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.

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.

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 ...

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:

Ups and Downs

This hasn't been the best of weeks. On Monday, over a month after our paperwork was lodged with the Diocesan Registry in London, I had a call from the Clerk to say that the Chancellor was away for a week and so we wouldn't hear about our faculty application this week: he knew it was important, however, and so would be taking it with him to work on. That was encouraging. However it was too late. Tuesday had been a deadline I'd settled with myself: no news that week, and there was no leeway for the work to be done ready for our first wedding on June 8th. So I had to go and tell the couple due to be married on that day that they couldn't be married in Swanvale Halt church. The bride used to bring her grandfather to church when he was alive, and now helps with our Junior Church despite being a Roman Catholic by upbringing. It was atrocious, and I didn't know what to do: the culmination of weeks of hoping, praying, tensely waiting. A sense of breakdown. I'm also having to negotiate between two fairground suppliers who each claim the right to attend our Spring Fair in May, and one of whom is quite nasty. Sadly he's the one who seems to have right on his side.

That meant there was no point hanging around, and so I went on my annual retreat for a couple of days to Malling Abbey. It was lovely to be quiet and non-interactive, but I suspect I was so tired I actually wasn't focusing very much. Here are a couple of photographs:


I was just about recovered from the sense of hysteria, though, and was driving back along the M25 through the sunshine when the car engine cut out. Simply stopped. Terrified I pulled over to the hard shoulder and called the AA who, thankfully, came very speedily indeed, gave the car the definite thumbs-down, and towed it back to the garage at the bottom of the hill. It turned out the cam belt had broken, and everything in the engine had smashed into everything else causing catastrophic damage. Two hours before I'd been congratulating myself on buying some particularly heavy books at a charity shop in West Malling, and now had to lug them back up the hill along with everything else.

Home to discover sixty emails, news that the retired priest in the parish is in hospital, and then almost immediately out for a meeting with the Town Clerk in Hornington about a civic service. The only relief (and an ambiguous and guilty one) was four phone messages from Mad Trevor, who I was due to meet that afternoon, and who has been sectioned. I'm not sure quite how I managed to propel myself out of the house on the bicycle to the Council offices. I caught the train to the cathedral to make my confession for Lent, but it felt a bit cursory. I couldn't either concentrate or relax.

In the evening I tried to call my mum, and got no reply. It was mid-evening, so I thought she might be babysitting at my sister's or eating there. But there was no reply there either. My mother hardly ever turns her mobile on and tonight was no exception, but my sister wasn't picking up either. It wore on past nine o'clock, nine-thirty, ten. By this time I was screaming and raving round the house. My mother, grandmother, sister, brother-in-law or nieces, or a combination of them, were in hospital I imagined and there was nothing I could do about it, stranded in Surrey with no car (and in any case piles and piles of things to do on Friday which was supposed to be a day off). It was an over-reaction, but I was running on empty: anything set me off. It wasn't until ten-thirty that my sister texted to say she'd been in a concert so didn't hear her phone: mum was indeed babysitting. Why she managed not to hear the phone in my sister's house the half-dozen times I called it over three hours I can't quite imagine.

For ages now I've woken up not wanting to face the day, sometimes whining and shrieking at the (perfectly ordinary) things I will have to do and interactions I'll have to engage in. Friday, thank God almighty, was some slight recovery. I was shaking as I made a to-do list, but gradually worked through it. I went to see a parishioner who's just had a cancer operation and her calmness and good temper was lifting; the garage called to say that, although the car probably wasn't worth repairing, they happened to have a very cheap Polo for sale which had just had an MOT test and might tide me over for a year to give me the chance to sort out something more permanent, so that was very lucky. I managed to chutney-fy the last of the 2011 apples (they haven't been prolific or up to much this year), and cooked for my lovely friends from Lamford, Caroline and John, who were as ridiculously appreciative as usual. So I've now had nearly 48 hours with nothing going wrong and nothing new coming up, and am calming down a bit. I'm not proud of myself for all this, and will have to watch my mental state.

The Silence Deeping

As I have in years past, I had the privilege this week of spending a couple of days at Malling Abbey in Kent. It's a place I love to go to because it's so deeply at odds with nearly everything else I do. I can go to Malling and not talk to anyone, if I please; I can even let the Sisters do the praying for me. The depth of the silence here has something to do with the fact that this is not just a Victorian religious house - this was the site of a convent for centuries before the Reformation when the nuns were expelled, only for an Anglican Benedictine community to reoccupy the ruins thanks to the good offices of a 19th-century Anglo-Catholic family giving up their property.

The Sisters have been joined by two new novices since my last visit two years ago, and the blossom is out on the interlacing apple trees.

And the skies were dramatic as I left.