MELTING MARBLE

Illustrating George Herbert: a Carthusian brother

           “The sky is marble to my thoughts.” So wrote William Hazlitt in that strangest of confessional works, Liber Amoris; and Christians often feel the same. We pray; we avoid praying for fishhooks;  we pray for those things we are promised shall be granted us; and not only does nothing seem to change, we have the discouraging impression that there is nobody on the line.

            We know the answer any reasonable spiritual director would give us. Do not despair; soldier on with the daily round; remember that God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform; and God’s time is not our time. What is much harder, at such times, is to realise fully that our spiritual director, in saying so, is right.

            It is encouraging to read the experiences of Carthusian monks, those professionals of the extreme, those Alpinists of the soul. Nancy Klein Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order is a wonderful account of the way quite ordinary but devout young men try to adapt to the (Parkminster) Charterhouse. In the end, only one of the five stays the course.

            I have had occasion to cite the Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love. In it, the role of the Brothers is also discussed: those dedicated men who do the physical work of the Charterhouse and live a limited version of the Fathers’ life. What helps the Brothers to sustain their life and their faith is, amongst other things, Work. Work, if not too absorbing and not undertaken in a feverish manner, is a steadying and organising influence, and can easily be accompanied by brief prayers and a belief in God’s presence. In George Herbert’s sublime poem “Teach me, my God and King” he says “Who sweeps a room as for thy Laws/ Makes that [the room] and the action, fine.”

            So when we find ourselves in that space where the sky seems marble to our thoughts and prayers, one answer is Work. Get on with it, and remember Brother Lawrence, who in The Practice of the Presence of God told his interlocutor that he certainly was no theologian or even a Father of saintly devotion, but that while cooking, baking and cleaning pots and pans in his monastery kitchen he simply talked to God all the time. One suspects that his pots shone.

            One of my mother’s rules in life was When in doubt, clean something or tidy something. Not only do necessary things get done that way, but you will inevitably end up feeling better.

            Another solution (not alternative but complementary) is reading: reading something that will help your knowledge of your faith, and thus often your faith itself. At the moment I am reading – in French, because I found it in a French bookshop – Aidan Nichols’ The Thought of Benedict XVI. Having read Benedict’s three compact volumes on Jesus of Nazareth I thought this looked interesting, and indeed it is teaching me a great deal, not only about that great Christian scholar but about the faith itself, its structures and its expressions.  

            Thirdly, helping others is a tried and true way to where we need to be. A friend of mine spends quite a lot of time teaching conversational French to migrants and refugees; another single woman I know works for and with elderly people, not only in domestic work like vacuuming and laundry but also conversation, gardening, or accompanying them to exhibitions or receptions.

            In such ways, even though at times there seems to be nobody home when we pray, we may eventually find that what we were praying for has been creeping up on us unnoticed, and that the shutters, doors and windows of our soul have quietly been opening to let in the Third Person of the Trinity. It is a way of becoming, as the famous prayer wrongly attributed to St Francis says, “an instrument of Thy peace”. And as we do such things, interspersed with brief prayers, we are – perhaps unconsciously --obeying His commandments, and one day we may wake up to new lodgers: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” (John 14:23).

Brother Epifanios, head chef of Mt Athos monastery