Back in 2005, I visited Mount St. Bernard’s Abbey in Leicestershire.  There is an altar there to Blessed Brother Michael Tansy.

I was in some desperation;  my son’s illness had come back again.

So, I asked him “What do I have to do?”  I was desperate for instructions.

And I startlingly got an answer.  From somewhere inside – but they weren’t mine – came these words:

“Eileen, it is not what you must do, it is what you must be”.

That was a bit of a shock. My name was spoken, it was a direct response to my question.  It made me wonder what on earth it meant.  But, I had asked and I had got an answer.

Quite startled that these words came up inside of me, I was left dumbfounded.  So away I went and pondered for a long time on this message.  What did it mean?  I mean, living is about doing isn’t it?  Isn’t it about what we do?  Blah, blah etc. etc.  but I began to realise that there is a very clear distinction between doing and being.  Easy to confuse are they and I hadn’t really discerned the difference between the two verbs before.

Eventually, during the same year some months later on I was back at the abbey and I went to the shrine and I said this:  “Ok, then, I have pondered the differences between doing and being, so what must I be?”  And this answer came back:

“Be still.  Listen.  Be a vessel.”

Dumbfounded, off I went again and just pondered upon this message for a long, long time and I remain pondering on both messages to this day.  But, gradually, it came through to me that by being still and listening I was actually becoming a vessel for presence.  This means that without interfering and “doing something” about something, I was just becoming aware and being there without thought, without judging the situation and without providing a solution.  Just being there and being aware.

Part of the changes in my life included taking positive steps towards keeping in contact with people that I had hitherto dismissed;  that is doing but it is directed from the source, the spirit, the real being of who you are and when this facet directs your actions, it is different and not judging, not trying to persuade someone to do something different, but just by being in contact, listening and speaking of things of common interest.  No, if and then, just being.

Similarly, with the whole situation around my son, I began to detatch from the situation insofar as not giving opinionated thoughts and judgements, I just was fully there in the present and lived each moment thus whilst being aware that I was following the discipline, the messages which came via that shrine.

So there I had it.  A fundamental shift in my ‘being’.

God speaks to us;  we just have to listen.

This occurrence was so baffling, so new to me that I have pondered it ever since.  But I know that it happened and I know also that I could not have come up with either response.

Miracles are not necessarily with divine lights and seeing images and witnessing a change from the normal order of things around us. They are subtle, gentle avenues to changes in our perception.  Mine began to change after I’d desperately sought an answer.  but I had thought it would be an answer of “do this, that and the other”.  And it wasn’t.  It was a call to reflect inwardly, to ponder, to be.

The miracle remains.  I am changing in a way that having read such a thing in a book might not have “spoken” to me.  But in the way that I have been encouraged to look further within at my own being, at my own witnessing and at my own presence being a conduit to the sublime, as opposed to blocking it by my “doings”.

To be; to recognise oneself as being without doing.  To come from the being and not from the doing, elicits ultimate enlightened doing instead of thought-directed doing;  as in cause, effect.  If I do this then that.   It is about learning to be still within instead of trying to control through action and doing.  So the quotation from Descartes “I think, therefore I am” is challenged and overcome.  ”I am” is about the being, and “I think” is about the doing.  Thinking is of itself the beginning of the problem, the process of thought as in philosophy leads us down to sorrow and depression.  Being takes us to the place of quietness, stillness, the place without doing or thinking.

It is a hard lesson and one which continues; I often fail, but I keep trying and I have those words within my heart  for ever now.

Thanks be to God.

(© 2010 Eileen Baker)