Ever wonder what it's all about? I need to try and work it out. I'll just begin with the deer.
This is about what and who and where strength comes from.
Simon Stock's name comes from the old word for the trunk of a tree. Some people say he might have lived in the trunk of an old oak when he began his search as a little hermit when he was just twelve years old.
It is like living a poem. It is like installation art that makes contact, that connects with a massive mystical reality, so that the metaphor becomes you.
Root your mind heart and soul. Nest there in your little cell, heaven, for your few hours of repose, in the trunk of an age old oak.
Christianity doesn't throw away the wisdom of ages, or it shouldn't. People have always valued and treasured and revered the oak. It gives so much, and stays so long. It sees four or five hundred years go by easily, watching children approach, play and climb, with similar faces generation after generation in the places where it lives. It nurtures them all. It even gives the ink to write, and thus it is the 'Gospel Tree.' The reverence is right. Little Simon was right.
In the quiet heart of the great oak, he found tenderness. Tending. A slow and quiet teaching. A contact with the Rood. A breath of rain and the smell of earth. A grounding.
He went out to the mountain, and came back a Carmelite, an exile now from the mountain, in an England that didn't understand where he had been, and where he no longer fitted in. He carried back and forth an ancient way of seeking communion with his creator. I can imagine the cry of his heart, here in this cold and misty land. I have walked and sat and listened in some of the places where he walked. I heard his song sung in the ruins of a chapel one misty dawn where once he used to pray. I could not sing. My voice was stilled. How it felt I cannot say.
He wrote Flos Carmeli in 1250 when he had the vision of Mary, to honour the woman who brought the Christ child into the world. The woman who inhabited her faith.
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Simon Stock in a stained glass window with the image of his vision.
