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

IN THE CARMEL OF BANGUI, A NURSERY OF 4,000 REFUGEES

                                                           

This is a translation of a letter of 18 January 2015 that appeared in the French daily La Croix, from Fr Federico, a Discalced Carmelite whose monastery in the Central African Republic is hosting thousands of people fleeing from the civil war. I found it moving and inspiring enough to publish it here – in part as an antidote to the horrors we are daily fed from around the world.

Very dear friends,

     It’s a little late to give you a Christmas story, but here in the Carmel of Bangui, for more than a year now it’s as if it was Christmas all the time.

     In the morning of December 5, 2013, towards the end of the Mass, the sound of artillery mixed itself with the chant of our prayers. That day, apart from the looting and the houses burnt down, 500 people were killed in various parts of the city. Soon afterwards, thousands of people arrived in our monastery. Before we knew what was happening, it was transformed into a huge nursery.

     That nursery is still there. Although the number of little ones has diminished, there are still about 4,000 people, who remain very attached to us. From time to time we remember with some nostalgia those first months when the children slept in our church, the women gave birth in the refectory, and we ate rice and beans in the dormitory corridor.  John of the Cross, the first child born in the Carmel, now walks on his own two feet and is starting to speak a few words. How beautiful it will be, one day, to tell him his own story.

     We are still amazed that so far we have been able to reconcile the demands, more or less rigorous, of a Carmelite monastery with the equally legitimate needs of thousands of refugees.  Today we are so used to their presence that we wonder how we spent our days before they came, when we were a “normal monastery”. We would almost suggest that every monastery or convent host some refugees, if only for a few months, in order to experience the good that their presence does to the life of the community, to recover the enthusiasm and to start over with a fresh liveliness.

     The main change since then has been the new setup of many tents, no longer attached to the monastery but a little further away, about 100 feet. We regret a little not having them as close as before. The refugees have given their new tents grand names, like “Noah’s Ark”, “Solomon’s Temple”, “The White House” . . . The International Red Cross has done a careful census with high-tech methods. Each head of a family has received a card with photographs and a bar-code. According to the census, there are more than a thousand family groups in our camp.

     For December 5 of last year, we thought that the best way to celebrate the anniversary of the events would be to have a Mass for the dead: the victims of the war, those who died to make peace and those who died of sickness here among us, old people and some children. At the time of the offertory, our guests had prepared a beautiful surprise for us, as if they wanted to offer their contribution and to beg us to continue a little longer this miracle of the loaves. All the heads of the various zones of the camp organised a dance and brought gifts for the community: bread and wine, fish, eggs, bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers and coloured fabrics (which would be transformed into twelve shirts – one for each brother) . . .  How this offering tasted of the Gospel!

     Giving a gift to a poor person is a beautiful thing, to which we are accustomed, which gives the feeling of helping to save humanity, and which inculcates peace of the soul; but receiving a gift from a poor person is quite a different thing, which happens when one least expects it and which gives you goosebumps and brings tears to your eyes.

When Christmas approached, the dream of giving a little present to each child almost gave us sleepless nights. Then came the miracle. In the afternoon of December 24, twenty serious well-dressed gentlemen arrived at the monastery. They were part of a Central African association unknown to us. They got out of their cars with five large crates and told us “We have brought you 1,600 toys for the children between 1 and 5 years old. Please distribute them as soon as you can.” Then those distinguished gentlemen, sent by Heaven knows whom, disappeared as they had come. It seemed surreal. In a little over an hour we distributed the presents and wished a Happy Christmas to all our refugees. I have to say that at that moment I would not have wished to be anywhere else in the world than here with my brothers and with these people.

     Afterwards, we celebrated Midnight Mass at 7 PM, which was already a sign of peace, for in 2013 we had had to move it up to 3 PM because of the war. On Christmas morning we celebrated a dozen baptisms. This is exceptional, for our church is not a parish. For me, a rather improvised and autodidact missionary, they were the first baptisms I administered in Africa. Among the baptised, there was a John of the Cross, a Theresa, an Edith, a Joseph . . . the Carmelite heaven can rejoice! Some Italian soldiers, led by Colonel Renna, were present also. After the celebration, they unloaded from their armoured cars balloons, felt-tips, colouring books and crayons, given by soldiers from Casale Monferrato, from Turin and from Como.

     In the night, there was another surprise. It was 1.30 AM and we were all asleep, when I was called to the door. A woman was about to give birth. I ran to wake Aristide, our novice and competent male nurse. After examining the woman, he told me that there isn’t time to get to hospital, as the birth was about to happen. So our roles were reversed: Aristide became the novice-master and I the novice (a little shaken, to be honest). In a few moments, the chapter-house was transformed into delivery room. We even had a wooden trumpet to listen to the baby’s heartbeat.

     An older woman, mother of eight children, sat down beside the woman in labour. While her rough hands told a worn rosary, she gave useful advice on how to push, how to breathe, and other matters I had not learnt during my theological studies. Her serenity was impressive, as if she knew the exact moment when the baby would be born. The mother gave no cry, she uttered only invocations and prayers, as if she did not want to trouble the silence of the monastery. Then a magnificent little girl came into the world. After the cutting of the umbilical cord, the newborn was given to the older woman who cleaned her, dressed her and received her, as if a chain of generations, of wisdom and womanhood needed to look each other in the eyes and hold each other, to continue the cycle of life. At that moment it was the father’s turn. He gather up the placenta and the umbilical cord to bury them: an ancestral rite to encourage fertility.

     It was nearly dawn. In a few moments the bell would call us to prayer. We went to the library where there is a weighing-scale. I put the little girl on the scales. How romantic our Bethlehem is! There are no angels, no shepherds, no Magi from the East; but there are books by Plato, the Treatises of St Augustine, and the Summa theologica of St Thomas Aquinas. Then I looked at the needle of the scales: 3,500 grams of life, of hope and of peace.