The Corridor at Night
Updated: Sep 2
“But he would withdraw to deserted places and pray.”
Luke 5:16
The corridor is long and almost empty. The lights are too bright for the hour. Your footsteps sound louder than they should.
Somewhere behind a closed door someone is breathing. A little further on, a machine makes a soft, regular sound. You walk past both without stopping.
There are places in life that seem to exist only at night. A hospital corridor. A church sacristy after the last person has gone. The stretch of road between one duty and the next. In those places the usual words do not work very well. You cannot explain much. You cannot put anything fully right. You can only be present for a few more steps.
The Gospel tells us that Jesus often went away to lonely places. It also shows him walking through crowded streets, and through the quieter spaces in between — the places where nothing dramatic is happening, and yet something still has to be carried. He did not live only in the great moments. He also walked the distance from one house to another, from one sick person to the next, from the crowd back into silence.
Most of the Christian life is lived in corridors like that. Not only in the rooms where big decisions are made, and not only in the open spaces of a feast, but in the narrow passages that join one hour to the next. A parent walking a child back to bed. Someone locking a church after night prayer. A visitor going down a hospital passage with no clear idea of what will be needed on the other side of the door.
You do not have to know what to say. You do not have to feel ready. You only have to keep walking with the kind of attention that night asks of us: not rushing, not turning away, not pretending that you can enter every room.
Christ is not waiting only at the end of the corridor. He is already in it. He is in the person behind the closed door. He is in the quiet duty that no one sees. He is in the Mass itself, which is also a kind of passage: we come from ordinary life, we are led from the Word to the altar, and then we are sent out again through the door into the same night from which we came. The One who walks with us in the liturgy is the same One who walks these poorer, narrower corridors after we leave.
When you reach the end of the corridor, the light will be different. For now this is enough: to pass through the quiet length of it without hurrying, and without looking away.