It’s early morning and the sky is a thinning dark; the sense of light is in it. It is a familiar long loved fabric washed over and over, the colour under the colour showing through. It is the first of the Hallows Days, the Triduum of Thin Days.
Hallows, according to etymonline comes from Old English haligan, and is both verb and noun.
I love the word hallow which at first sounds round and thick as a pumpkin but is really pourous, beautiful, and breath-filled.
We so need, I so need what this word holds. We need the verb of it, the sense of making holy, or of honouring what is holy. We need the noun of it, the saints, the holy persons that show through the fabric of the thinning dark. The hope of holy persons yet to be. The hope of who we are together. The hallowed arches that we make of our touching fingertips.
Let us sit quietly or let us go out to stand among trees or by water and allow ourselves to be hallowed, porous, beautiful, and breath-filled.
Practices
You might want to rest with some questions. What is hallowed ground for you? Hallowed space? Hallowed relationship? Hallowed commitment? Do you breathe or walk more slowly in your hallowed places?
You might read Seeing Saints or practice worship round a table with Thresholds and Thin Places.
You might want to practice lectio with these words
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”
― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Hallowed be the secret beauty of your heart and the One who makes it so.
