I was born and raised in England. For over forty years the Caribbean
island of Grenada has been the context, the environment, of my priesthood. In this beautiful setting I have been
fulfilled and challenged. Here I have felt ‘at home’ and yet ‘home-sick.’ Lofty
mountains, golden beaches, grim fortresses and interesting buildings have been
my friends.
My somewhat stiff English body has learned to sway to the beat of the
drum and the steel pan. My ears have become attuned to the rhythm of Calypso
and Reggae. I have known the tense, bewildered
excitement of the rise and fall
of a Revolution and the fear-filled insecurity of a hurricane blasting,
grinding, my home, my church, into rubble.
When members of my family and their friends have come to visit me it
has been my joy and my pride to ‘show them around.’ I’ve introduced them to ‘MY’
Grenada. What they’ve perceived
through the lens of my experience has had a texture that has fitted well around
the detailed information, the spectacular photos that can be found at any
Travel Agency or on any computer.
They’ve seen the face of this tropical island through my eyes. Through
my soul, my heat-beat they’ve felt something of its throb, its heart-beat.
It could be that I’m claiming too much for myself. After all, in spite
of my many years in this part of the world I will always be a ‘stranger in
paradise.’ I shall never, ever, have that understanding that belongs to those
whose grounding, culture, mind-set, and inborn attachment and loyalty are
rooted in the local soil.
It was in 2002 that Pope John Paul 11 gave to world the Luminous
Mysteries of the Rosary. In so doing he shared with us these inspiring sentiments,
"With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the
school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and
to experience the depths of his love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive
abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer… To
recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of
Christ.”
Mary was there! She
saw it all, she felt it all, she lived it all with her Son, Jesus, and now she
shares it all with us as we meditate upon everything associated with the Word
of God becoming flesh-of Mary’s flesh, and dwelling amongst us – as a child
shares his life, his very self with his mother.
At the moment of
writing, through my very being courses the question of the Lenten hymn, “Where
you there when they…?” Then follows the response, “Oh! Sometimes it causes me
to tremble, tremble, tremble.” Yes! Mary was there with Jesus through it all.
Sometimes she must have trembled with excitement and joy; at others she was
there trembling with fear, sorrow, and horror. Luke
in his Gospel wrote that after the shepherds departed from the stable outside
Bethlehem ‘As for Mary, she treasured all these things and
pondered them in her heart,(2.19). I
detect here an intensity of feeling that she dearly wants to share with us.
Through the lens of
her own experience she leads us into the Mystery that was the life, death and
glorification of her Son, Jesus-for our sake and for our salvation.
I dare to suggest to
you that I have journeyed with the people of Grenada for many of the
significant years of its history. The pulse of my emotions has throbbed with something
of the same pounding as has their own. I dare to suggest that because ‘I was
there.’ I have been able to share with others something of what all this has
meant to me.
The vocation, the mission, of
Mary who was ‘There’ throughout the whole of the ‘Jesus Story’ is now to share
with us all that it meant to her personally.
This is far more than an emotional autobiography. For Mary, for you and
for me this is to a spiritual journey of discovery in which we discover Jesus
and in so doing discover ourselves. This
is what reciting the Rosary, by the grace of God, can do for us.
Peter Clarke, OP
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