After Vespers, there’s this space before it’s time to gather for Collatio and then into Compline. Not long. The professed brothers will gather in the calefactory, or maybe go for a stroll in these warmer months of the year. It’s a beautiful evening.
There’s a fireplace in the novitiate. The teaching circle of benches and low stools is broken up as the young men take them to gather round the hearth.
Colin usually looks forward to this convivial hour among his new friends before it’s time to go down to the cloister. But not tonight. Vivid impressions and pictures from the day move around inside him like rustling forest creatures, glimpsed and lost. This day… he feels like a man who put his hand unthinking on a mound in the grass he hadn’t looked at properly, only to feel it furry and breathing, warm to his touch. With a heartbeat. This day has overflowed with life. Music. Faces. Voices. Beauty. Mystery. Kindness. The curious individuality of men, in their human struggle to bring forth a faithful life.
So instead of heading inside to find the others, after Vespers he wanders slowly along the cloister to find some solitary peace. He walks the length of the west range, past the refectory, the little parlour, and the abbot’s house which wraps round to form part of the south range under the dorter. Where the south range meets the east range an archway opens out towards the river. As he strolls that way, alongside the kitchen garden and the orchard, Colin wonders why on earth the past monks who built the abbey sited the refectory in the west range instead of the south. It ought to be handy for the kitchen buildings that jut out from the east range. They shouldn’t have to trundle things back and forth as they do; it’s a daily inconvenience. That’s seriously bad planning, he thinks. He wonders if, in the old days, in the abbey’s beginning, that storage room in the east range just off the kitchen might have been the original refectory. The big room next to the buttery. Probably – it has a nice arched ceiling and very lofty windows. Perhaps they moved it when numbers grew. If you’re going to have lots of men, why not make things as awkward as you possibly can? Good for them. So what’s now the frater used to be… what? Not the library. Nobody in their right mind would leave books so accessible to people drifting through, just off the abbey court like that. Anyway, the library in its present location, upstairs, has the air of establishment; the shelves are old, the nails in the wall well rusted. He tucks it away as something to ask the novice master in the morning.
He decides not to go to the left, beside the riverbank up towards the spinney and the burial ground, the farm and the moorland above, because that’s a favourite walk for many of the brothers, and this evening he wants to be on his own. So he turns to walk along the path by the huge storage rooms, built like caves into the side of the hill as the land slopes down the valley flank to the river. Part buried, each having only one big window facing the river, they stay cool – and in some cases usefully damp – even on this south-facing side of the square. The sun serves to keep most of them tolerably dried out. It works well.
The path snakes on into the birch grove at the back of the abbot’s house. These trees are so graceful, incarnating inspiration and peace in their whispering, leafy, arising height. He notices, somewhat to his annoyance because he craves solitude, a brother sitting on the low bench there under the tree. Then he stops short as he realizes it’s the abbot, and now it suddenly occurs to him that here, right behind his house, is probably where Father John seeks refuge and takes much needed time to be alone. In fact it’s quite possible this could be a place hardly anyone goes, in tacit agreement that their abbot should be allowed a bit of privacy. He would have turned right round and walked away if it hadn’t been that the abbot has seen him, lifted his hand in a friendly wave. So now he doesn’t know what to do. Walk past? Go back? Speak to him? They’re not in silence yet.
Accepting that it would on balance look very rude to turn on his heel and head in the opposite direction, Colin decides the best thing to do is greet him and be honest about not having known this to be private space.
The simple humility of the cellarer’s apology is still sending ripples from the centre of his being to its periphery and back, but obviously “I’m sorry, John” would be most impertinent coming from a postulant. So, as he comes near, he settles for a humble “I’m sorry, Father” by way of greeting.
“What? Why?” says his abbot.
“I hadn’t the wit to see this patch of land at the back of your house is for your private use. I didn’t mean to blunder in and disturb you.”
His abbot smiles. The serious face, verging on stern much of the time, is warmed and illumined by kindness that seems to emerge and envelop Colin like a hug.
“Don’t you worry,” he says. “Think nothing of it.” From which Colin correctly infers that he was right, and he shouldn’t have strayed along into this grove. “There’s no private property here. Come and sit down.”
Colin hasn’t been long in this monastic community, but it has been early made clear to him that when the abbot suggests, or invites, you don’t say no. It’s a command. He’s just putting it courteously.
Father John shifts along from the middle of the bench to make enough room for him to be comfortable. “You look pensive,” he says. “Everything all right?”
“Oh, yes, Father – it’s just been one of those days when I’ve seen so much and learned and felt so much, taken such a lot on board, that I thought my head would burst. I think, in truth, this has been a turning point for me – making up my mind that this is the right place for me. This is where I want to be.”
He glances shyly at the abbot for his reaction, and is encouraged to see the evident gladness his words have brought.
“That’s good to hear,” Abbot John says quietly. “I won’t say more than that, because you must have space to change your mind if you think differently later. But – well, it brings me joy.”
“What…” Colin plucks up courage to ask: “What were you thinking about?”
“Me?” The abbot gazes out through the trees with their beautiful dappling light to where the low sun reflects golden on the river. “Well, oddly enough, I was thinking about my own first weeks and months in our community. When I was a novice and, before that, a postulant. The things I liked, and what I found hard to adjust to. We – I came here before the time of Father Peregrine – we had Father Gregory of the Resurrection for our abbot then; a sensible, practical man. Very sane. I was thinking back to a conversation I had with him. Something I didn’t get on with at all in the early days was all the ritual and ceremony. I mean, I was used to the Mass of course, like everybody, so I expected to bow and genuflect and make the sign of the cross and all of that. But I didn’t get on so well with there being a correct way of doing every blessed thing – a form of words, a prescribed action, when you could, when you couldn’t, what you had to… I felt as though I’d been caught and caged, a wild animal used to ranging the moor and the forest, prodded and schooled into performing a whole lot of tricks. And I said as much to Father Gregory.
“He listened patiently, God bless him. I think I might have been very rude in the way I expressed myself, but he didn’t chide me. He just listened, and commented in that mild, vague way he had, that if I liked I could try to see all these things we did as reminders. Useful, like notes to myself that I didn’t have to bother carting around and sorting through, because the life did the reminding for me. He said there’s only one trick really, and that’s getting the knack of seeing more deeply into the meaning of all the little things we do. Like learning to say ‘our book’ and ‘our spoon’, instead of ‘mine’ – it’s to remind us we are vowed to own nothing. That we have chosen simplicity, holy poverty. And then we can look deeper again, to remember that we belong to Christ; we are his property and at his disposal. We do not own because we are owned. And he said there is more peace in that than hardship; it is such a blessing and a relief to put everything down – all the cares of the world, all the troubles – and find rest in Christ, the one to whom we belong.
“He said the bowing, the kneeling, is for remembering humility – and is not that the most beautiful thing in the world? And the forms of address – Father, Brother – they are to comfort us with the reminder that this is our family. We have made a commitment to one another. This is no mere acquaintanceship or passing encounter. We have made one another our kin. Oh, and so much else he said, Colin. But for fear of boring you and because I haven’t forgotten you came down here seeking solitude, only to find me drivelling on about how things were In My Day, I think I’d better stop. I guess the main thing he meant was that I, by nature impatient and all too inclined to be dismissive, would do well to learn to look more deeply before I tossed aside treasure I hadn’t understood. And that’s a lesson I’ve gone on learning – oh my, is it not!”
They sit in silence then. Colin wonders what he’s supposed to do now. Should he go? Must he wait to be dismissed? A small, whirling cloud of midges catches his eye, the dance of their tiny wings reflecting the sun in sparks of gold over the river shallows just beyond the trees.
Time passes, and the abbot does not speak. As they sit there in quietness, Colin thinks how unusual this is. People generally feel obliged to make conversation. Silence is normally something awkward, prompting jests and adages and nervous laughter. But his abbot just lets it be. In his company, the peace he had hoped to find in solitude begins to seep into Colin’s soul. As the sun dips low – crimson, vermilion, lilac, blue-green – the light fades from the day and the shadows intensify, he becomes aware in the cooling air of the human body warmth of the man sitting so close beside him. Sitting there together, the postulant has a sense of getting to know him – becoming acquainted with the colour… flavour… quality… of his soul. In the quiet dusk it emanates from him as distinctly as the aroma of an animal. Personality. Human being. And then the sun slips below the horizon and here beneath the trees chill shadows gather. In peaceful resonance, clear, measured, sonorous, the bell begins to ring.
“Oh! Rats!” The abbot sits forward, then jumps to his feet. “I must just run across to the gatehouse and have a word with Brother Martin; tell him not to – er – see you later, Colin – good to have a moment to talk.”
And before the postulant has the chance to stand up as he should when his superior rises, and bow and do everything properly the way he’s been taught, with a flurry of robes and a stride that almost breaks into a run, the abbot is gone.