Angels in Ordinary

Michaelmas Day gives me an opportunity not just to speak about angels but also our former sacristan Sister Mary, the ex-nun who 'always kept her vows' even when the Community of the Sacred Passion told her that because she couldn't put up with the climate in the parts of Africa where they worked, there was no place for her in the Order at all (poverty and chastity weren't a problem, obedience was a bit more difficult). This is because September 29th was the day she took her final vows all those years ago, and I always regard it as a subsidiary, local festival to Swanvale Halt: the Feast of the Solemn Profession of Vows of Blessed Mary Fontingham. We didn't always see things from the same point of view but our disagreements were mostly aesthetic: she felt Roman vestments made priests 'look like beetles scuttling about', and I never got my head around her fondness for gold lamé in the embroidered items she made. Yesterday, though, we did use the burse and veil from the old 'best white' set in Mary's honour.

I talked about Christianity's insistence on a hidden level of reality and the way the religious life is committed to uncovering that reality with an intensity that laypeople don't necessarily have to, even though we're called to acknowledge and proclaim it. We're not alone in doing so - the angels sing with us, but while we sing from a place of hope, they sing from one of certainty.

The congregation wasn't large yesterday; I looked out and realised that probably barely half the people there knew Sister Mary, but have joined the church since she died back in 2013. That caught me by surprise. Even the saints disappear gradually from human recollection, and are left to God's. 

The Cloister and the World

The world, as the holy Sisters of West Malling have always insisted, flows through the Abbey and through the prayers of its residents, permanent and temporary. Until this year’s Lenten visit, I hadn’t thought about how the presence of the stream watering its ancient grounds reflects this; it rises at St Leonard’s Well about two-thirds of a mile to the south, passes through, and out the famous cascade painted by Turner, before meandering around the Leybourne lakes, and reaching the Medway at Snodland (one of England’s most mellifluous placenames!). It enters from the worldly world, passes through the prayerful stillness of the Abbey, and emerges on the far side. It brings the world to the Abbey, and takes the Abbey and its prayers out into the world.

We stood in the customary circle at mass in the morning, but the World intrudes even here. We exchanged the Peace with our neighbours in the form of a courteous bow, and only the priest received the Chalice. This is a time of plague, and the Wuhan Distemper would wreak havoc at Malling if it got its microscopic foot in the door.

My spiritual book this year was not all that brilliant. I was surprised to see it on my shelves, and reckon I must have bought it years ago at Dr Bones’s suggestion. It says useful stuff in a pretty straightforward way. Still, its theme is precisely the connection between faith and action, and the tenderness of Jesus, which was apposite considering my own lack of tenderness was on my mind. The other book, though, was Robert Harvey’s Liberators: South America’s Savage Wars of Freedom, which I bought because it’s a period I know next to nothing about. I am only a quarter through, but that’s enough to convince me that I am grateful for not living in Venezuela, let alone the other Hispanic colonies, in the 1810s. By the time the narrative reaches the fall of the Second Venezuelan Republic, it’s a wonder there are any human beings left given the number of towns whose inhabitants have been slaughtered by one side or another, on top of disease, earthquake, and the ever-present backdrop of colonial exploitation imposed by brutal force. As ever, the social solvent of war throws up evil characters who outbid even the savagery of the age.

In the Abbey church, the plainchant bears the ancient words of the Psalms on its swooping, stately wings, an icon of eternity. These age-old poems insist that God hears the anguish of the world, even if they speak specifically of the suffering – and occasionally pride – of Israel. Israel stands for everyone, after all. His answer was the Cross, where mercy and justice meet; and it’s the cross we carry into the world, attempting as best we can to bear it.

Malling Abbey 2019

My previous stays at Malling Abbey have always been in the old guesthouse, or in recent years, the new Abbey Garth rooms. This is the first year I have stayed in the Tudor room over the Pilgrim's Chapel named S. Thomas Becket. It's more spacious than any of the others and has a little hatch that looks into the Chapel itself, its drawbacks being the remoteness from the kitchen, the fact that the toilet is down a precipitous staircase, and the bathroom, if such you can call it, is wedged into what is effectively a cupboard.

Before Malling Abbey cut its labyrinth into the turf a few years ago, I was sceptical about labyrinths: now I always walk it when I visit. The motif of the labyrinth is about the spiritual journey to some still point at the centre, a place of belonging and truth, and the outward journey has often felt a little awkward. You can cheat and just walk across the labyrinth, but if you don't do that, what is it you're doing by retracing your steps along its winding paths, now approaching, now distancing from the centre point, until eventually you leave? I only felt for the first time this year that it must be about taking what you have learned out again: you walk past quirks and obstacles you've passed before, and this time recognise them. It's as much a journey of growth as going inward is.

Taking the Dirty Water

I sometimes give myself a challenge in Assembly at the Infants School, and as yesterday was the Feast of St Thérèse of Lisieux I thought a good challenge would be to say something about her that a mixed group of 5 to 7 year-olds could grasp. I'm not sure whether I succeeded, but it made me read a bit about her. I've had a copy of L'Histoire d'une Ame for years, but never read it. 

What a brilliantly straightforward, honest young woman Thérèse was. She wrote that she found writings about the spiritual life quite hard to take on board, whereas, when she turned to the Scriptures, everything became pellucidly clear and seemed easy to manage. I find the opposite; the parables and sayings of Jesus are multifaceted and ambiguous, pointing us beyond what we are and where we are towards a heavenly way of living but - absolutely necessarily - not describing in any detail what that might mean. The lives of the saints, however, show ordinary men and women striving to work out what the Gospel meant for them, and sometimes give me something I can aspire to.

Thérèse's 'Little Way' is like that: concentrating on the small and apparently insignificant things you are called to do as a means of self-forgetting. I liked one story I stumbled on in her book. One particular sister Thérèse shared duty with in the convent laundry had a habit of flicking handkerchiefs to lay them out for drying in such a way that Thérèse was usually splashed with mucky water. This was probably not deliberate (although it might have been as most of the sisters were considerably older than Thérèse and she found them tough to get on with). Thérèse admitted that her first instinct was to take an obvious step back when this happened and thus passively-aggressively to impress on Sister X her displeasure without actually saying anything, although presumably explosions of temper were not entirely unknown among the Carmelites of Lisieux, either. Then she reflected that it was not her business to correct her fellow nun, and that getting used to this little discomfort was a suitable occasion for the exercise of virtue. 'Another sort of asperges', she jokes in L'Histoire, turning this disagreeable sprinkling into a reminder of baptism like the scattering of water during Mass. And so the transgression of Sister X lost all its power to make her angry and became a source of amusement instead.

You might think this all a bit weird. But living in community is full of instances which raise the same questions. Had Thérèse confronted Sister X, the other nun would either have been horrified and penitent, or defiant and stiff-necked. What would have been the point of either? Negligently splashing dirty water did Thérèse no harm, and if it was deliberate, taking Sister X to task would only have increased the bitterness of the situation. They all had to live with one another, after all: there was no escape. Instead Thérèse's little act of sacrifice absorbed all the potential hurt and converted it into something else. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in a group of people apparently devoted to a common purpose but in fact gathering all the time a history of petty rivalries and resentments will recognise how more apparently common-sense approaches to them seldom do much good. As in the Carmel of Lisieux, so in much of life - including a parish church.

The Vocation of the Whole Church

Michaelmas Day saw me at a church in Camberley giving a talk about the nature of priestly ministry and location, a shortened version of one I delivered a few months ago, to a group of people exploring their own sense of vocation. I found myself talking about Mary, our former sacristan, the ex-nun who had had to leave her missionary order after suffering a breakdown of health in Africa, but who always saw herself as a detached member of the community - a community which eventually repented its harsh treatment of her to some extent. 'I've always kept my vows, and I've always said my Office', she told me. Michaelmas Day was the date of her taking her final vows, so for me it's the 29th of September, rather than the date of her death in March, when I think of her most: it's become not only the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, but also the observance of the Solemn Profession of Vows of Blessed Mary Fearon. Infuriating sometimes, Mary, but a saint. Saints are often like that. 

At Morning Prayer before I headed out, I and Roy our verger said Psalm 150 together, the psalm set by the Church for M.P. on Michaelmas Day. It imagines the whole of creation joined together in a song of worship to God - 'let everything that has breath praise the Lord, alleluia' - and the angels lead that song. I thought of Mary singing the song of the angels along with them, as we should all pray we will one day. It's the work all Christians are called to do, before and after everything else.

Perhaps it seems a bit childish or flippant, bolting my own experience, rooted in my particular place and context, onto the great experience of the Holy Church, my memory of Mary onto the solemnity of the Angels. But it's only a Christianised version of what I think most human beings do, generating meaning and structure through connecting their own story with something bigger than they are. And it makes my small life with my own small and struggling church part of something beautiful and wondrous.

Juana Ines (2016)

The first couple of episodes of the Mexican miniseries on Netflix about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juana Inés, I found intriguing but pretty broad-brush. It was a glimpse into (someone’s version of) a period of history most English people know next to nothing about, Spanish Mexico in the 17th century. Sor Juana is perhaps the greatest figure of Mexican letters, a genius far from neglected even in her own lifetime: the Tenth Muse, the Minerva of the Americas, they called her, even while many of the religious authorities in New Spain chafed and grumbled at the idea of a woman (and a nun!) writing profane verse and speculating on theology. The amazing portrait of Sor Juana by Miguel Cabrera misleads with its sheer swagger (remember it was painted long after her death) and the most authentic image, created about 1680, is far more conventional while still emphasising the scholarly pursuits of its sitter, but she was highly thought of and clearly had no doubts about her own abilities. The series majors on the conflict of the learned nun and the Church hierarchy, but despite this restrictive set-up it becomes remarkably subtle by the end, an exploration of the nature of the religious life, albeit a contradictory and ultimately inconclusive one.

The show looks wonderful: the various New Spanish dignitaries remarkably resemble their contemporary portraits, and the clothes are fantastic. It’s all a bit static, as a great deal of the ‘action’ consists of characters talking to each other in cloisters, and often via a grille (any conversation between the Sisters of St Jerome and anyone who isn’t, for instance); and sometimes a bit repetitious, as young Juana first becomes the uncomfortable love-object of the desperately lonely and frustrated Vicereine Leonor, and then middle-aged Sor Juana enters into a not-quite-consummated relationship with Vicereine Maria-Luisa. The central relationship of the whole narrative is between Juana and her Jesuit confessor, Fr Antonio Nunez de Miranda, and that goes through thirty years of repeated conflict too until she dumps him and then, at the last, re-admits him. At first it seems that all the ecclesiastical figures are simply bigots, intent on reining-in this contumacious woman. There is Fr Antonio, apparently determined on saving Juana Inés’s soul from her own intellectual pride but full of his own unacknowledged motives; her cynical Prioress at the Hieronymite convent, Sor Maria, who cares mainly about preserving the comforts of the house against interference from outside; and the misogynist Archbishop Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas who seems frankly psychopathic. Only easygoing Archbishop Payo de Rivera, the cleric who admits Juana to her final vows and who likes a good poem and some Indian sweets, comes over particularly sympathetically.

Then after all this churchy and courtly to-ing and fro-ing, we have the last episode-and-a-bit where all these characters emerge rather differently. Poor Fr Antonio, who has spent thirty years harrying and manipulating Juana into giving up her intellectual life yet (as Archbishop de Aguiar points out) never quite forcing her, finally admits to her through the convent grille that he has been at least partly motivated by envy at her cleverness: that he has tried to ‘bring you down to my level’ by using the confessional to get her to stop writing. ‘I’ve never hated you … I’ve always admired you’, he stutters, and then passes through the grille the bundle of Juana’s romantic letters to the Vicereine that could get her denounced, surrendering the last hold he has over her. He gets shockingly beaten up by the Archbishop, and finally succumbs to a fever after a botched cataract operation: it’s not a happy end. When the Archbishop scours the convent for evidence to put Juana on trial, the Prioress is one of the very few sisters who refuses to collaborate (‘At my age, I can’t be expected to remember everything that’s happened over the last 25 years’, she comments innocently to the investigators), and organises the copying of her books so that they can be published in Madrid against the wishes of the colonial Church hierarchy. Finally, it’s the man who should be Sor Juana’s most bitter antagonist, the monstrous Archbishop de Aguiar, who liberates her: he visits the convent garden (overcoming his repugnance of female contact) to tell her she is free to choose what to be – a nun, or in her heart still a courtier, living in her imagination a life she claims to have left behind, to be ‘Juana Inés de Asbaje, or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’. He’s not going to force her. You can see the scales fall from her eyes as she realises how much of her literary endeavour has been motivated less by pure delight in learning than by the very opposition she has aroused. Liberation from pressure means she can lay down her pen. She sells her books and equipment and gives the money to the city’s poor.

Except she doesn’t, quite. The series has to accommodate the fact that, although the historical Sor Juana Inés made a public act of penance and never published again, after she died ministering to the other nuns in a plague, manuscripts and books were found secreted in her cell proving that she never gave up writing completely. The story shows her treating this as a spiritual conflict, an addictive habit she has to combat: she even blames herself for the plague that hits the convent, scourging herself so that the aghast Prioress has to tear the whip out of her hands, and then breathing in the infected breath of one of the sisters so she too can die.

In the end I was impressed by the genuine way the series treats religion when at first I thought it was going to be a bit of a panto. Of course, from a secular-humanist point of view, Juana Inés’s change of heart is nothing more than a defeat, and it’s to the show’s credit that it hints otherwise. Sor Juana and Fr Antonio, at the centre of the maelstrom of misogyny and power, are shown taking the business of sin and redemption absolutely seriously. Both deeply flawed people, they see in the end how it goes to their very hearts. ‘God moves in mysterious ways’, says Fr Antonio somewhat pathetically as they talk about Juana Inés’s life at their last confession, which is as much his as hers; ‘God himself is the mystery’, she answers.

Malling Abbey in the Snow

After a weekend of trying pastoral encounters in which, eventually, I didn't acquit myself well at all, it was a relief to know that I was setting off for a couple of days at Malling Abbey. It didn't start that well: after pulling off the main road into West Malling High Street that is the first harbinger of the separate world you're entering, and finding my way to the guest room I would be using (it's all much easier now there's a code on the outer door so that you can get in without having to alert the attention of anyone inside), no sooner had I put down my bags than the church office called to say the alarms had gone off at the Rectory. I had to drive all the way back home again. Of course there was nothing identifiable wrong - no break-in, no fallen object that might have set the alarm off. 'It shouldn't have done that,' mused the engineer over the phone. No, it shouldn't. I returned to Kent and said the Office in my room having arrived too late to hear the Sisters sing Vespers. The reading was from the First Letter of St Peter and strangely apposite to the events of the previous few days, so I thought I would frame my reflections around verses from that text. There were several that made sense. 

The general otherworldliness of the Abbey was intensified by the snow that fell yesterday and overnight. I think it snowed during my second stay at Malling, a long while ago now, but that was little more than a dusting. This was quite a heavy blanket, accompanied, this morning, with beautiful lucid sunshine. 

Back to Malling

You might think that religious communities never change, from decade to decade – and even century to century – and that perhaps that’s their point. But they do, and last year I missed out on my annual retreat to Malling Abbey because the holy Sisters were reorganising the guest accommodation, and in fact I was too woefully disorganised to get in anywhere else either. It was a relief to be back this year for a couple of days.

The guests now inhabit four nice new rooms over the Abbey cloister, looking out onto the Cloister Garth with its fountain and church bell tower behind. The old Guesthouse, which comprised many more rooms, had a certain spatchcock charm, but I won’t miss scuttling along the hallway in my pyjamas wondering who I might meet on my way to the shower, and not being able to move around the room without the floor creaking so much one risked waking the resident next door. It used to be pleasant to have meals cooked for us, but I don’t resent the Sisters deciding that aspect of Benedictine hospitality is a bit beyond them now, and self-catering just requires a little organisation. Frankly I never went to Malling for the food, it has to be said; although a few years ago on the Feast of St Benedict we were treated to rather a nice banoffee pie.

The old Guesthouse is now occupied by the St Benedict’s Centre, a theological and spiritual resource for St Augustine’s College, Canterbury, with a new library on the opposite side of the path. There’s a big car park beyond what was a tall hedge, and a path between the two along which people come and go, making the site feel less isolated than it once did. The Pilgrim Chapel’s quaint rush-seated chairs have been replaced by upholstered red ones, aesthetically horrendous but far more comfortable. There are entry-code doors and PIR-operated lights so you run less risk of serious injury moving around the Abbey at night (of course once upon a time it was assumed you wouldn’t be moving around at night) and so you no longer have to ask the Guest Sister for permission to be outside the enclosure after Compline. Change has come to perpetual Malling; and although as outsiders none of us knows quite what conversations the community went through before they opened themselves up in this way, it must have taken quite some mental restructuring, some reassessment of what ‘Benedictine hospitality’ actually meant.

My time there was good. I arrived in rain, spent Tuesday in lovely sunshine, and left in rain again: seeing the Abbey in its different meteorological moods gives some sense of what living there is like. I managed to pray about things I need to amend in my life, aspects of the life of Swanvale Halt church, and the centrality of the Blessed Sacrament as I sat in the Pilgrim Chapel with the rain beating on the windows. I got through Michael Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church, which reminded me why I read it first ten years ago, and Rowan Williams’s Silence and Honey Cakes about the spirituality of the Desert Fathers. I’ve read that before, too, but it hit home far deeper this time. The book is more than it first appears: far from being just an examination of a time in the past life of the Church, it’s a politely and covertly stated manifesto for what the Church should be now: certainly not adopting too much the models of the manager and theologies of leadership (as though Jesus ever talked of any such thing!), but based rather on the words of St Antony the Great: ‘Our life and death is with our neighbour. If we win our brother we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble we have sinned against Christ.’ Of course he takes a book, albeit not a long one, to open that statement out. I realised afresh how superficial and silly my spiritual life can be and the nonsense that sometimes characterises my thinking. I think I have a new glimpse of the reason why there are priests, and why parish priests are in so perilous a spiritual position. I walked to St Leonard’s Well and found it dry as it sometimes is (it was in full flow in 2015).

And I was very grateful for it all, for the rain and for the sun and for these old stones and for Benedictine hospitality, whatever it means in the 21^st century.

Back to Malling

Just a few images from my annual visit to Malling Abbey just before Easter - for the sake of it.

Reprehensible Nostalgia

Snobbishly, it feels slightly embarrassing to admit to enjoying something as popular as the BBC drama Call The Midwife, but I and Ms Formerly Aldgate have indeed rather delighted in catching up with the series over the last year since discovering it. There are those who react very unfavourably to its saccharine approach to the 1950s and depictions of 'posh people being nice', but then the caring professions were full of posh people being nice, and watching an hour of human beings struggling to be as good as they can be is a healthy change from serial killers, of which, in reality, there are rather fewer about than television might have us believe.

I feel a particular connection with the events because of my albeit short stay in Poplar while I was at theological college. Although the real convent which Jennifer Worth's midwifery memoirs were based on is the Community of St John the Divine in Whitechapel, most of the action is still set in Poplar, somewhat to the south and east, where I did my placement in 2002. The parish of Poplar, in common with most of the rest of the East End, was a great centre of Anglo-Catholicism, once upon a time comprising nine churches and a staff of twelve curates (or was it twelve churches and nine curates?) as well as the Rector, not counting all the lay workers and Sisters of various religious orders. In the 1950s the then Rector of Poplar, Fr Eastaugh, who later become Bishop of Hereford, came to Swanvale Halt at our incumbent's invitation to lead a Mission. That whole world, of course, is now long-gone, thanks to wartime depredation, depopulation, immigration and economic change; of all those Poplar churches only two survive, one of which (St Nicholas, Blackwall Steps) has now been moved to an entirely different location. Only the original parish church, Georgian All Saints, maintains a tenuous link with the culture the TV series shows.

The aspect of Call The Midwife which impresses itself most on me is its generous depiction of Christian faith and life. The more quotidian and twee features of an Anglican parish in the 1950s, from cub scout troupes to nativity plays, one might expect to be gently ridiculed, but aren't, and are in any case balanced by the gentle intensity of the experience of the nuns and the laypeople who interact with them. When the Sisters sing Compline it's suspiciously professional (no ropey notes or coughing), but I recognise the chant tones with a sense of gratitude, and the way faith and life interpenetrate is shown seriously and realistically, almost as though Christianity might be something sensible people could adhere to and find it shaping their lives and helping them in both challenging and joyful times. So far as popular culture is concerned, it so very rarely is.

Back to the Abbey

As in previous years I spent a couple of days on a Lenten retreat at Malling Abbey. The Holy Sisters are planning building work to turn part of the premises into a proper retreat house for the Canterbury Diocese. Even more excitingly, they've bought two new toasters for the dining room which actually toast bread rather than just warm it up a bit.

I walked the turf labyrinth in the grounds. Usually I don't go in for labyrinths and what my friend Adam from St Stephen's House would have described as 'Celtic nonsense', but I rather like the one at Malling. There are gnarled old apple trees, and a couple of others, in the grounds which the grass paths must wind their way around on their journey to the centre, meaning that as you wend your way around the labyrinth you are not simply treading a featureless path but continually approaching and retreating from these trees and seeing them from different angles. It adds a depth to walking the labyrinth you might not otherwise get.

As I was there, slowly treading the turf and trying not to get too muddy, I saw one of the Sisters driving a small tractor around the grounds, circling the trees. The tractor had nothing attached to it, no mower, harrow or roller. She went round and round for about ten minutes and then drove off into the Enclosure and by the sound of it drove around in there for a while. I couldn't work out what the purpose of this was, and wondered whether it was a penance, or a reward ...

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Beyond the Hills (2012)

A stray mention in a magazine describing a film festival in London led me to Beyond the Hills, a dour but compelling description of sad events in a Romanian convent. Alina and Voichita grew up in the same orphanage, but since leaving their lives have taken different courses, Alina going to Germany to work and Voichita becoming an Orthodox nun. Alina comes back to find her friend, and brings disturbance to her and the life of the convent, which eventually results in tragedy.

The style is ultra-realistic and yet despite a complete lack of cinematic tricks and fireworks and a very understated mode of acting the film manages to be fascinating, probably because the story and characters are so real and involving. So they should be - the inspiration came from the terrible events of the Tanacu exorcism which took place in 2005, and it's a jolt sometimes to remember that despite the nuns' almost medieval lifestyle with drawing water from a well, shovelling snow and lack of electricity, theirs is actually a new and modern convent not far from a contemporary Romanian town. The town has its own problems: an under-resourced hospital, overworked medical staff, weary police, endless roadworks - the issues of a tired society struggling to make do in a tough and changing world. None of the characters are wicked, and you can see so easily how the little community deprived of both oversight and outside help falls into chaos and horror. In fact you learn very little about people's inner motivations, what is actually happening, even the exact nature of Alina and Voichita's relationship, and that reticence and ambiguity makes the narrative all the more affecting.

Place of Silence

Looking out of a window at West Malling Abbey, where I was on retreat last week:

And one of the fun gargoyles on the gatehouse:

They Do Things Differently

I happened to speak today to a member of an Anglican religious order who spent some time in South Africa and who told me about the way certain ecclesiological controversies had been managed there. ‘The ministry of women was sorted out in one day,’ he said. ‘Nobody was forced to do anything, everyone against was accommodated, whether you were a bishop, a priest or a parish. Deacons, priests, bishops, all voted for at once, no fuss, no agonising, and they’re just about to appoint their first female bishop. Here, it’s just mess and pain and disaster.’

‘And as for gay marriage,’ he went on, ‘the South African government declared everyone had to marry same-sex couples. They weren’t going to give anyone a conscience clause, Christians, Jews, Muslims, whatever. The Archbishop said, well, the Prayer Book won’t let us do this. And he simply suspended the marriage licence of every Anglican priest in South Africa. Result, chaos: nobody could get married in an Anglican church. The State gave us a conscience clause in a week. Here, it’s going to take years of heartache and handwringing.’

Oases in the Desert

I've just finished reading this book by Peta Dunstan, The Labour of Obedience, a history of the Anglican Benedictine monks of Pershore, Nashdom and Elmore. It's a fantastic story, beginning with the defection of Abbot Aelred Carlyle of Caldey Island to the Roman Catholic Church in 1913, telling how the Order survived just through Denys Prideaux, who was then a mere oblate but was convinced to take full orders so that the Benedictine life could be maintained in the Church of England, an aim to which he devoted his life and, arguably, sanity; of the personalities not just of Denys but his successors as Abbot and their battles with the less Ultramontane hierarchy of the Anglican Church; of the monks' gradual acceptance; of the dislocations of the 1960s and 70s, and the marginalisation of the monastic tradition since then. It's very well done.

It made me reflect what's happened to the religious life in the Church of England as a whole, particularly the Benedictine tradition. The Sisters of West Malling we know about and indeed hopefully I will be off there for a retreat in a few weeks' time. The six brothers of Alton Abbey, where we had our pre-ordination retreat from Staggers, are holding doggedly on to their gigantic plant in the Hampshire woods, and Edgware Abbey is still there with its atrocious buildings, but elsewhere religious communities have had to relinquish their grand premises and occupy more humble settings. The Sisters of the Holy Cross are now based at Costock:
... having sold the rather well-appointed Rempstone Hall for £2.5M. The brothers and sisters of Burford are now at Mucknell Abbey in Worcestershire, which in its starkness seems to reach back beyond the Middle Ages to something even earlier:

And what of the great foundation of Pershore/Nashdom itself? Well, the brothers made the move to humbler surroundings at Elmore in Berkshire in 1987, unable to keep up the gigantic Lutyens mansion which had been their home for sixty years. Last year they abandoned Elmore in turn, and this is where the remaining brethren are now, St Benedict's Priory in Salisbury:

It's the former house of the Principal of Salisbury Theological College, as was; and how permission was ever granted to build it in Salisbury Cathedral close one can't imagine, but there you go.

What this represents is the relinquishing of the great medievalist fantasy of monasticism, expressed through stunning buildings, elaborate liturgy, mitred abbots and ecclesiastical politics. Instead God seems to be sending Anglican monasticism back to humility, smallness, and a ministry of prayerful presence whether in the Dark Age isolation of Mucknell or the urban centrality of Salisbury. It's something different for a different age.

'Through the Narrow Gate', by Karen Armstrong

I've just finished reading Karen Armstrong's memoir of her time as a nun in a restrictive Roman Catholic order in the 1960s. A very good read indeed - though given Ms Armstrong's less than fastidious approach to religious history you must wonder, all allowances being made for the novelistic style, whether everything really did happen quite like that. The contrast between the etiolated emotional life of the convent and the warm, supportive community of women students the former nun has entered at the end of the book is a little too neat and tidy. What emerges most strongly is the bizarre attempt such orders made to live entirely in the head, to the extent of repeatedly ignoring what were clearly physical illnesses (not just Karen Armstrong's, though years later her fainting fits were traced to temporal lobe epilepsy) on the grounds that the sisters concerned were hysterical or not being tough enough. 'If seven years in the order taught me anything', Ms Armstrong states, 'it was the relative feebleness of the human will' - a lesson which should have been a fundamental assumption in any Christian spiritual venture. Vatican II got shot of a lot of things which would have been better retained, but the excessive and very unChristian Platonism of the religious orders is not one of them.

St Seiriol's Well, Penmon

Here's something a bit nicer. On holiday in Wales I went to Penmon, on the eastern tip of Anglesey (or Ynys Mon as they insist nowadays), having wanted to go for a long while. This was the monastery of St Seiriol, one of those shadowy holy men of the Dark Ages who founded religious communities through the Celtic lands. It feels as though it takes a long while to get to, though Penmon isn't really all that isolated and Anglesey isn't all that rough. Before long there was a daughter settlement over on Puffin Island a mile or so out in the Irish Sea, and that must have been a bit more challenging, as though the monks felt life on the not-quite-mainland wasn't tough enough. The legend was that whenever the brothers fell out with each other a plague of mice would eat all their food, so perhaps Puffin Island was where they sent the specially fractious ones.

Today Penmon is an odd sort of place. You park in a rough car park and a rotund cove in a beanie hat toddles out of a hut to collect your fee. All around are the monastic relics, including ruins, a very grand dovecote, and the church with some more modern cottages built onto it around a little yard, and beyond them remains of quarry workings and derelict houses. Then there's a little path which takes you round the corner towards St Seiriol's Well.

This is one of the loveliest religious landscapes I've ever visited. The rock forms a natural enclosure, the well huddling beside them, and the remnants of what may be circular monastic cells scattered around. Were they the actual dwelling places of Seiriol himself and his early companions? Well, that may be wishful thinking - and certainly the well-house itself was substantially rebuilt in the 1700s - but it at least has the feel of those remote times. It is a bit neat and tidy, a bit like a theme park display of Dark Age monasticism, but there is a beautifully romantic sense of contact with antiquity. And, after all, St Seiriol did walk this greensward even if he may not have laid these precise stones.

Flogging a Dead Emotion

My friend Cylene, who has her problems, asked me last night why she should get a hard time from her psychologists for cutting when self-flagellation was an acceptable and even encouraged practice in certain Christian traditions. Cutting is(at least for her) equally ritualistic, she maintains, and brings a feeling of catharsis which can be seen as therapeutic even though most people are very disturbed by the practice.

I've never read very much about pain-inflicting practices within the Christian Church, nor have I spoken to anyone who's ever admitted practising them. Extreme groups like the medieval Flagellants were usually regarded as being illegitimate by Church authorities, though I'm not sure whether that was more for their bizarre practices or their tendency to slip into heretical beliefs. More mainstream instances are more mysterious. Karen Armstrong talks about it a little in Through the Narrow Gate, her narrative of leaving a pre-Reform Roman Catholic convent in the late 1960s, and of how dissatisfaction with 'the Discipline', as beating oneself with knotted cords was known, focused her issues with the religious life in general. She concluded that, at least in her case, it twisted sexual feelings in an unhealthy direction and confronted her superiors with the conclusion, but it's clear that The Discipline was intended not to deal with sexual feelings alone, but with all the other 'worldly' emotions and thoughts aroused by the intense experience of community living: resentment, anger, or just boredom. It was, I suppose, a means of processing negativity in circumstances where there was no safe way of expressing it, and converting unhelpful emotions into physical pain allowed them to be connected with the sufferings of Jesus.

Like most forms of self-harm, it seems to me (and of course I may be wrong, but Cylene agrees) that cutting is also a means of processing negative emotions. Anger and rage towards people you rationally don't want to damage can be dealt with in a very formal, ritualised way by self-damage: the feelings are psychologically so unacceptable that rather than face them they can be converted into something which, because of its ritual nature, is more contained. 'I'm frightened that if I don't cut I might hurt someone', Cylene says. The danger is that, if you happen to have suicidal feelings (which is rather likely), the ritualised, contained business of cutting may take you further than you originally intend. But, considered on its own, I think she's right: there's not much to separate it from self-harm in a religious context.

Malling Abbey

I've mentioned Malling Abbey before. It's a wonderful place, where the centuries of prayer seem to have soaked into the soil. I have a deep concern for the convent and was delighted to see that the holy Sisters have put together a website - very simple, but a shop window for the Abbey and the contemplative life which is so very, very vital to the rest of us in the Church. There are times when I think the whole of the Church of England rests on twenty women praying in a convent in the middle of Kent.


www.mallingabbey.org