To Bring Exactly Nothing Home

Sunday August 3, 2025

"I go out there to wrestle with emptiness. And success would be to bring exactly nothing home with me."

(By Tim Robinson, from Connemara, Listening to the Wind.)

To bring exactly nothing home with me. Yes, that's the ideal. Not sure that I can actually succeed in bringing nothing but maybe I can bring much less than I had planned.

Maybe it isn't necessary to fill my car again with stuff to bring across the Irish sea. And in this process of clearing out my room, making way for another, I just have to look at what needs to be taken and what should be discarded.

There are framed pictures, a mall box of them. There are the pictures coloured and painted by the children over the years for me personally and done so often with great detail and care. So I think I'll bring those with me.

But all of the boxes of notes that go back 30 years, retreat notes and talks that I've hauled about with me, thinking that I might make use of them, that they might make their way into becoming a book or something. The book that people keep saying I should write.

Yes, now I'm not going to take them with me.

They are going into the recycle bin. And if I am to write, it will be to write fresh and new, unencumbered, and uncluttered. Yes, drawing from memory, but doing so with a present perspective. Because I have changed, will continue to change and my thoughts will change with me.

I've been thinking about all this in the context of today's Gospel - storing up treasure for yourself, in heaven and not here on earth, keeping one's mind focused on Christ. Realising that at the end of everything when it comes to the end-of-life I can take nothing with me. So why hold on to anything that is not eternal. No.

At a funeral last week, the son of the deceased woman in the last line of his eulogy said, “what I will remember most is how she made me feel.”

I think that's the kind of treasure that I want. Both to take with me and leave behind. To leave with people the experience of how they have felt with me and for me to take away in my heart how they have made me feel So that's a treasure beyond price. That's the most important thing to take with me and it is profoundly emotional.

Sentiments are very strong and very real. Very powerful. So I think that's enough. It's all the treasure that I need, and of course all my treasures have their place in Jesus. Thanks be to God.

And of course, regarding the time of my departure people keep asking when it will be, and I keep asking myself. But the Visa process keeps encountering setbacks. And the latest setback left me feeling like I didn't know whether to laugh or to scream.

And then I came to a moment of acceptance. It will happen when it happens.

I said to God. Out loud, that I didn't start this process. And even if I am seeking its completion, even if I need it to happen, I didn't start it. So it's not my doing in that sense, and I have to trust in some way that the discernment of our Provincial Assembly that began this process, that this somehow must have been guided by the Holy Spirit, must be part of Gods plan for Hastings, for us as a Province and for me. There have been many signs confirming that it’s God’s Will and only this fact makes a very difficult experience bearable.

So, if it's Gods will, it will be done. The delay is not really important. But it would be very difficult at this point for it not to happen at all, because I am totally set up for it and the people are set up for it.

The image that has come to me is that it would be like being half born and then to have to go back into the womb. And even if it is the most lovely womb, yet, when you're half born, going back is not the thing. It just doesn't happen. So let it be done. And His Will be done.

My mother singing "Che sarà sarà" comes to mind. Whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, "Che sarà sarà"

A parishioner spoke these words of Shakespeare today as we discussed departure and a future yet to be defined:

“There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will” (Hamlet)