by Kevin Scully
1. St Teresa penned The Way of Perfection.
What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
‘Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.1
1. 1 Corinthians 15:50-58—another random quotation from the Bible, handwritten by Columba, with no key as to what prompted him to do so.
Dropping Stitches
One afternoon I joined a couple of women in the lounge on the first floor. The young one—though that should be a comparative, as she was far from the first flush of youth, her companion edging or toppling over the age of 90—sat calmly as her hands dealt deftly with needles and wool. I recognised the old lady, always turned out in smart, pressed clothes of neutral colours, as a fellow resident, one with whom I had never had a conversation.
I asked if I could sit down. The woman looked up from her knitting, nodded vigorously and said, ‘Of course. We would be glad of the company. Wouldn’t we, Mum?’ The old lady seemingly ignored her. I took my seat. I mentioned not a word had passed between her mother and myself.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t take that personally,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember when Mum last spoke to me.’ She turned and smiled at her mother. ‘What was it? Ten years ago?’
A slow turning of the head. There was a mixture of deadness and interest in the older woman’s eyes. No raising of the eyebrows, no tilting of the head, the rotation having been sufficient acknowledgement that she had been mentioned.
‘You did well,’ said the daughter as her mother turned her head away. ‘It used to drive me nuts. I would come in and witter on, reporting family news, commenting on this and that—the news, the weather, politics, even sport—and get nothing. My sister can’t handle it. She comes in once a week like me. That‘s our agreement. She does Saturday and I come on Tuesdays. But I know fifteen minutes is about her limit. We see each other regularly. She can’t handle the silence. She can’t take the fact—is it a fact?—that Mum does not seem to even know who we are and shows no interest in what we do.’
I ventured to comment, ‘Maybe she’s had enough? Pardon me,’ I said, intending to include both of them.
‘We all have, to be honest. God knows why she is dragging it out.’ She looked at me. ‘Sorry. I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. You being a priest and all.’
‘I’m not a priest.’ There followed a brief, but ultimately futile, attempt to explain the difference between lay and ordained members of a male religious community.
All the while the woman’s fingers moved in small arcs, sometimes picking up the string of wool with a lift and fall of the needles which, every now and then, gave an occasional click. She saw I was watching.
‘It helps pass the time. As I said, I come in every week. I come just after lunch and sit with Mum till tea time. She never liked television. The carers will turn it on in her room. My sister bought it for her. They mean well, I suppose. But she was always proper. Liked us to sit in the front room and talk. Social-like.’ She gave a slight laugh. ‘Talk about talk! Her! But she was a brilliant knitter. Taught me. But never picks up the needles now.’
I asked her what she was working on.
‘It changes. I used to do a lot of baby clothes. But people don’t seem to like that kind of thing now. They like labels, fashion. For a baby! Sometimes jumpers, they can be fun. But you have to have someone who wants them. I have one grandson who likes a new one now and then. Socks. Now they are a challenge.’
She explained the techniques of using four open ended shorter needles—she liked to use bamboo because they had a kind of holding traction that metal and plastic did not—and the variegated colours in sock wool that formed a surprisingly coherent pattern. She talked of the concentration required to turn a heel and the delight she felt in completing a toe.
‘And then you have to do it all over again for the second sock. But it didn’t seem right. You can’t really do anything else when you’re knitting a sock. Like this, I couldn’t be talking to you right now. You have to concentrate.’ She paused to look at her handiwork. ‘This is a very simple job. Different colours. Short ends of balls of wool. I knit them up into squares, then sew them together into a rug or throw. There’s a nun who collects them—maybe you know her, Sister Julia?—and they send them off to refugee camps. Feel like I am doing a bit of good while visiting Mum.’ Who, all the while, had sat staring into what Peter Porter had described as ‘crowded emptiness’.1
I excused myself not long after. The easy social chatter, in which the knitting lady was clearly adept and grateful for a listener, reminded me—did I need reminders?—of the buzzing noises around me and how far I had travelled from the silences of St Candida’s.
It is not that I am socially withdrawn. A substantial part of my life has been spent in regulated order. And silence was one of the threads knitted into the garment of daily living. As the Novice Master once said, ‘Silence should be neither a denial nor a drudgery. If it feels like either, it is probably not your vocation to be in a place like this. This is not a condemning judgment, merely a realisation that we all have different gifts and discomfort may be a sign that you may not be called to the cloister. If not denial or drudgery, what is it? Discipline. The regulations, the Rule, are there for us to be free in. If it does not work for you, God may well be calling you to something else.’
I went to my room. After a period of reading, I popped in to check on Fr Aidan. He was in bed, sleeping. I noticed a loose thread on his habit which was hanging on a hook on the wall. This brought to mind the interconnectedness of monastery life; of how much we depended on others.
I thought of Fr Ambrose, a tailor in the world, who found himself general overseer of fabric—in the sense of cloth, not buildings and the like—in CSC. He was the go-to monk for tutoring in how to repair or maintain your habit. On occasion he would do the work himself, saying it would be quicker for him to make good the defect than to explain the technique and supervise the process. The onset of arthritis frustrated not only him, but other members of the community who now could no longer rely on Fr Ambrose’s skills. Oddly, his incapacity with the needle liberated him. He took to sitting in chapel for prolonged periods. Once, at recreation, I asked him how he could spend so long in prayer.
‘Making up for lost time, brother. Making up for lost time.’
From nowhere came a recollection from school at Woy Woy. One boy—I see his face, yet grasp to recall a name—wore a hand-knitted pullover. It was in the colour of the school uniform, even sporting the thin double stripes of yellow on the neckline and cuffs. The lad was looked down on, pitied, bullied even, because he stood out from the rest of us, turned out in machined knitwear. His jumper we thought a badge of poverty.
I realise now that the pullover was the result of labour, hours of concentrated work to produce a thing of beauty. For a moment I saw in a mirage of diversity, like Hopkins’s song to working man’s kit.2 I let my fancy take wing. I saw the mother of the boy—I don’t think I had ever seen her, which is not a surprise given I can’t recall his name—lacing each loop over the clicking needles, her fingers weaving her affection i
nto the wool, turning out more than a garment, but a token of love.
1. Peter Porter was an Australian-born poet. The reference comes from his poem Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum. Phar Lap was a famous racehorse.
2. Columba is referring to Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
The Place of No Return
For some reason today Fr Scully stayed on after the mass. The carers were signally efficient in gathering up the residents at the conclusion of the service to take them to their respective dining rooms. For all that, as one of them noted to me as she satisfied herself that all who required assistance had been rendered it, there was a quarter of an hour to wait before the meal. She also assured me that Father Abbot was quite content.
Fr Scully had flopped into the chair next to me. He had closed his eyes and sat in silence for some minutes. When he eventually opened his eyes again, I asked, ‘Tired?’
‘Not really, Brother. Just taking advantage of a few minutes quiet. Some mornings it is just one thing after another without a break. And the next day there will be precious little to do. It would be great if you could somehow level it out to be tackled evenly each day.’
‘You looked so far away for a minute there,’ I said.
‘Yes. A short prayer and a visualisation. I find that usually does the trick.’
‘Do you go anywhere in particular?’ I asked.
‘What, in my head?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why but I often find myself lying on a towel on a sunny day at Macmasters Beach. That’s on the Central Coast of New South Wales. My parents moved there. As to my image, it’s funny, I can even put a year to it by the swimmers I’m wearing. The sound of the surf, the warmth of the sun on my body, the relative seclusion of the place…’ He laughed. ‘I was on my own that day for some reason. Funny, I haven’t been there in years.’
What were the chances of his mentioning Macmasters Beach? I could have told him about Bensville, my parents, my journey here. But there seemed little point. After all, I have been scribbling away about those things. I thought it best to keep the lid on. What could be served in talking about it now? So we sat in silence for a while. I thought maybe he would understand if I left these papers for him when—if—I leave Care Home.
‘I used to go back—to Australia—every couple of years. To see my parents when they were alive, God rest their souls. I still have a sister there.’
Somehow this led to an offer for him to show me some pictures. Not his own, thank heavens, but ones on the internet. He told me you could just put ‘Bensville’ into a search engine and a host of images come up. It is, he said, a gift to the lazy traveller.
I thanked him for the offer. But, as I told him, they would mean nothing to me. I did not tell him I would simply compare it to what I remember. Which, in itself, is harmless enough. But it is not really about now. And that is the call of faith. To live now. In the presence of God. Now. Lord knows what sort of memories I would dredge up if I saw the Brisbane Water again.
Cat and Mouse
I had an erection today. It came quite out of the blue, unbidden by thought or occasion—there was no-one about who could have been thought to embody the pulchritude that gave rise to the private part of my person.
I was startled, much as I was when I encountered a mouse in the guests’ kitchen, or a large spider as I cleaned a room in the Guest Wing. In both cases it was a confrontation with a creature that was simply out of place. And in both cases I knew what to do. For the mouse I would either lay a trap or borrow Brother Kitchen’s cat. The very presence of a feline seemed to do the trick. But she was such a good mouser that capture and despatch was both rapid and effective.
With a spider, a large glass from the kitchen would hold the arachnid in what looked like an inverted fishbowl while I got my special postcard—one I reserved solely for this purpose—from the Guestmaster’s drawer, sliced it over the mouth of the glass, usually incensing the creature whose apparent fangs were bared to alert the reluctant predator—me—that no good would come of the encounter. I would then carry the glass, holding the card to it, and, having reached a door or window, fling the creature to the outside world. Though once one ran back with such speed that it crossed the threshold before I did. It was a couple of days before we renewed our acquaintance and I placed the animal at a greater remove.
But today’s guest in my body—once both the centre of my consciousness and drive—stayed for a few minutes and seeped away. Leaving me to ponder just that: when did I lose the drive for sex and become content with contentment?
The Dying Vigil
It is surprising how sustaining living among people with dementia can be. At first there is a sympathy mixed with anger, tempered by the clichéd realisation that ‘it’s all right’ for those with the disease—they are unaware, or so we are told, of their condition so the amusing, fractious, alarming and confronting symptoms do not matter. For them the ship is sailing as normal.
In the monastery there was a profound element of distraction: the brothers whose powers were beginning to evaporate initially seemed ashamed that their behaviour had disrupted the ordered agenda of community living. A monk is always seeking to be, but not attract attention to, himself. I have written elsewhere that this is a veneer: the routine discipline of daily life, while lived out in a pattern, is one of infinite variety for both individual and community.
In the care home the outrageous becomes predictable. There is a woman who screams for much of the day—and through the night if her medication is not precisely monitored—in what, on first hearing, raises the deepest alarm. Someone is being attacked, murdered. It was under this apprehension, mistaken as it turned out, that I rushed to her room, only to find her alone, with a cup of tea in her plastic beaker with its straw-like spout on the sliding table in front of her. As soon as she saw me she was overcome by calm.
‘Where’s Margaret?’ she asked. I had no idea who Margaret was. I came to learn it was her elder sister who had lived with her in a council flat that had been raised out of the ruins of the Blitzed east end. Both women had lost fiancés in a battle in the Japanese theatre of the war. Margaret had died some ten years earlier.
The sisters were local legends. United in a narrative of common grief, they soldiered through the recovering East End as machinists in the rag trade, school dinner ladies at the same establishment and, for a while, cleaners of the same City offices. Margaret, so long the bookend to her isolation and sadness, had toppled, allowing nothing but singular horrors of life to flow in. And hence the scream.
Care Home’s corridors rang out during the day with a symphony of alarm calls. The almost incessant bleeping of strategically placed wall units through the facility meant the staff were never far from learning which room—a number would be displayed on the beeping box—and respond, or as it happened sometimes, not.
Like all activities, there were serial offenders in pressing the button or pulling the cord that led to the aural assaults. At first newly inducted staff would run to the panel and rush to visit the summoner. But in time response became one that was slotted into other duties—being with fragile people requires care and assistance and leaving someone may render them vulnerable—so it can prove problematic. You can’t leave someone in the bath to investigate who had instigated the alarm.
In an almost myst
ical development, some of the carers had an innate sense of an emergency, or a summons from someone not numbered among Louis Renault’s ‘usual suspects’.1 There was the odd occasion—staff distracted, otherwise engaged, involved in a delicate situation—when a resident in a real emergency had to wait but this was, thankfully, very rare.
Life among the unpredictable strangely has its patterns and the disordered clash of alternating realities, for those of us inhabiting a different world and time in the same space, can be frustrating and entertaining. In Father Aidan’s mind I have become a range of members of CSC, some whom even he would not have met face to face. One afternoon I came into his room to find Father Abbot holding a photograph—Lord knows where he had obtained it—of The Founder standing among the foundations of the first chapel of the monastery. He then informed me, in extraordinary detail, of the challenges of securing the site in Dorset.
It had long been claimed—and subsequent archaeological digs had confirmed—that there had been a small monastery on the land that was to become the site of the Community of Saint Candida. It had been a mixed community of women and men, its first leader an Abbess. The experiment apparently failed because of the openness of the vision. Not only did the monks and nuns pray together, but they sought to live a full daily life as brothers and sisters. The salacious would no doubt suggest some kind of grubby conspiracy, à la Matthew Lewis2,
but it is more likely to have been a more sedate and humane failure. Two brothers and two sisters fell in love, became two couples and, having left the community to set up as marrieds in the nearby village, embarked on family life. The effect on the nascent monastery was terminal.