedness in what follows, you had better Google another internet site, for we cannot answer the mystery when it questions us. We can only reply, and we do so, when we do so, in the upheaval and downfall of our own baffled existence.”

So, for those who venture into the retreat’s weeks three and four, he first suggests an exercise in stillness, even though he looks with suspicion not only on the possibility of ever reaching stillness but also on the reason for attaining it. “It is not about robes. It is not about gongs. It is not about chanting matins or mantras. The time is never right, and the place is never perfect. Even the most righteous of rites can deteriorate into trickery and mere technique, for prayerfulness, which fumigates the wistful list above, is always, by definition, a precarious state. We can never coincide completely with ourselves…”

So if you’re ready to ‘pray’ this retreat for Lent, click here for the stillness exercise of week 3 »