Letters from Scotland - 5

Dear Helen,
Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I love words – chewing over them and exploring them. When you suggested your students make time to read John Cassian’s tenth conference I realized immediately that here was a man of antiquity who was in love with words too. He could chew them over to perfection. What a joy his sermons must have been.
The life of John Cassian (c360 – c432) took him from his probable birthplace in Dobrudja in Romania to a monastery in Bethlehem from where he gained permission to spend time learning from the monks in the monasteries of the Egyptian desert. Further journeying would lead him to Constantinople, Rome and eventually to Marseilles where he founded a monastery and a nunnery. It was in Gaul that he wrote books to explain the monastic ideal and thus became an invaluable resource for our knowledge of Egyptian Spirituality.
For me, Cassian’s conference on prayer was a delight for there he explores in extraordinary depth and with no little charm how well suited to absolutely every situation in our lives is the prayer: O God, come to my assistance: Lord make haste to help me. It seems it would serve us on every breath, in every hour, every moment. Great emphasis is placed in his work on the mastery of the psalms and conditioning ourselves by ceaseless meditation on Scripture as background to our lives, interspersed with ejaculatory prayers consisting of Scriptural texts. The Psalms we are told are the language of the Holy Spirit and a gift for our converse with God.
As I am getting ready to go on holiday and looking out my Italian phrasebook I began to wonder what John Cassian’s phrasebook would include for the beginner in this language of the Spirit, phrases that would lead to confidence and fluency. Lines from psalms which I have loved and used to lighten my days might find themselves there:
Your word is a light to my feet and a lamp for my path...
For you my soul is thirsting for You like a dry weary land without water...
When can I enter and see the face of God...
Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death you are there with your rod and staff to comfort me...
It is your face that I seek, O Lord, hide not your face...
You open wide your hand, O Lord, and give us our food in due time...
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord...
Ring out your joy to The Lord, serve Him with gladness...

Your student, Jane.