A few days spent in the company of an elderly relative living with dementia became an unexpected invitation to contemplation. Two paintings, a piece of music, and a prayer accompanied that journey.

*

“O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!” (King Lear’s prayer before his descent into madness, Act I, Scene 5)

Come, O true Light.”
— St Symeon the New Theologian

“… Come to us, who lie in hell,

… Come, you who have lusted and lust

my suffering soul

come, you alone

to me alone

because, as you see

I’m alone!…

Come, you who set me apart from everything

and you made me unique on earth…”

Only afterwards did I realise that those few days had become an unexpected continuation of “The Talk That Prepared Me”. It is one thing to speak about courage in the presence of suffering; it is another to discover whether one can quietly remain beneath the Cross.

Beyond the Cross, the path continues.

(*) Robert Schumann’s Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”) was the last work he completed. He composed it in February 1854, shortly before his suicide attempt and subsequent admission to a psychiatric asylum, where he spent the final years of his life.