If you get one of those emails from me saying I am currently marooned overseas and need help, please don’t ignore it. It’s true. At time of writing, I am stuck on the Isle of Wight. Storm Katie means that there are no ferries operating. And I would be most happy to be marooned here for a few more days, to bathe in the graces of a wonderful Triduum and Easter Sunday celebrated with the Benedictine community at the Abbey of St Cecilia’s in Ryde, so don’t send any money.
The Abbess told me when I arrived on Maundy Thursday that many of the nuns had colds and sore throats. It didn’t affect the beauty of the chant, though there were a lot of handkerchiefs being wielded in choir. I am sure the nuns must feel, as I do, as if we have made a long journey together. I am tired and joyful and full of zeal for the beauty of holiness, so that all I have to record are a series of impressions which are so very rich and powerful that it will take more time and silence for them to solidify into a coherent whole. Actually, I am not sure they need to.
I think that may be the wrong object – too static, like a photograph hung in the hall of my mind that I will look at from time to time, something too conceptualised. The deepest impressions are not in my mind but in my heart: a more dynamic process than memory whereby the individual elements are transcended into nonconceptual reality – or better, are touched by it. I can only list a few.
The great doors to the enclosure swing back and there, outlined only by the molten glow of a charcoal fire in a brazier, stands the community. Their long veils and habits (like other things about their life which might seem at first impression anachronistic: the grilles, the silence, etc) impart a grace and stateliness to the group standing in a simple act of waiting. On the other side of the enclosure are a small gathering of people whose dress and age and condition even in the darkness are apparently quite disparate. They are just a group of people waiting for something.
On the nuns’ side the evident stillness and uniformity lend a prophetic quality to this scene. The mother of all vigils begins. A vigil is not a yearly thing for the nuns. They keep vigil very early every morning with singing psalms and readings. They are the wise virgins of the Scriptures, who keep watch for the Bridegroom, not just for themselves but for a sleeping world.
Tonight’s vigil is different. The Bridegroom was lost, they have mourned for him and for his suffering, and now they wait the cry that tells them that He is risen, the Lumen Christi which shatters the darkness and gives purpose to all their watching. As a special privilege the liturgical procession is allowed to follow the Paschal candle through the cloister to the church. Suddenly the paschal candle is ahead of me; in its light I see the ribs of the cloister above and the outline of the Mistress of Ceremonies leading the way into the nuns’ choir. As we turn I am dimly aware of the silhouettes of the rest of the community processing silently behind on either side of the cloister and I think of Wordsworth’s metaphor “quiet as a nun”.
It could be a scene from hundreds of years ago in its simple outline. This is important, not for reasons of nostalgia but because we are celebrating Christus heri et hodie, yesterday and today, and the sense of continuity is itself helpful and Catholic. We do not need to strive for ever more creative expressions of emotion; we take our turn in the procession of those who have contemplated this mystery before us and handed it down so that we also might believe, and believing have life.
Nothing can compare to the exuberance of bells announcing the Resurrection. They ring from the louvred tower of the church for Lauds and before Mass, not some English mathematical pattern of changes, but a wonderful jangling joy that ends the sombre silence that has held them since Maundy Thursday. I have a momentary fantasy of nuns swinging in the ropes, so happy does it sound. And, like some perfect divine screenplay, there appears arcing above the tower of the church and enfolding the abbey a full rainbow, the promise of a covenant whose cosmic dimensions exceed anything Noah could first have imagined, a covenant which enfolds all time and all the ages; the light of Christ’s glory shining through the vapours of sin and death and beautifying them with his radiance and the sevenfold gift of his Spirit.
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