I Leap Over the Wall

by Monica Baldwin

  Of course, suffering was not the only disturbance against which it was necessary to steel one’s soul. Anger, jealousy, curiosity—in fact, any emotion strong enough to get hold of one was fatal to interior peace. And because, in the earlier stages of these struggles, ‘natural’ reactions gave one very little respite, this business of guarding the citadel was, for anyone who went in for it seriously, an all-time job.

  I remember the Novice Mistress telling us that the only weapons were a determined will and prayer. The former without the latter would be of little avail. As an incentive she quoted to us those haunting words of St. John of the Cross, which reveal nothing yet hint at so much: ‘Interior recollection alone is able to open the fountain of spiritual delights.’

  That ‘fountain of spiritual delights’! There it was, at the end of every long dark tunnel, waiting to refresh one before one started off on the next phase of the ascent; not an end in itself but just a stimulus to the achievement of greater things. This nun also told me that she had always envisaged the business of acquiring peace of soul in terms of silence.

  Exterior silence first: stillness, gentleness, absolute noiselessness in all her movements down to the very way she opened a door or laid down her scissors on the polished table in the community room. Next, the substitution of silence for speech. I never knew her break the smallest rule of silence, or even speak at all, unless it were demanded by charity or necessity. I thought this a pity, for her rare words were always well worth listening to. They seemed charged with some dynamic energy from the silence which had gone before.

  The next degree of silence was interior. It had to be imposed upon one’s memory and imagination, one’s likes and dislikes, sufferings and joys … that strange gabble of voices that were always clamouring outside the gates. Even into her prayer this silence followed her. She spent it, she told me, chiefly in what she called ‘listening for God’s voice’. (Observe—not ‘to’, but ‘for’.) Because, sometimes for weeks and months at a time, God seemed to hide himself from her so that she had no means of apprehending him except the very bleakest kind of faith.

  ‘Do tell me,’ I once said to her, ‘what you do when that happens.’

  Her answer impressed me.

  ‘Well, I just fill my soul with his silence and … endure.’

  In this constant and universal effort after silence, a soul can find all the mortification it requires. Because silence can be harder than fasting. It can weigh you down like an iron chain. It can bore you almost to screaming point. And yet there can be no doubt that God exacts it from certain souls as a condition of union with himself.

  When I was a young nun, Dom John Chapman, O.S.B., came to give a Retreat at the convent. He had just been made Abbot of Downside and was well known as one of the greatest English authorities on early Church History as well as a famous director of contemplatives. Though horribly nervous at the prospect of talking to so great a scholar, I went to the parlour one day to ask his advice.

  When I told him how difficult I found it to keep my soul barred against the disturbances that, in my case, inevitably followed any kind of suffering, he nodded understandingly. (He was a large man with a proportionately enormous sense of humour and a kindness of heart which almost took one’s breath away.)

  ‘Probably,’ he said, ‘you are not going the right way about it.’

  He then explained how everything that happened to one was through the Will of God, and that God’s Will, being the Will of One who loved us, was always best, however strange this might seem, because it intended our good. The thing to do, therefore, was to see God’s Will in every tiniest detail of one’s life and to lay one’s will alongside his, so that his Will and ours became one thing.

  Of course, he said a good deal more about it than that. But that was the gist of it. You had to accept everything, no matter whether it hurt or pleased you, as God’s special choice for you. You had to take everything that came to you from God’s hands, not only with reverence, but with love. You had to force yourself to say, no matter what happened: ‘I want this thing, because it is your will; I would not have it otherwise.’

  Another thing he said was (quoting, I believe, from de Caussade, who as is well known, was his master in the spiritual life): ‘Don’t you see?—in all suffering, c’est l’acceptation qui délivre.’ And again: ‘C’est la volonté de Dieu qui opère la sainteté dans nos âmes … Ce qui nous arrive à chaque moment par la volonté de Dieu, est ce qu’il y a de plus saint et de plus sanctifiant pour nous.’

  He told me to read Cardinal Newman’s Sermon on Bodily-Suffering. It contained, he said, a complete programme of how to cope with the difficulties I’d described. I did so, and found it to be a compendium of the doctrine of de Caussade and St. John of the Cross. No better or briefer advice could be found for getting the best out of any kind of pain.

  This is the passage he spoke of. (The arrangement under numbers is my own.)

  To bear pain well, is:

  (1) To meet it courageously: not to shrink or waver, but,

  (2) To pray for God’s help: then,

  (3) To look at it steadfastly;

  (4) To summon what nerve we have of mind or body to receive its attack, and

  (5) To bear up against it (when strength is given to us) as against some visible enemy in close combat.

  (6) When sent to us, we must make its presence (as it were) our own voluntary act, by the cheerful and ready concurrence of our will with the will of God.

  Of course, I’m not suggesting that everyone in the convent strove after the attainment of peace of soul exactly along those lines. But somehow or other, if you wanted to get anywhere in the spiritual life, it had got to be achieved. It all depended upon what happened to be your attrait.

  Now, attraits are things you hear a good deal about in contemplative communities. The word—as of course you are aware—signifies the special angle or aspect of the spiritual life towards which a soul feels particularly drawn. (The English word ‘attraction’ doesn’t convey exactly the same meaning.) You might almost say that an attrait was a vocation within a vocation. As a rule, if you followed your attrait, you became a specialist along some particular spiritual line.

  Practically every nun in the convent had her attrait. It was usually discovered in the Noviceship, either by yourself or by the Mistress of Novices, who would then advise you as to the best method of following it up. Until you knew your attrait, you were inclined to beat the air a little purposelessly. Once, however, light had dawned, one forged ahead with a new and concentrated energy.

  Most of the nuns tended, as life went on, to concentrate more and more upon their attrait. There were Souls of Silence, Souls of Penance, Liturgical Souls, Souls of Prayer, Souls of Charity, Souls of Humility and Souls of Faith. There were ‘Ames d’Abandon’—(which, incidentally, is not at all the same thing as ‘abandoned souls’)—Souls of Sacrifice, and quite a number whose spiritual life centred round the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity. There was a nun to whom the doctrine of Grace as revealed in the Epistles of St. Paul was everything; and another who had offered her life, with its prayers, works, sufferings and joys, for the Sanctification of Priests. Another—an Apostolic Soul—lived only to win the graces necessary for the Conversion of Sinners; another for the Foreign Missions; another was wholly inspired by the idea of membership in the Mystical Body of Christ. And there was one rather prosaic old nun who used to say that she didn’t hold with all this talk about ‘ways’ and ‘attraits’. For her part, she found everything she needed in exact fidelity to Rule.

  Two of quite the nicest nuns in the community had as their attrait an intense devotion to the Blessed Virgin. The life of one of them seemed to consist largely of what Hilaire Belloc, in a curiously moving letter to G. K. Chesterton, at the time of the latter’s conversion, calls ‘a looking up to Our Dear Lady, the Blessed Mother of God’.

  I don’t know whether it is the same in all religious communities, but in that one, each nun seemed to be l
ooking at God through a different facet of the million-faced jewel of religious life.

  Naturally, just as people in the world enjoy talking about their hobbies, so the nuns liked to discuss their views upon the spiritual life.

  The choc des idées, it was held, often engendered what were known as ‘lights’, which sometimes had far-reaching consequences on people’s lives. So that now and again a group of nuns would get together when occasion offered and compare ideas.

  The best—indeed, the only—time for doing this was during what were called the Lot Days.

  This rather peculiar phrase had its origin in the old custom of ‘letting blood’, which took place three times a year in all mediaeval monasteries.1

  Four days were allowed for it, during which, in order that the victims of the lancet might more speedily regain their vigour, the Rule was considerably relaxed. And it has always struck me as a sign of great spiritual enlightenment on the part of Superiors that, even when blood-letting was discontinued, the Lot Days were still retained. Even in the early fourth century, Pachomius, that wise and saintly Abbot of the Desert Fathers, was heard to say that ‘no religious, least of all the younger, could persevere in virtue unless from time to time a certain relaxation were allowed to them’.

  I still remember the Mistress of Novices revealing to me the existence of the Lot Days. A certain amount of talking, she told me, would be permitted. Also, the nuns, instead of being obliged to sit and sew all day in the community room, would be free to go about the house and garden and to do—always within fairly strict limits—what they liked. In the refectory, too, the fare would be less austere than usual, and, during the autumn Lot Days, when the fruit trees were loaded with apples and cherries, special permission was sometimes given for the nuns to pick and even eat.

  These revelations, I am ashamed to say, filled me with profound disapproval. With the odious priggishness of extreme youth, I held that such junketings were unfitted to the life I had embraced. And it was only after several sets of Lot Days had come and gone and I had observed for myself with what renewed vigour and enthusiasm the nuns took up once more their austere life when the Lot Days were over, that I understood how immensely helpful such a break in the ordinary routine can be. They were as braced by it as people in the world would be by a week at the sea.

  (4)

  It is, however, time that we returned to my departed Peace of Soul.

  I was still lamenting its loss when I arrived at the little church of St. Teresa of Lisieux. If you have ever seen it, you will certainly remember the rather shattering coloured plaster statue of the saint which stands on guard in a sort of wooden sentry box outside the door. As I passed it, the thought came to me that probably no other saint in the calendar has been so consistently misunderstood. Of course, her appearance is rather misleading: a young, almost childlike figure in a rough brown habit and cream-coloured cloak, a rather simpering smile on her lips and one clumsily modelled hand clutching a bunch of cruelly deceptive roses to her heart. Unless you had read her life—(and if you haven’t, do please be careful which you select from the two or three dozen, of which at least half are as stupid and unrevealing as the pictures and statues which abound)—well, you would find it difficult to believe that for sheer, stark, heroic courage, sustained at concert pitch throughout her short and hidden life, she would be difficult to surpass. ‘Little Flower’, indeed! ‘Little Wedge of Iron’ or ‘Bar of Steel’ would be nearer the mark.

  I pushed open the door. Groping in the darkness, I found, as I believed, the pew in which I usually knelt. I stepped into it, stumbled heavily over an invisible foreign body and just managed to save myself from falling prostrate over the kneeling legs of a lady in a fur coat. The scuffling noise of my agitated withdrawal caused somebody to switch on the electric light. The lady, instead of scowling angrily upon me, smiled kindly and made room for me beside her in the pew.

  A minute incident that seems hardly worth recording. Which only shows how difficult it is to know which are the small and which the important things in life. For, as it happened, this early morning recontre was in reality the beginning of another Push from Providence along the road to my Cottage-in-the-Clouds.

  By the end of Mass, I was feeling a good deal better. My Peace of Soul had miraculously returned, bringing with it the idea of a plan which I determined I’d work out that very day.

  I would make a patriotic gesture. I would go into Brighton, visit the Labour Exchange and offer myself to do the kind of war work the authorities there considered my country needed most.

  (5)

  I’m afraid I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about the job they offered me. However, since the masterful lady in uniform who interviewed me kept repeating that ‘the country was yelling out loud for women to serve the Services’, I had the satisfaction of feeling that at least I was filling up a gap.

  So I produced my birth and baptism certificates, answered a long list of peculiarly irrelevant questions, filled up a dozen or so of variously tinted forms, signed a document giving the address of my next-of-kin and another to say that I didn’t object to working in a danger-zone and went forth in a somewhat exalted state of mind as an employee of an organization which we will call the British Army Canteen Service. Headquarters would inform me, I was told, within a day or so, where I should finally be sent.

  On my homeward journey I stepped off the bus into a darkness that baffles description. I was trying to find my way along the lane when for the second time that day I tumbled into the lady in the fur coat. She and her husband, taking compassion on my torchless condition, escorted me home. By the time we parted at the long white gate leading into my aunt’s garden, we found we liked each other.

  I dined with them once, and for two reasons I remember that evening rather clearly. One was my discovery that my hosts possessed a summer bungalow on the north-west coast of Cornwall; the other that my vis-à-vis at dinner was a nice young Irish priest from Donegal.

  Now, this gave me a curious sensation because it was the first time that I had met a priest ‘socially’ since I had been a secular.

  You see, in the convent, one had been trained to look upon things and people from what was called a ‘purely supernatural’ point of view. Thus, the view of a priest was so enhanced and glorified by the dignity and sanctity of his office that he was practically negligible as a man. A nun, happening to meet the convent chaplain in the cloister, immediately knelt at his feet for a blessing, and the same at the parlour if she went to see a priest. So that it felt just a little odd to meet one on an equal footing, and to shake hands, smoke, and so on, just as one would have done with anybody else.

  One of the severest reproofs I ever received from a Superior was for having spoken critically about the convent chaplain.

  He was an oldish man, with sharp little light-lashed eyes and a heavy jowl. In fact, he might almost have sat for Memling’s Man with a Carnation, hands and all.

  To me he was, and will always remain, a psychological mystery. One can’t and mustn’t judge one’s neighbour: but how anyone could remain stationary at the stage of blameless mediocrity which he had apparently achieved was to me incomprehensible. He had, moreover, a rare genius for infusing dullness into everything with which he dealt. After the spiritual conferences which the Rule ordained that he should, once a month, inflict upon the community, one came forth feeling so completely desiccated that it was sometimes several hours before one’s spiritual energy began to work again. One felt, as one listened to him, that the Water of Life itself would dry into bone-dust if he so much as looked at it.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ I remember almost spluttering to the Reverend Mother after one of these appalling séances. ‘He simply withers me with dullness. Nobody ought to be allowed to bore other people like that about spiritual things. It’s like being smothered in stale sawdust. If he really believed the things he talks to us about, he couldn’t talk in the way he does…. Anybody who’s so obviously dead ought at least to be decent
ly buried instead of being allowed to spread that awful blight of boredom over other people’s souls!’

  Reverend Mother was much displeased. She said that that was not the way to talk. The Chaplain was a very learned man, and I had better read the Letters and Dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, who probably more than anyone in history had to criticize the ecclesiastics of her day.

  Well, I did so; and, to be quite honest, before I had reached the end of those amazing volumes I had begun to change my point of view. The saint’s method of coping with anything that was not as it should be was to envisage it through what she called ‘the eye of faith’. It didn’t, however, explain to me the convent chaplain’s curious mentality.

  I wonder how many convents possess a really satisfactory chaplain?

  In this country, where there are not nearly enough priests to go round, they must be hard to discover. Most of them appear to be drawn from one of two classes.

  There are the delicate, sometimes slightly eccentric men, who are unfitted to cope with the exacting demands of a parish; and the unselfish, hard-working ones who can be called upon to combine a double service. Neither are, of course, really suitable for the job.

  The ideal chaplain for a community of contemplatives would be a priest who was so ‘interior’ that he could keep ahead of, or at least abreast with, the religious in their spiritual lives. Such hidden treasures, however, are rare. Which explains why many nuns look upon the chaplain only as a confessor. If they need a director, they go elsewhere.

  I can never remember any difficulty about spiritual direction. The Church legislates quite admirably for this in the case of contemplatives. Besides the ordinary confessor, who is always most carefully chosen, another priest, known as the ‘confessor extraordinary’, is deputed to hear the nuns’ confessions at stated times. Besides this, there were two annual ‘Retreats’—one lasting for eight days or so in the summer, and a Lenten ‘triduum’ intended to stimulate the nuns to greater fervour in the practice of their Vows. The priests who gave these retreats were men eminent for personal holiness and frequently distinguished directors in the spiritual life.