by Kevin Scully
What I miss is the quiet that I so long associated with reading. The incessant cacophony of music, competing radio stations and blaring televisions, the raised voices of residents, staff and visitors, makes it difficult to read here. Sometimes the volume is no more than the result of the hard of hearing mistakenly thinking they have not been heard. The lounge can be a refuge, but not for long. Sooner or later a bewildered or confused resident will come in and break the peace, and with it my concentration. And then there is Fr Aidan. He is my brother and it is my duty to sit with him. Every now and then I read aloud to him. But his awareness rightly challenges me: who are these people? What is going on? What have they to do with him?
Better, then, to read from the Bible. I tend to keep to the Gospels. Even such a small repertoire is inexhaustible. After all, that is all the Church has of the life of the Saviour. The Word made flesh is literature enough.
1. Various accounts of this Belgian saint are both alarming and amusing as, in routine prayer or elevated from her coffin at her funeral rites, Christina hovers over her sisters in chapel, so offended was she by the odour of their sins.
EDITOR’S NOTE
What follows were all on separate pieces of papers. I assume they were written at different times, but the theme of decline—‘change and decay in all around I see’—militates for their being brought together. Clearly this theme is reflective of many people’s concerns about loss of physical and mental capacities. There is something almost touching in the way that the community, and its buildings are part of the journey to ashes and dust.
Old Chapel
It was not only within the cloister that signals of change were evident. There seemed to be reminders of the road travelled by those outside our community when they visited the monastery.
Some signals were clearly to be seen in our regulars, men and women who came each year to spend time with us—no, that is not right; they came to spend time with God in our company, as Fr Aidan would have reminded me. These people, around whom we built a routine into which they could float in and out—no, wrong again; people were admitted to the rhythm of the house to gain some connection to a pattern lost outside our walls. These people also sustained us, bringing in concerns from outside our experience. It was a gift to watch them—some of them at least—relax, unwind and find a deeper sense of peace that, by the grace of God, we somehow were able to offer to others. But, like us, they became increasingly frail and fragile.
Some of our guests, clergy and lay, would begin to slow down, resiling from the long, bracing walks that so re-energised them in years past, to long stretches in a comfortable chair in the Guests’ parlour. Many would look out the window, as if searching for some divine message in the gardens or the rolling hills beyond them. The sky and hovering birds drew their attention for prolonged periods, the viewer relishing in sights that normally would pass unnoticed.
Sleep is no stranger to the retreatant, however experienced. Nor is there any shame attached to it. Indeed, well before I served as Guestmaster, I had witnessed the exhausted faces on those coming into the Guest Wing. The first day or so they would be confined to their cells. I initially assumed them to hard at prayer. ‘No,’ said Brother Bernard, ‘they’ll be in no state for that yet. Listen as you walk. You will hear them laying down the burden of daily life. After they have done that, if they are lucky, they may get a minute or two of the blissful joy of the silent prayer Teresa of Avila writes about.’ Indeed, he was right. The Guest Wing would reverberate with snoring.
Guests would return, slouching, shuffling, until, announced or not, they made their last visit to St Candida’s. The hair would thin, grey, become less groomed. The clothes harked back to an earlier fashion, tweeds autumning into the utility brand of the elderly—the elasticated waists, the stained jackets, the velcroed, rather than laced, shoes. Some would add their shuffle to those of the more fragile brethren on the way into chapel. Like their professed brothers in the stalls, they would sometime lose their place in the ever-turning pages of the Office Book. They found stairs a similar challenge to some on the other side of the enclosure. Competition broke out for booking the ground floor guest room which, as had happened for the monks, was a concession to fragility.
Occasionally we would get a card or a letter from someone who knew them, telling us of their deaths, requesting that a mass be offered for the repose of their souls. But it was mostly silence.
And it was the silence they came for. At first. As the old timers thinned our younger, newer retreatants became more demanding. We were often unable to respond to what they presented as requests (which were entirely reasonable to them). Fr Abbot refused to get a computer for the house. He saw it as yet another development in distraction. He might as well have said work of the devil.
The mobile phone reception was non-existent at first, then compromised, but always poor. Likewise we seemed to have been placed in one part of Dorset that was never going to get superfast anything, let alone broadband. Indeed, for many of us, that was the attraction. But the Guestmaster would be made to realise that not all people come to a place of prayer and silence for what we think is attractive and essential. Why did we not have wi-fi? Why did we not agitate for a booster to improve our facilities? How could we exist in such a communications black hole? The questions became increasingly technical and the questioners concomitantly aggressive. Somehow we were no longer a retreat from the world, we were despite it.
More vibrant centres of Christian hospitality rivalled us: screens, bands, eruptions of joy and intentionally missional, as one retreatant told me. (I have no idea what he meant.) Occasionally some of their patrons would come to us, having heard of the counter-culture we embodied. Some, as refugees from the new centres, came for the silence, routine, the dull drudgery of discipline the monastery had to offer. Others reacted to what we were and did. Or did not do. For them the style and expression of their faith paraded under a number of words—Spirit-filled, charismatic, exciting. This, one told me, was what made such places ‘relevant’. One of the brothers, no doubt, would have quipped, ‘Relevant to what?’, before giving a lecture on how it could not stand on its own. I didn’t have to ask. It was pretty clear. It was relevant to him, and the world he moved in. We were not. A one-time retreatant, who left after a day and a half, less than halfway through his projected, booked and paid for stay, considered us irredeemably lax and liberal. He described himself as Bible-believing.
Our next abbot set out to bend the community to our visitors’ needs and requests. Or were they demands? His winning argument was based on Christian service—we were hosting people whose needs had to be met as guests. He cited the epistle of James, chapter 2, saying the community was meeting the bodily needs of our guests. Some of the brethren tried to counter, unsuccessfully, that catering for modern communications was hardly an essential of charity. Vigorous, theological and social, debate followed on the nature—essential or otherwise—of God’s grace and charity.
The abbot won the day and this led, as it always did, to an invasion of builders, and a disruption of our established pattern of prayer and work. When it was finished the abbot urged us to be open and allow a settling in period. For some of the brothers, it ushered a sense of ongoing unsettledness.
Chapter became the venue for vexed questions. Was an email sent by computer in the evening a breaking of Greater Silence? For some it was clearly a breach. One should not be working anyway. For others it encapsulated the problem: was being a contemplative finding stillness in a world which changed no matter our rhythm or response? Older brothers would recount earlier disputes—electricity in the chapel; central heating throughout the house; the internal phone system; the alteration to the pattern of Offices to keep abreast in changes of language and the Church of England’s liturgies; the restoration of a house style by one abbot; the musical regimes set, maintained, changed and abandoned.
All of this was part of our daily life as our numbers fell. One brother, straight from Cambridge, c
ompleted his doctorate while a Novice. This caused consternation among some of the brethren but Aidan, who was Novice Master, was in favour. Some brothers grumbled—there are grumblers in every community—arguing that the research took the novice ‘away from his vocation’. It was a serious distraction, they said, from his formation in the monastic life. Having an academic—and an active one at that—for his overseer in monastic formation did his cause no harm.
I don’t know who could be judged right in this. The brother, unlike Fr Aidan, later left us to take up an academic post, produced a long list of books, then got a pointy hat. He made a series of retreats with us some years back. It was not a happy experience for him or us. It served to remind some that the grumblers had been right—he would never stick. He was more interested in other things than silent contemplation.
He would spend quite a bit of time with Aidan who was similarly academic, but seemed to carry it off in a different manner. As Aidan’s stature decreased—perhaps the bishop had noticed the falling off of his acuity—so did the visits. He recently wrote a well received memoir, which contained long reminiscences of his short time in the cloister.
A guest to the Guestmaster: ‘What do you do for fun?’
There was a long pause.
Fr William replied, ‘I think we strive for contentment. It is a bit of a struggle, but fun enough.’
Wash Me Throughly—1
This morning was change of bed linen day. For a few of us that is a weekly occurrence. For others it is daily. When it gets to the situation when it is more than twice a day a case conference is held to decide what is the best care plan for the individual. To that end, getting residents mobile and clad in incontinence wear is to the benefit of all. It contains the problem.
I usually strip my bed, take my sheets and pillow case to the worker pushing the trolley. With me, at least, it is something less burdensome than others. I like to maintain my own room, much as I did my own cell. I am usually rewarded with a clean set of bed linen—usually the stripping of the bed and its replacement is done in stages, if not by different carers—but most of the domestic workers know that I will be ready to put my room in order. I do that, having turned my mattress in anticipation, and make up the bed for the week ahead.
This routine has been a strangely comforting one for me. As part of my duties as Guestmaster, I used to maintain the accommodation of those who stayed with us but CSC, as did many retreat houses, relied on guests to change their sheets prior to departure. This got easier with the adoption of fitted sheets and the use of continental duvets rather than blankets. But even then, it did seem beyond the capacity of some guests, usually married men, I am both ashamed and surprised to note. (Monks are trained and expected to be relatively self-reliant in this regard).
One bishop, who had a reputation for pomposity, subverted all expectations during his first and only stay at St Candida’s by being a truly humble co-resident. He insisted that he be called by his Christian name, not even Father before it, which perturbed some of the brethren. His maintenance of silence for his retreat allowed all to avoid any discomfort. His vesture was anything but prelatial—not a dog collar to be seen. Certainly he never appeared in a cassock, purple or otherwise. He not only changed his linen before departure but, on his own insistence, had turned the mattress before he did so, vacuumed the room, including bottoming out (as I learned they call it in the East End), and scrubbed the sink.
‘It rather puts me out of a job,’ I quipped when he asked for the hoover.
‘Don’t mind that, Brother,’ he said. ‘I am sure you will find plenty else to do.’
The routines of clearing and cleaning rooms was one I looked on with quiet satisfaction. Having read of the horror stories of some bed and breakfast operators in a Sunday paper, I realise that even our most untidy and troublesome guests were relatively easy work. The BandB owners’ accounts of broken furniture and fixtures, towels used as toilet paper, blood and other bodily fluids seemingly sprayed in all directions, made the retreatant a focussed and pliable client.
There were some things you came to expect: clipped toe- and finger-nails. What was it that made a retreat the venue for such activity? Cast off packaging and various used personal hygiene products—dental floss, razor blades, cotton buds—as well as stationery, read or abandoned books, notepads. Then there were the forgotten trappings of modern life that needed returning—the phone charger, on occasion a phone itself, the cord for the laptop or other device. We kept a store of recycled padded envelopes for their despatch, trips to the post office being one of the Guestmaster’s duties. These were really minor irritants. Though, in my less charitable moments, they could became Everests of resentment.
For all that, it did seem that slipping a fitted sheet onto a mattress, with a straight, neat mattress protector beneath, was beyond the skill set of some. It would be in seeking to correct these shortcomings I would detect the occasional evidence of sexual self-satisfaction. Even clergy take things in hand from time to time.
I loved the completion of tasks. Clearing up, putting the washing on, hanging it out to dry in the sun when the weather allowed, or in the long drying room by the Guest Wing boiler, the subsequent folding and stacking in the linen press—all that was part of the Founder’s original vision, was a prayerful, calming ritual. All such work somehow gave me a fulfilment. In my elevated moments—and these were rare—I imagined myself a sort of Brother Lawrence, exercising his ministry of minutiae, and in doing so immersing myself in my practice of the presence of God.2 But I am far from being such a mystic. Lawrence’s gift was to channel his thoughts to God. One of the great English contemplatives, Mother Maribel of Wantage, is quoted to have advised a novice having trouble with prayer, ‘Don’t try to do things. All you have to do is to provide a channel sufficiently clear of rubbish for God to work through. It is his love coming through you, his light shining through you that matters. Our poor little efforts are nothing. It is all so simple, and like all simple things so hard to do.’3 Needless to say, there was plenty in Columba’s channels that needed dredging.
Here in Care Home such satisfaction was temporary. Getting my cell—no, my room—in order was provisional. There was little chance to go to it and receive instruction4, as my vocation now was one of accompaniment to Father Abbot. To be with him meant to leave my space for the common one that was also his. On a good day we could do the office together, attend the weekly mass in one of the sitting rooms, even go for a stroll around the home’s garden. But mostly it was making myself visible, my habit and scapular somehow supplying the reassurance a fretful, forgetful priest required.
My duties have become focussed on a person, rather than on than on what some call creature comforts. Or the menial tasks of life. Of course, it has always been a mixture of the two but, as I hand my dirty sheets to the Care Home worker, and receive their replacements, as I did today, I thank God for the little things that allow me to help others help myself.
1. Once again Columba has resorted to the Book of Common Prayer 1662. This rendering of verse 2 of Psalm 51, leaves out an ‘o’, in ‘throughly’. Despite that, many people use the more modern word ‘thoroughly’ when reading it on sight.
2. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, to give him his full name in religion, was a 17th-century lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris. His tasks were mainly in the kitchen. Despite this, his sayings and wisdom have come to be regarded as classics, captured in a book The Practice of the Presence of God.
3. This is quoted in the biography by Sister Janet C.S.M.V. Mother Maribel of Wantage, SPCK, London, 1973, p 34.
4. This is a version of an oft-quoted aphorism attributed to many spiritual teachers, St Benedict among them. One of the best known renderings of the advice ends with the claim that the cell contains in itself everything requisite for instruction.
Come into
the Parlour, Maud1
I don’t think I had ever heard anyone speak of a parlour until I arrived at St Can
dida’s. The very word conjured up for me special spaces, perhaps those ‘good’ rooms into which great-aunts were posted to sit and chat with my parents, children not to be admitted into such polite company.
A similar thing occurred with nuns, so I learned from my Roman Catholic friends, so they could eat cake and drink afternoon tea away from prying eyes—children’s or relatives’. Why they demanded this, or people conceded to it, is beyond me. I have been told that nuns hunted in pairs—they were not allowed to be out alone, even with their immediate family—and until certain reforms within the Roman discipline, only a fellow sister was allowed to see the crumbs fall to what was by repute the best china.
My ears should have pricked up at the mention of a parlour when I was first ushered into one after my rescue in the wheelbarrow. But such was my addled brain that I hardly registered the dropping of this strange term. Brother Kentigern brought me a tray to the thus designated room for my first solitary repast at CSC. Perhaps I had brought my contagion with me? One that could not be risked in the Refectory of professed brothers?
Having never heard of such places, they began to proliferate. The Abbot had a parlour. The Prior had one named after or for him, but it was used as a space between the guests’ area and the enclosure. Small groups of retreatants, priests or ordinands discerning possible vocations to the monastic life, would gather in the Prior’s Parlour. It was also a place where spiritual direction—routine, one-off or emergency—was offered. It was part of the monastery, but still outside the perimeters of the professed. (There was also a room/confessional off the guests’ section of the chapel.)
The Guests’ Parlour was, at the time of my arrival, a place of communal recreation. The walls were lined with books. It was stocked with comfortable chairs, often with wings to support a nodding neck, in a circle approximating a potential view of the fireplace in which, in the latter part of autumn and winter, logs may be set ablaze. Over the years central heating was relied on to provide protection from the chill, so the company of other silent readers was abandoned, a development welcomed in part by the Guestmaster, among whose tasks was the clearing and cleaning of the fireplace. With no fire to gaze into, people tended to remain in their rooms or took to the chapel. It seemed, or so said Brother Librarian, people had lost the ability to sit with others in company in individual pursuits. He used the term ‘to recreate in silence in company’. But then he was from another era. Guests either needed to socialise—talk or interact—or to be completely on their own. The search for solitude overtook the desire for communal silence. Though, while walking along the corridors of the Guest Wing, you could hear the not always muted sounds of radios and one side of conversations on mobile phones. As Guestmaster I found myself the sometimes unwilling interventionist in having to promote the idea of our collective commitment to quiet.