BEING war-time, there were no sleeping or restaurant cars on the train in which I travelled up to Stirling. So, for a matter of six hours or so, I had to sit bolt upright in my corner.
I felt as excited as a school-child about the adventure that lay before me. A journey to Samarkand or El Dorado could hardly have held more potential thrills.
As usual, I was passionately interested in my fellow-travellers: three huge Commandos, a red-haired sailor with a lovely girl-companion, and a husky-voiced young woman with a husband in Air Force blue, whose head, arm and leg were swathed in cotton-wool and bandages. Amongst their heaped hand-luggage they had a tame brown rabbit in a basket. Half-way through the journey they took it out and handed it leaves of limp-looking lettuce to nibble. It was an enchanting rabbit. When it lifted its split top lip to show long supercilious teeth, it looked like a disdainful elderly spinster. The wounded airman held it close in the crook of his unbandaged arm and appeared to derive much solace from its company.
That rabbit rather disturbed my peace of mind.
As children, my sister and I had kept every kind of pet: dogs, cats, pigeons, owls, canaries, bantams, rabbits, guinea-pigs, silkworms, pet lambs, white mice, goats, hedgehogs, donkeys, and a distinguished family of tortoises.
We had adored them all. And in the convent I had missed them desperately. Now, watching the rabbit, I felt the old animal-longing beginning to creep over me. It was nearly thirty years since I’d possessed a beast of my own. Probably I shouldn’t be able to have one till the war was over. But the moment that Cottage-in-the-Clouds materialized …
Before all things, I felt that I required a cat.
Exquisite, runcible creatures, detached, aloof, entirely uncoercible—their strange, secret lives quite impenetrable by any human personality—how I longed for one. The cat in my Vision had been a Siamese—ivory and sepia colour, with huge, pale, sapphire eyes and a slim, kinked tail. I took a long look into the future and saw the lovely, decorative creature frisking alluringly among my rose-bushes….
This, naturally, led to dreams about my garden, till, presently, I fell asleep.
I was awakened by an alarming sensation of nausea.
Obviously, a certain quantity of oxygen must have been shut in with us several hours before, when the guard had gone round at black-out time to see that windows and doors were hermetically sealed.
Since then, however, eight persons and a rabbit had been breathing it more or less energetically in and out of their lungs.
It now appeared to have reached exhaustion point.
Another two minutes—and, unless something drastic could be done about it, I knew that I should faint.
Now, absurd as it will surely sound to persons who from their cradles have been accustomed to deal with the things, I must here confess that one of the minor nightmares of my post-conventual life has been connected with windows and doors. When, for instance, I try to enter a bank or a post office, my unpractised instinct invariably guides me to pull when it ought to be push. Or vice versa. And it is the same with windows. Whenever, in car or taxi, I turn a handle to lower the window, the door flies open. As for buses and railway carriages, no matter how perseveringly I turn, twist, pull, push or press the gadget intended to control their windows, I have never yet encountered one upon which my efforts produced the slightest effect. And I find it humiliating.
This occasion was the solitary exception. Perhaps the saints of Paradise, whom I so desperately invoked as I fumbled with the blind, had something to do with it. Anyhow, the window suddenly yielded to treatment and, lowering itself obligingly a couple of inches, admitted a shaft of cold night air which cut into the fetid atmosphere like a blade. I inserted my nose into the space between blind and window, and drew a long, life-giving breath. By the mercy of Heaven, I was saved.
(2)
It is a curious thing, but, as I look back on it to-day, I believe that this trivial incident did almost more to impress me with the sense of my new and bewildering freedom than anything else had so far done.
I had actually dared to open a window, in a place containing several other people, and the universe had NOT rocked to its foundations and then come toppling down about my ears.
It seemed almost too wonderful to be believed.
The reason, of course, is that in convents, windows are such a subject of contention that it is practically impossible to touch one without getting your fingers burned.
Two parties exist in every religious community: the Fresh Air Fiends, who want the windows open, and the Fug Fiends, who want them shut. The odd thing is that, though the first are nearly always in the majority, it is the second who get their way.
It puzzled me when I came up from the Noviceship to the community. Why, since the lovers of fresh air were so numerous, didn’t one of them just rise up and fling the windows wide?
The answer is that, in convents, things simply don’t happen that way.
I remember one of the older nuns explaining this to me after I had suggested that certain measures should be taken in connexion with window-opening. They were excellent measures, inspired by the most elementary rules of hygiene. And I was much surprised by the lack of enthusiasm with which they were always met. It was then that a certain nun, wise, elderly, and enormously kind-hearted, threw up her eyes to heaven at the crude inexperience revealed by my remarks, and said to me:
‘Ah, mon enfant, croyez-moi: if it were ’umanlee posseeble for those windows to be flung orpen, flung orpen they would be. Mais—ça ne vaut pas la peine.’
I did not believe her. I experimented with the windows. And—I regretted it.
For, unfortunately, even in convents, one sometimes finds people who will stop at nothing—absolutely nothing—to get their own way.
Most people appear to think that by the very fact of entering a convent, one ought at once to be transformed, automatically, into a saint. The idea of a nun committing even the smallest imperfection profoundly shocks them.
This is unreasonable. Nuns and monks—although examples of extraordinary holiness are sometimes found among them quite early in their religious life—would be the first to tell you that they are, generally speaking, a considerable distance from sanctity. They have—and carry with them into the convent—human faults and weaknesses, just like the rest of mankind. Many of those can only be corrected after long years of self-discipline and prayer.
Moreover, it sometimes happens that, after the period of trial known as the noviceship is passed, a nun will develop some idée fixe or eccentricity of character. When this happens, the nun in question can become a positive menace to the community.
In such a case, two courses of action are open to the Superior. The first is to enforce conformity to the accepted standard of life by commanding it ‘under Holy Obedience’, warning the nun that a refusal to obey will result in expulsion from the community. This method, though drastic, has the advantage of ridding the convent of undesirable members. Of its disadvantages nothing need here be said. They are, I think, too obvious to need cataloguing.
The second course of action is entirely ‘supernatural’. Should the Superior decide upon it, the community must just resign themselves to shoulder the cross which Divine Providence has laid upon them, and simply envisage the ‘difficult member’ as a means of acquiring merit.
I once heard a distinguished Jesuit preach a sermon upon how to use disagreeable persons in the community as a means of acquiring an ever-increasing degree of sanctifying grace.
The old nun from whom I have quoted before had—in her long years of community life—made the most of many opportunities. A window-shutting fixation on the part of a certain ‘difficult member’ had deprived her for years of the fresh air that she not only loved, but which was essential to her health. It also, now and again, made virtue arduous among the weaker members of the community.
One day the old nun said to me:
‘Ah, chère petite, you do not onnerstan’.’ (It was true; I did not
. Perhaps I never shall.) ‘You t’ink cette personne-là is a gret orbstacle to la perfection de la communauté. An’ eet ees not so. She ees a cross, yes—mais, what is a cross? C’est une petite gâterie de Notre-Seigneur.’
As for ‘cette personne-là’, she insisted that, far from thinking her the curse of the community, she had come to look upon her as its greatest asset. For—voyez-vous—did she not provide her religious sisters with almost hourly opportunities of practising virtue, with the excellent result that most of them were rapidly attaining to a standard of holiness which they might never otherwise have reached? Enfin, if le bon Dieu had not presented such a person to the community, it would be their duty—mais oui, absolutely their duty!—to ‘go out into the ’ighwez an’ ’edges an’ chercher, chercher, CHERCHER, onteel won wass found!’
All of which only goes to show that, in convents, your success or failure in the matter of acquiring virtue depends entirely upon your point of view.
(3)
I reached Stirling at daybreak.
Having been told to change there, I climbed out, dragged my two suitcases from the van (the solitary porter was too busy to attend to me) and sat down on a bench to wait for the next train.
The bench was hard and the air extremely chilly. I had an hour before me. To pass the time, I began to say by heart the Office of Prime.
Jam lucis orto sidere
Deum precemur supplices …
The sun had just risen. The sky, drained hitherto of every vestige of colour, was dappled with little pink and golden clouds. It made one think of the floor of heaven, as painted by Fra Angelico. And, far below, on the shadowy earth, where the world still appeared to be sleeping, the walls and roofs of Stirling clung huddled together against the steep sides of the hill.
Oddly enough, however, it was neither the flaming sky nor the dim grey city that seized upon my imagination, dragging it forcibly away from the words of the morning hymn upon which I’d only just started. It was the abyss that yawned between.
That abyss had already begun to bother me when, as a child at school, I had been given the Letters of St. Catherine of Siena to read. She saw it as the abyss of infinity between God and his creation. To her, Christ was always the Pontifex—the ‘Bridge-maker’—between the Creator and the creature who had become separated from him by sin. Thinking on these things (when I ought, I suppose, to have been studying arithmetic and grammaire française), it always seemed to me that there could never be too many of those who made it the business of their lives to bridge that gulf by prayer. That, I believe, was largely why, when I entered a convent, I chose an Order the raison d’être of whose members was to ‘stand in the breach’ and play the part of ‘bridge-makers’ between God and man.
For this is the work of those whom the Church officially dedicates to the recitation of the Divine Office in choir.
Among the various questions which are so often hurled at me in connexion with convents, one of those which most constantly recurs is, ‘What really is this thing you call the Divine Office?’
Well, this seems as good a place as any other in which to try to answer that question. It is not easy, since it involves the statement of one or two Catholic dogmas. And this bores—or alarms—a certain type of person. To ignore the basic idea, however, is to miss the point.
Catholics believe that God, being what he is—infinite and completely ‘other’ from all else in existence—created man principally in order to be adored by him. The other purposes of man’s life are only secondary. The right order is: God first, man next.
Here, a difficulty arises.
The abyss which, since the Fall of man, yawns between creature and Creator, is infinite. How then can man’s ‘nothingness’ formulate an act of worship which is in any sense worthy of God who is All?
The answer, of course, is that it can’t.
So—we find ourselves up against an apparently insoluble problem. God, when he created man, knew—obviously—that this ‘nothingness’ of the creature would make his adoration of the Infinite entirely valueless. Why, then, did God create him?
Catholic theology replies that, when God made the world, he foresaw the Incarnation. He, the Infinite, would join himself to that which he had made, thus endowing it with a value which, like himself, would be divine. In this way—since the value of a divine action is infinite—the worship offered by those who are truly incorporated with God-made-Man would acquire the value of him into whose Mystical Body they would thus be drawn.
Which is exactly what happens in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Christ, in the Mass, as on the Cross, becomes ‘That with which we can at last incorporate ourselves and thus regain our true existence—that of Sons of God’.1
He lifts up the hearts and souls of those who assist at Mass and holds them within the white-hot circle of his own divine and infinitely holy Heart. Thus the adoration of Christ and his Christians mount up together to the Father, and the creature’s worship—valueless in itself—is transformed and ‘en-Christ-ed’ by that ineffable union and embrace.
Now, the Catholic Church—being Christ-on-Earth and, therefore, speaking with divine authority—has drawn up a public, official worship of God, called the Liturgy,2 which is more important and more powerful than anyone’s private prayer. This is because, being the Church’s official prayer, it has an absolute value, independent of the person who prays.
A Catholic who uses liturgical prayer—provided always that he is in a state of grace—prays officially, as a member of the Mystical Body of Christ. Through this membership, he can offer to God a worship adequate to the Infinite. He can adore God divinely, through, with, and in, Jesus Christ.
The Divine Office is that part of the Liturgy contained in the Breviary. Originally, it appears to have actually formed a part of the Mass. The early Christians, meeting secretly at nightfall in the shadowy catacombs for the synaxis or Breaking of Bread, prefaced the ceremony by psalms, litanies, invocations, canticles, readings, homilies and hymns. Then, gradually, as time went on, these elements evolved slowly into the Night Office of Matins and Lauds. The Little Hours of the day,3 Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, were added later.
The Mass is the heart of the Liturgy. The Office is a radiation from this divine centre, a kind of cortège which should never be separated in thought from the Holy Sacrifice, whence it derives all its meaning and value.
I have written rather a lot about this—the theological—aspect of the Divine Office, because, unless one grasps it, it is difficult to understand how monks and nuns can feel justified in looking upon it as the object of their lives. The Church sets so much store upon it that all her priests are bound—under pain of mortal sin—to the daily recitation of the Divine Office. And large numbers of religious orders of both men and women, have—as the official reason for their existence—the solemn recitation in choir of this, the Opus Dei.
(4)
Looking back, I am not sure that being trained for the service of the choir wasn’t one of the most terrifying experiences of my early religious life.
I was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere of solemnity and decorum which pervaded the building that, for the first few months, I hardly ever dared to raise my eyes. This may sound incredible, but it is none the less a fact.
The Mistress of Novices began by explaining the construction and inner spirit of the Divine Office.
Matins, we were taught, was the Great Night Office of the Church. Its three nocturns were like a three-act drama in honour of the feast which was being celebrated. It was our privilege to recite it at an hour when God was almost forgotten by a world chiefly absorbed in pleasure, sin or sleep—at least in this half of the globe. As for the little devil of fatigue who creeps about in every choir when the inmates are more or less exhausted by a day of fasting or heavy labour, novices who listened to him would certainly incur heavy responsibilities. For the souls of sinners, or those struggling against temptation, would thus be deprived of the grace which faithful pr
ayer would otherwise have obtained for them. Therefore—no matter whether your back ached, your voice failed, or your heavy eyelids dropped with weariness—into that great symphony of praise, thanksgiving and supplication must your whole energy be poured. Only thus could you be certain that your part in it was at least as worthy of God as your human powers could make it.
Lauds—the exquisite Office of daybreak—followed immediately on Matins. Its hymns and antiphons were full of symbolism. The rising sun was hailed as the figure of Christ triumphant and glorified. The whole Office was ablaze with the light and splendour of dawn. Now and again one felt an almost ecstatic note in the psalms which the Church had chosen: they were songs of such pure praise as might well have been uttered by lips already half in heaven.
Prime was longer than Lauds and more prosaic. It was the Church’s morning prayer and asked for special blessings on the work of the day. The Martyrology was read; the ‘senses, words and actions’ of those present were commended to God; the dead were prayed for. And in the hymn, The star of morn to night succeeds (Jam lucis orto sidere), as well as in that ancient and beautiful responsory which asks that ‘the Splendour of the Lord Our God may be upon us’, the ‘light motif’ appears again. In the convent, Prime was usually said at half-past five in the morning. I remember being taught to recite it as a morning prayer for those who forget to pray.
In the early days of the Church, Terce was at nine o’clock. This was the ‘third hour’ of the Romans, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles at Pentecost. In the convent, it followed immediately after Prime. This ‘Hour’ is in a special manner consecrated to the Holy Spirit, ‘Who,’ says St. Augustine, ‘when He has been given to man, sets him ablaze with the love of God and of his neighbour and is Himself Love’.4
I Leap Over the Wall Page 14
