The art of savouring
Opinion
<br /> <br /> We’ve just said farewell to the Year of Jubilee 2025 and we have begun 2026, mostly untouched and unwritten. There is something sacred about this moment, not unlike the afterglow that lingers when the sun has set, that peculiar light that remains even after its source has disappeared below the horizon.
Have you ever been captivated by the ethereal beauty of twilight? Its soft, golden glow paints the sky in hues of amber and rose, creating a magical atmosphere that inspires poets and writers alike. Poems about twilight often explore themes of love, loss and the passage of time, capturing the bittersweet emotions that accompany the fading of day.
The Jubilee Year invited us into extraordinary graces, but now we face the deeper challenge: learning to savour the ordinary days that stretch before us.
Savouring is not a word we commonly associate with the spiritual life. We speak of discipline, of perseverance, of sacrifice. We understand that deepening our faith requires work. But savouring? This feels almost indulgent, even suspicious. Yet this hesitation reveals precisely why we need to recover the art of savouring. The Christian life is not meant to be endured but received. Not gulped down anxiously but tasted slowly, gratefully, with full attention to the Giver of every gift.
One of the many graces that I take away from the Jubilee Year is that it reminded us of the importance of savouring. It called us to slow down, to return to what matters, to notice mercy in places we had stopped looking. Yet Jubilee years end with the next one not beginning for 24 more years. The danger now is that we return to our old pace, our old patterns of distraction and hurry, mistaking busyness for faithfulness and productivity for holiness. We risk becoming people who consume grace without tasting it, who receive blessings without recognising them, who move so quickly through our days that we arrive at the end having lived very little of what actually happened.
To savour is to pay attention. It is to refuse the tyranny of hurry. When we savour a meal, we don’t simply refuel; we notice flavour, texture, aroma. We eat slowly enough to experience what we’re receiving.
The same principle applies to the spiritual life. Savouring prayer means staying long enough to actually hear the silence speak. Savouring Sacred Scripture means reading not for information but for transformation, allowing a single verse to unfold like a flower rather than racing through chapters. Savouring the Eucharist means approaching with wonder rather than routine, receiving the Word of God and the Body of Christ as if for the first time, because in a sense, it always is.
The saints understood this.
St Ignatius Loyola developed his Examen not as a checklist but as a practice of savouring, reviewing the day slowly, looking for God’s presence in specific moments, relishing consolations and learning from desolations. St Thérèse of Lisieux discovered her ‘little way’ by savouring small acts of love, finding the infinite within the ordinary. She didn’t wait for grand opportunities; she paid exquisite attention to the moments actually given to her. Br Lawrence practised the Presence of God while washing dishes, transforming mundane tasks into encounters with the divine by bringing his full attention to them.
What they discovered is that savouring is fundamentally an act of gratitude. We cannot be grateful in the abstract. Gratitude requires specificity, attention, memory. When we savour, we acknowledge that this moment, this gift, this particular grace is worth our time. We declare that the present is not merely a bridge to somewhere else but is itself valuable, unrepeatable, worthy of being fully inhabited. This is countercultural in an age that trains us to always be elsewhere, scrolling through other lives, planning future experiences, reliving past grievances.
The liturgical calendar itself teaches us to savour. The Church doesn’t rush through Advent to get to Christmas. She lingers in seasons, allowing us to steep in particular mysteries. Ordinary Time, which stretches before us now, is not a filler between festivals. It is where most of life happens, where holiness is usually formed. Learning to savour Ordinary Time might be the most important spiritual discipline we can cultivate. It means finding God not only in the extraordinary graces of a Jubilee Year but in the weekly rhythm of Sunday Mass, in daily prayer that feels dry, in conversations with neighbours, in work done faithfully even when no one notices.
As we begin this mostly untouched year, our invitation is to live more slowly and more deeply. To read fewer spiritual books but actually practice what we read. To take on fewer commitments but be fully present to the ones we keep. To pray shorter prayers but mean them entirely. To receive fewer Communions hurriedly and more Communions hungrily, with hearts prepared and attention undivided.
Savouring also means learning to linger with suffering. This is harder, but equally important. Christian hope doesn’t bypass pain; it enters it, stays with it, allows it to do its transformative work. When we rush past difficulty, we miss what it might teach us. When we savour even our struggles, bringing them slowly and honestly before God, sitting with them long enough to discover what they reveal about our dependencies and desires, we allow them to become not obstacles but invitations into deeper intimacy with the Lord Jesus. He did not avoid the cross but moved through it deliberately, slowly, savouring even there the will of the Father and the salvation of the world.
The untouched year ahead is a gift. Every day of it will be given to us only once. We can race through it, arriving at 2027 wondering where the time went, or we can learn to savour it. We can notice the particular graces of each season, pay attention to the people actually in front of us, taste and see that the Lord is good not as a theological abstraction but as a lived experience in the ordinary rhythms of prayer, work, rest and relationship.
The art of savouring is the art of being present to the Present, to the gifts God is giving now, not yesterday or someday in the future, but today. It is learning to recognise that every moment is charged with the possibility of encounter; every ordinary day is shimmering with the presence of the One who said, ‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Revelation 21:5).
The Jubilee Year has ended, but the invitation to live jubilantly, gratefully, attentively and deeply remains. May we learn to savour it well, for God is good, good indeed!
