Day and a Life (eBook)

Chapter
One

It starts in the deepest darkness of the night. The call of a hunting owl. Across the valley, the loud, melodramatic yapping of a vixen. No other sound. The hens are asleep on their roosts, close together, their heads tucked down. The sheep, packed tight in the byre, breathe air warmed by each other’s bodies. The calf sleeps close against the warm belly of her slumbering mother.

The abbey lies under a gibbous moon, rapt in the Grand Silence. Clouds drift. How profound is the night, and sometimes how terrible. Dreams. Death. Darkness. Demons of insecurity, terror, loneliness, regret are let loose. But at this hour, who is stirring?

In the infirmary, small lights burn. The two men who have kept watch over the sick make their second round of the dark hours, quietly and without fuss: turning those who can no longer move, changing wet sheets, checking all is well. Brother Michael holds the lantern up, so he and Brother Benedict can see their way along the passage. The place where they are is eaten by shadows, but the warm, dancing halo of candlelight illumines Michael’s face. Even in the crumpled weariness of the depth of night, you can see the kindness. You would trust this man, with your life – and many do. Benedict is new to working through the night. He took his solemn vows – his life vows – in the summer. In his novitiate year, they let him go to bed. But here, someone always has to keep watch. Now Brother Damian has been moved to work in the school, and John is abbot, Michael is grateful to have Benedict with him. And they know each other well. The night strips away defences, and bonds form between man and man, in the care of the sick.

The infirmary is set apart from the main buildings of the abbey: the great church, looming up monolithic, a majestic assurance of faith immoveable under the night wind, the shifting clouds, the waning moon. Beside the church, the cloister garth, and set around its verdant square the west, south, east ranges of the abbey buildings, all folded in stillness.

Father Bernard, the sacristan, is lost in dreams; just the faintest whistling snore. He has no idea what he dreams, because he never remembers them. He is not tortured by the recollection of deadly sweet concupiscence, the sensual ardour of unconscious erotica: not that it doesn’t happen – he just forgets. The moon doesn’t peep through his window; at this hour she is looking in on someone else.

The sacristan’s cell has been built just a little larger, to accommodate an utterly essential device: the clepsydra. This water clock drips time away until the point is reached when the striking mechanism, operated by weights and a rope, turns the axle so that the flail strikes the little bells, and wakes up Father Bernard.

He knows from past experience of embarrassing human frailty what you have to do: get up immediately. The clock will not sound another alarm until he re-sets it for the next night. If he lingers for two more minutes, that can lengthen into three… five… drowsing… back to sleep. And an entire monastic community can fail to make Vigils. This must not happen. So the instant those bells penetrate the sacristan’s sleep – and he is listening for them in some buried watchfulness persisting beneath bodily rest – he swings his feet down to the floor, bringing himself to sit upright on the warm hollow of his low wooden bed. And stands up, stiffly, stretching.

Apart from the care of the sick, and the cold nights of early spring when Brother Stephen watches over the lambing, the monastic day begins here, with Father Bernard. He fastens his sandals, his belt. In his cell he has a lantern with a fat candle that burns through the night. Too many abbeys have been rased to the ground as a result of a brother struggling with flint and tinder in the dark. The abbot of this one will not take that risk. So their sacristan sleeps with the light burning, the living flame enclosed securely inside its iron and horn cage. It doesn’t stink like the tallow candles of an ordinary home. Monks prize their bees. The beehive is itself a sort of monastery: Our Lady in her chapel surrounded by her industrious virgin community. And the wax burns sweet and clear, freshening the room. If the sacristan breaks wind as he drifts off to sleep, the flame from beeswax restores the air to purity.

Father Bernard takes up the lantern and leaves his cell. Just outside, on a shelf affixed to the wall next to his door, stands the bell, its wooden handle worn smooth and shiny from the hefting of his hand every night of the year.

He starts along the dorter, making the most unholy jangling clamour as he goes by. Unstinting, as he treads slow and reliable along the passage between the closed cells, the faithful hullabaloo rouses the community out of sleep – ker-chang, ker-chang, ker-chang – all the way to the end and back again.

Doors are opening already as he reaches the night stairs. Going carefully, minding his step, one hand holding the lantern, the other clutching the bell, neither free for the handrail, he goes down to the moonlit cloister. He doesn’t stop to look through the arches at the beauty of the cloister garth bathed in white moonshine, its shadows and shapes mysterious under the stars; he heads for the abbot’s lodge. There he sets down the bell and lifts the latch, picks it up again, and goes through the atelier, stopping outside the inner chamber where the abbot sleeps – ker-chang, ker-chang, ker-chang.

He waits, listens for the sound of the wooden clapper telling him he has succeeded in waking his abbot. Satisfied, he goes out into the cloister, leaving the door open behind him to permit a little more moonlight to shine through, and to save Father John the trouble of groping for the latch of the door in the dark.

By the foot of the night stairs, at the doorway into the south transept of the church, just near the holy water stoup, a stone niche originally intended for a blessed statue makes a convenient place to house the bell while Father Bernard is in chapel. As he places it carefully there, ensuring that the iron tongue so vigorously wagged a few moments before is now hushed, the sacristan is already surrounded by the quietly scuffing feet of the community assembling for prayer. Even given the peaceful monastic tread to which they are schooled in their novitiate years, the brethren descending the night stairs sets up a rumbling like thunder. But here in the stone-flagged cloister, only the ripple and flow of woollen robes and the susurrus of many feet.

Towards the east, in the sanctuary, the perpetual light burns in the ruby glass. High in the rood loft Christ on his cross hangs over this, their world. For a while there is nothing to hear but sandals on stone, robes, the creaking wood of the stalls as men take their places, the discreet muffling of a cough. Then, in the darkness lit only by the sanctuary light, and one lantern, the gathered community comes to absolute silence, ready. The knock of the abbot’s ring against the wood of his stall, and you hear them all rise in the darkness.

“Pater noster, qui es in coelis…”1 Abbot John begins the Office. Then the Ave Maria and the Credo, facing east, turned towards the source of light and hope, Christ the daystar.

“Deus in adiutorium meum intende.”2 The abbot’s steady voice speaks into the silence.

“Domine ad adiuvandum me festina,”3 comes back the murmur of reply from all around the choir, then the Gloria.

“Domine mea labia aperies.”4 Abbot John again.

“Et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.”5

So the day begins, like a birth, from the dark roots of its depth. So faith walks forward, knowing the prayer by heart, not needing to see. Like an unseen river, the quiet flow of chanted psalms, canticles, and responsories carries the community along its current towards the dawn.

Father Bernard bears the lantern, taking it round, keeping watch. He sees a man drowsing asleep, and gives the lantern into his hand, goes to his own place in his stall. And the sleepy one is glad for the responsibility handed to him, to get up, to take his turn at walking and watching. Sometimes it is the only way to struggle up from drowning in the irresistible waves of sleep.

After Matins, the cardinal6 Office of Lauds: the Benedictus with its antiphon, the prayers and blessings and eventually the Benedicamus Domino bringing Nocturns to a close. So they go up again to beds by now well cold, sandals shuffling on the stone, the quiet ripple of robes, the rumble of many men mounting the stairs. Then they give the abbey back to the nightwatch of stars as the moon’s remote beauty looks down on them and the great trees ranged about their home sigh in the restless wind.

Back they all come for the Office of Prime in the first uncertain light of dawn. After Prime, the morrow Mass, a pause elapses, spent mainly in the reredorter and taking a quick wash in the lavatorium. Then they break their fast – standing, still wrapped in the Great Silence, just small ale and dry bread now in mid September. Their abbot watches over their wellbeing with common sense and compassion; in the winter he sees to it they have gruel seethed through the night over a low fire and doled out into wooden bowls held in hands numb with cold. But yesterday’s...