Lent retreat: weeks 3-4

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 »