The Very Revd John Mann shares beautiful reflections in every episode of our special series of Sacred Harmony, filmed in Northern Ireland. Here’s an encouraging sneak-peek at his thoughts on God’s protection and our response to life’s dangers and threats.
One of the psalms speaks of the author’s desire that he may have the wings of a dove to be able to fly away and be at rest. It is a longing to shed problems and anxieties and be at peace. This need to escape, what threatens one’s emotional and mental equilibrium, is something that we can all to some extent understand, but the Christian of St Patrick’s day possessed a more robust outlook on God’s mercy and protection.
What threatened was also what inspired; what was awesome, brought one closer to Christ; as he was in the world and he was human, like us, but also beyond us and divine. At each turn in the path of life, the Celtic Christian was drawn further into the reality of nature’s power and beauty, rather than take them to a place where they could not be touched by insecurity and danger.
If prayer results from our contemplation of the heavens and the earth; from the sinuous movement of a fish in a placid stream, to the breeze waving the grass of a hay meadow or the sound of the lowing of a cow or the sight of the flight of a bird, then prayer becomes as natural as breathing, and as constant as time itself. Into such a world of faith we can, following the way of St Patrick himself, encounter Christ day by day.
