“Lord Jesus,” he says softly, humbly. The tenderness in his voice takes the novice by surprise. He thinks this is how a man might speak to the person he loves best in the world.
“Brother Cedd here, your lad; he needs to know your love for himself. He needs to find you and follow you. So much confusion and discouragement, so much disappointment. Failure and broken dreams. It’s painful, my Lord. It hurts. All of us want to be worth something. Look, Lord Jesus, here where he opens his heart to you. Please come in. Please forgive him for everything that’s offended you. Oh, my Lord Christ, I beg you to have mercy. It clags up inside us harder and harder – the fear and resentment, the peevish complaining, the comparisons with other people, obsession with self. Sulkiness and petulance and self-pity. Have mercy, oh have mercy. Dissolve it away until your love flows free inside him, flows like rivers. Come to him, Lord Christ, with all that hope and joy. Give him your peace, like you promised. Give him grace to start anew. May he – by the miracle of your love for him – may he be born anew.”
Brother Cedd is still coming to terms with this assessment of his character and diagnosis of his problems, taken aback and more than slightly offended, when William says, “Amen.”
And the novice thinks: What’s to lose? Why not? He’s so tired of the way life is. It couldn’t get much worse.
Still with his eyes closed, without moving, William says: “‘Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis et ego reficiam vos.’”17 And Brother Cedd says: “Amen.”
The silence intensifies into presence, personality. Neither one of them moves. Then William opens his eyes and he looks at Cedd, and he knows. He nods, seeing it. Then, apprehending the rising tide of emotion, afraid the boy might be about to gush or – even worse – try and thank him: “I think we’re shirking our chores,” he says. “Shall we go and get some more apples?”
Chapter
Fifteen
The Office of None is so called because it marks the ninth hour of the day. At this hour, Peter and John went up to the temple to pray and healed the man begging at Beautiful Gate,18 Cornelius the centurion had his vision,19 and Jesus died. Those things happened a long time ago, but the great cry of Jesus, “It is finished!”, is carried in the heart of every brother every day, for that accomplishment directly affects them, being the work of their salvation.
Momentous as the death of Jesus surely is, and though monasticism perseveres with the psalmist’s “seven times a day do I praise Thee”, there’s no doubt about it: the Office of None obtrudes annoyingly into the day. So Brother Stephen thinks, anyway. In the summer timetable, because daybreak is so early, he nips up to the farm after Lauds and breakfast to milk the cows. If he’s quick and has help, he can get the cows milked and turn them out to pasture before Prime, first Mass, and Chapter. That means legging it up the hill and setting about it with dispatch – but what else can he do? A cow needs milking. Everything else gets left, and even then he’s often late for the Office, sometimes even late into Mass. If there’s any serious business dragging out the Chapter meeting he has his work cut out, because after that it’s back up the hill to strain the milk, feed the pigs, and look over the sheep. He swills down the house where the cows are milked and the dairy, but in truth it’s often a hasty job, because through the morning the novices are at their lessons and he has no help. The poultry aren’t his job; Brother Giles looks after them.
He barrows the milk down the hill to the kitchen, has a quick wash, and goes in to Terce and High Mass. Then back up to the farm to attend to whatever work awaits him until the bell rings out for Sext and the midday meal.
After they’ve eaten, he can have one or two novices, sometimes a few schoolboys if their lessons are done for the day, even Brother Giles and Brother Walafrid (though not today) to help him around the farm. In these last few weeks he’s scavenged all the help on offer to get the fruit in and the grain, glad of a stretch of fine weather after so many wet summers.
But what really tries his patience – whether they’re cutting rye, barley, oats, wheat, building the ricks, mending a wall, whatever they’re working on – is having to come back down for None smack dab in the middle of the afternoon. None takes barely more than a quarter hour, and it drives him mad when they must every man of them down tools, walk all the way along the farm track and all the way back up again after, for a few psalms, a couple of Bible readings, a canticle, and intercessions for the world’s poor and struggling. What makes him feel even worse is his deep, inescapable shame at regarding the Divine Office as a tedious interruption to necessary farm work. When he needs no one to tell him, what he came here to do is hold all life, including his own, before the loving face of Almighty God, and make of his hours a ceaseless stream of thanksgiving, praise, and prayer. The rest he manages to juggle with good grace. It’s None that gets him.
Just now he’s refusing to look ahead beyond Michaelmas when they change to the winter hours. The days will be shorter, beasts out to pasture in the summer will be in the byre and needing food fetching for them, and the shrinking days mean shorter intervals between the obligations of the monastic horarium.
From Lammas right through to last week, as many brothers as the house could spare have laboured to bring in the grain; it’s all safely gathered in. So today, Brother Stephen, with Brother Placidus and Brother Josephus to help him, has been threshing, winnowing, and sieving wheat up in the big barn. He’s pleased; they’ve done well. When they hear the bell begin to ring for the Office, obediently they set aside the flails, unroll their sleeves, and unkilt the skirts of their habits, shaking out as much as they can of the dust and chaff, rubbing it free from their hair, knocking it out of their sandals. Then they set off at a good pace down the hill to the chapel.
Brother Stephen asked his abbot’s permission to work through the afternoon during harvest. At the height of it, in mid-August, seeing the weather was holding and the whole community depends on that grain for the winter, Abbot John agreed to it. But now the sheaves are in under cover, he insists Stephen come down every day for None. “It’s what you’re here for, Brother,” he said. “I know how vital your work is on the farm – it was the same for me with the infirmary. There was nothing that could be neglected or put to one side. I was responsible for the wellbeing of sick men, as you have the care of livestock and the task of feeding us all. It is no small thing. But – or so I often thought when it exasperated me to stop right in the middle of something to be present with the community at prayer – there’s a snare in this. Because the work is essential and won’t wait, the temptation is to begin to see the duty of prayer as a lesser thing. As something small and distracting, an addendum to what really matters. I can’t tell you how often I had to admit that line of thought to my confessor. It’s a dangerous track to follow: that way travel the lost.
“Whether or not someone is dying or a ewe is giving birth, the work of prayer is still our central calling and our first duty. So, no, I’m very sorry; you do have to come down the hill and join us for None. What you are is a monk, not a farmer.”
Brother Stephen heard this in silence. Sometimes when a man does not speak, it’s a form of resistance: a refusal to engage. Not in this case, and his abbot did not mistake Stephen’s silence for obstinacy. He stood, mulling over what John had said to him, and eventually he replied, “Aye, you’re right. Please forgive me. I got carried away. Father Lucanus – your novice master too, wasn’t he? Or did you have Father Matthew? Anyway, he used to say to us, ‘Be wary, lads, watch yourselves. Have a care not to get possessive, not to get wrapped up in the work you do. Keep one step back. Remember you have only one job to do, and one Master to serve. Leave the men of the world to fall in love with their occupations if they find it satisfying. You keep your eyes on Jesus.’ Comes back as if it was only yesterday. That’s what he used to say. Drummed it into us at every passing opportunity. And look at me – I still forget. I’m so sorry.”
His abbot’s eyes shone with affection and respect. “Tha
nk you for understanding,” he said. “And when there’s something you simply cannot leave, well, I will understand too.”
And this afternoon, just as Brother Basil stops ringing the bell, Brother Stephen, Brother Placidus, and Brother Josephus, fragrant with the dusty goodness of golden grain, are in their places in the nick of time before the abbot gives the knock and the community rises to pray.
Not everyone experiences None as a maddening interruption of vital work. To some men sometimes, this brief space of prayer and chanting feels as though you just threw them a lifeline. As it does to Brother Damian today.
This all begins earlier in the day when he says he can manage without Brother Josephus in the abbey school, since Brother Stephen is looking desperate about extra hands still needed up on the farm. Normally Brother Tom will help out until the grain is all threshed and stored, but the abbot has sent him off on some errand that will fill up the entire day. Colin is handy and practical, but Father Theodore says they can’t have him today because Father Gilbert needs him to practise his singing and his refectory readings. When Brother Josephus says he’ll go up to the farm then (reluctantly), neither he nor Brother Damian realize that Father Gilbert wants two of the novices as well as Colin, and one of those is Brother Cassian, which leaves Brother Damian on his own in the school.
The boys are in boisterous spirits, having spent most of the last three weeks picking fruit and generally larking about on the farm. Brother Damian is put to it to get them even sitting still and paying attention. One particularly over-excitable juvenile, given to pinching his neighbour and causing much hilarity among his classmates by finding it necessary to fall off the bench, or drop his stylus, or sneeze explosively, or shriek when the boy next to him pinches him back, eventually exhausts Brother Damian’s patience.
Attempting nothing more taxing than teaching them, line by line, the Apostles’ Creed, he finds the task made untenable by this delinquent’s relentless and asinine interruptions. And in the end he loses his temper.
“Ah! Damn it, child!” he blazes at him. “Whatever devil of hell took up lodging in your brainless skull? Are you out of your right mind or didn’t anyone ever teach you how to behave? Were you dragged up in a barn, you confounded little wretch? Can you not sit still for two minutes together? One more word from you – I mean it; one more word, and by the Mass you’d better believe it – and I’ll have that birch down and really give you something to squawk about!”
Now, this threat quickly proves unfortunate. Consumed with gruesome childish eagerness to see one of their company tortured, from this point on the rest of the class spare no effort to goad the lad in every imaginable manner. Every time Brother Damian turns his back, or even takes his eyes off the boy, someone tweaks the lad’s clothes or tugs his hair or pulls a mocking face at him. Not a placid individual at the best of times, he’s beside himself under this concentrated torment – all of it covert, sly, and most artfully concealed from their infuriated schoolmaster. Twizzling and thwacking, exclaiming incontinently, for no good reason that the master can see, the young scamp generates such mayhem that in the end Damian is ready to make good on his word.
His face grim, he dismisses the school early. He does what he can to redeem things from an appearance of disintegrating out of control, by telling them Brother Stephen has so much work in hand he has no time to forage for morsels to feed the pigs. This is entirely true, of course – always – though it omits the detail that, seeing pigs are ideally adapted to foraging for themselves with no help from anyone, searching out delicacies to tempt them is not how Brother Stephen would have spent any afternoon. But Brother Damian tells them to find a pail up on the farm for whatever they collect – be it beechmast, acorns, toadstools, slugs or snails. “And don’t bring them back here,” he thinks to add: “I don’t want them. The pigs’ll be in the orchard like as not – you can take them up there. Once you’ve fed them, you can go home.”
Collaring his young ruffian firmly when the wretch hastens to escape through the door with the others, who look back over their shoulders grinning and pointing as they set off, Damian keeps a relentless hold on him until they’ve gone. He pushes the door shut after them with his foot, and drags the now frightened child across the room. He feels the boy’s panic and the turbulence of his fear, but he doesn’t care because he’s angry. Grim with rage, he tightens his grip on the resisting, protesting boy and grabs the birch down from its nail on the wall. There’s no likelihood of the child keeping still, that’s not his temperament, nor is there anything calm and measured about this; it’s a fight to hold him. He’s too big to go over Brother Damian’s knee, but the monk, capable and strong, roars at him to shut up, slams him face down onto the master’s table, and pins him there with one hand firmly planted on his back. Irate, he slaps the birch down alongside on the table to get back a free hand for roughly yanking down the boy’s breeches, then grabs the rods and gives it all he’s got, six vicious stripes before he lets him go. Furious as he is, the sight of the lad’s howling red face running with tears as the boy struggles his clothes back in place, gives him immense satisfaction. The birch hurts. He knows it does. He left red, swelling weals where he sliced him.
“Now get out and don’t come back here until you can behave!” he yells at him. Still bellowing, the child turns and runs, knocking a bench over as he stumbles into it, yanking the door open so that it crashes back against the wall as he goes.
Alone in the classroom, still angry, Damian hangs the birch back up on the wall. His heart hammering, he sets about tidying the room, restoring order. He picks up the kicked over bench, straightens all the benches back as they should be, collects the boxwood wax tablets that have dropped to the floor in the eager exodus, kneeling down to retrieve styluses scattered here and there. As his rage subsides he feels shaky and upset, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. The child behaved abominably. He deserved a thrashing.
Eventually the room stands in impeccable condition. There’s nothing left to do. And Damian feels rotten. He pulls the door shut behind him as he leaves the building, and walks, his shoulders hunched, looking at nothing but the dust of the ground, to the church. He takes refuge in his stall and, within the shortest time, Brother Basil begins to ring the bell for None.
Force of habit has Brother Damian sitting, standing, uttering responses, saying his Amen; but his mind is in turmoil. He tries to find a way in to the peace and cannot. He can hear the child bawling, see the tears, see the rising red stripes on his flesh. Even so, the serenity of the Gregorian chant gives him something to hang on to, a means of re-establishing some kind of core.
At the end of the Office, as the brothers go about whatever the rest of the day contains for them, Damian reverences the presence of Christ in the sanctuary and turns to go, but listlessly now.
Brother Cassian appears at his side. They shouldn’t talk in church, but, “Are you all right? School went smoothly?”
Damian just looks at him. “No. I think I’d better talk to Father John.”
He turns back, and there is his abbot, eyebrows raised in enquiry. Cassian sees where he is not wanted and discreetly withdraws.
Brother Damian walks back with his superior to the abbot’s house, and John listens seriously and attentively as the young monk tells him what happened. “When you say you hit him hard,” he asks, “what do you mean? Did you break his skin? How many times did you hit him?”
“I gave him six strokes with the birch, which is more than he deserved, and I didn’t hold back. Not enough to cut him, but… I was just out of my depth,” Damian answers. “And I’m sorry, Father. I’m so sorry. I’m so ashamed of myself. I should have been able to do better than that. It was… violent. Horrible. Such a skinny little runt – nothing much of him; and me a grown man. I should be taking responsibility for the situation, not thrashing him with sticks.”
Boys are beaten every day, of course, and expect no sympathy from their parents and teachers. It’s just the way of the world. Bu
t he wonders: “Does it mess things up even more if I apologize to him? He was badly out of order, but if I’m honest, so was I. It got past a reprimand or a just punishment. I scared him, and I really hurt him. Can you – I was too rough with him, Father. I frightened him. I… well… can you – should you – say sorry to a child?”
The abbot considers this in silence. He thinks of his bishop, who at the last visitation chided him for letting the birch gather dust, told him it must be laid on harder and more frequently. He thinks about that, and about the accustomed ways of keeping discipline in school.
“I don’t see why not,” he says. “It’s hard to move on from something you regret if you don’t put it right first. It lodges inside you. And I’d rather the lads in our school learned from us that power is meant for gentleness. Think carefully, though. You can’t back down from your authority or your requirements of him, or you’ll mire yourself in deeper. Maybe see how he is when he next shows up for school. Assess the changes in him. Words aren’t always the best way of healing a relationship, and it pays to be cautious, use restraint. Think it through and learn from what happened. I’m sorry you were left on your own and everything got so badly out of hand. We let you down. Thank you for telling me. I doubt very much the lad’ll say anything to his parents, and if he doesn’t I don’t think you need to either. Sounds as though you gave him chastisement enough, without bringing down his father’s wrath on his head as well. I think in all honesty I’d let it be, if I were you. But take it into your prayers, and so will I. Watch to see how things unfold.”
Realizing he should have locked up the schoolroom – Brother Josephus usually does it – Damian goes back to get the key from its hook behind the door. Rounding the corner of the building, to his astonishment he finds the same child dawdling about outside, mooching along kicking at stones in the dust, evidently waiting for him.
A Day and a Life Page 11
