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 The Pilgrim Chapel’s quaint rush-seated chairs have been replaced by upholstered red ones, aesthetically horrendous but far more comfortable.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.