The Hour Before Dawn

by Penelope Wilcock

  “What?” John repeated.

  “I can hardly say this. I feel so ashamed.”

  In the silence of the night John waited for him to speak, and finally William said, “The thing is… Oswald… my response is not like yours. I knew I had to go back and look for him, do what I could to find him. I knew I couldn’t just help myself to safety and leave him behind, but…”

  “Yes?” John prompted after some time went by.

  “I don’t want to take care of him,” William mumbled. “He’s going to be a confounded nuisance forever now, isn’t he? Incessantly needy, trapped in his own body. It won’t only be the appalling disabilities that have been imposed upon him; I mean, it isn’t too hard I suppose to help someone get from place to place and make sure they have something to eat and someone to talk to… although…” Again William paused for a long time before admitting, “I don’t want to do even that. It drives me wild having needy people tagging along with me. But the worst thing is, there’s going to be an absolute tornado of grief and despair and tears and ‘why me?’ and religious doubt and all the rest of it unleashed once we get him to a place where he isn’t just concentrating on surviving—isn’t there? And all that makes me feel as if I’m drowning. I simply can’t stand it. I mean, I wish he’d just died if we’re going to have to live through all that. But people never can keep it contained, can they? They have to talk about it and weep about it and tell you how completely broken they are and all the rest of it.”

  He shifted restlessly. “I was his superior. I asked to go and find him. I’m responsible for bringing him back. So I guess that means I’ll have to look after him and keep him company; listen to him and figure out the meaning of his weird moaning from day to day; take his arm and lead him every time he wants to go to the privy—and misses the hole—or it’s time to go to chapel; sit with him and help him while he slobbers his food and pushes it off the side of his dish, poking his fingers into it and trying to find what he’s got and where it is and trying to get it down his gullet without choking to death. And what about the office? D’you think he’ll attempt to sing the psalms? Every time? Will we have to put up with that forever? And what’s this going to mean about the community’s attitude to me? They can barely tolerate me as it is: I’m there because you fought tooth and nail to keep me there. What will they think when we turn up at home with Oswald in tow: ‘Oh look, everybody; William’s brought his friend! Happy days!’ Sancta Maria!”

  He fell silent for a little while; then, by the faint moonlight in the room, John saw his head turn toward his abbot. “And I feel so dreadfully ashamed,” William whispered, “that after all you’ve done for me, I can’t do better than this. It’s disgraceful, isn’t it? I’m a disgraceful man, and I should probably never have been a monk. I certainly never thought I had a vocation. But here I am now, and what on earth am I going to do? I never even liked the man. Irritating individual. I can’t bear all this intimate, personal stuff, and I just can’t stand it when people slobber their food. It makes me feel sick.”

  “Is that all?” asked his abbot after a further silence had elapsed.

  “Yes.”

  John considered what he had just heard.

  “Are you… are you really disappointed in me?” William asked. “Are you sitting here thinking how pitiless and cruel I am?”

  “No, not that. I love your honesty, which I think takes courage. I love it that you don’t pretend to be the man you think you should be. I’m not disappointed in you. When someone’s life goes badly wrong, starting with reality is helpful. When we add pretense to personal tragedy, we just give ourselves two impossibilities to struggle with. For what it’s worth, you may feel reassured to know, every time I try to approach in my own mind the fact that very soon, once I’ve figured out how to clean out his eye sockets thoroughly, I’m going to have to suture his eyelids, it makes me go cold inside—makes me feel like running away.”

  “Stone the crows!” said William’s appalled voice into the silence that followed John’s words. “I should think it does!”

  The two men contemplated this hideous prospect as they gazed into the dark.

  “Will he be able to sit still enough to let you do it? I mean—you won’t be able to leave gaps or anything, will you? Because once you’ve stitched them you won’t be able to get in to clean them.”

  “That’s correct. I mustn’t get it wrong. I’ve never done it before, and it’s going to hurt him. I have to keep telling myself, if it feels too much to face for me, what must it feel like for him? Still, whatever he or I think or feel, it’s got to be done, so there’s an end of it. I’ll find out what to do and take it from there. But can I ask you about something else? In all you told me just now, you said in passing that you never had a vocation. So what are you doing in monastic life?”

  William reached down and pulled his cloak up from the floor, wrapped it around his shoulders. The days were warm now, in May, but the hours of darkness drew in cold.

  “I like power and wealth. I like silence and beautiful music. I like fine art and good craftsmanship. I like spacious buildings. I had no stomach to be a soldier and no money for an apprenticeship. I worked for my father—he was a merchant—but things got too bad at home. I craved peace. My family did not love me, nor did I love them. There was nothing lost in parting from them, but I had to live somewhere. And I find women tiresome. It seemed the obvious choice.”

  “So you had no sense of being drawn by Christ into this way—or desire to come closer to him?”

  “Christ?” William turned the question over thoughtfully. “When you speak about Christ—or when Theodore does or Francis—it is the same as when Columba spoke of Christ. To listen to you, anyone would think you meant somebody actually real—somebody you know, your master maybe or your friend.”

  “That’s right,” said John softly.

  “Well, that isn’t what most people mean.”

  The wide spaces of the night expanded around them. John had that odd feeling of limitlessness that comes in the deepest hours of the night—a time when anything might happen; a time when people die and truth is spoken, when animals lie down to give birth to their young. He listened to the silence and felt the spaces, felt his own soul expand into the spacious night. “What do most people mean by ‘Christ’?” he asked.

  William pondered this question. “Most people mean one of two things,” he replied after some thought. “Either way it is an object, not a person. Either they see Christ as an important asset—like a tool or weapon or a game piece. If you can prove you have Christ on your side, you win the game. If you have Christ in your hand, your arsenal is superior to that of those who don’t. Religious argument is about establishing that my argument has Christ in it, not yours—so that you have to capitulate and I win. Or else they see Christ as the object of a set of ideas. The concepts formulate around the second member of the Trinity and fix him into his place in the dogma of the church. The dogma is mandatory then—hence the Christ idea being useful as a tool or weapon: something to get your own way with. Not all people manipulate things that cynically, of course, though it can certainly be done; I’ve done it myself.

  “But many believe faithfully all their lives without ever realizing that their faith is just the pursuit of self-interest ratified by being able to produce ‘Christ’ in substantiation of their own theory or objective. Whoever has Christ wins.

  “But when you speak about Christ, in Chapter, it is as it was when Columba spoke of him. You are not trying to work an angle or push through your own advantage, and you don’t care who wins. But you—I don’t know—it’s as though Christ were not just a matter of belief but somebody you know, someone you’ve personally met, I mean… and you love him.”

  “Yes. That’s right,” John replied. “That’s how it is.”

  “How your religious faith is? You mean that faith for you is a personal thing, so real it’s like actually knowing someone?”

  “Yes,” said John, then, “
No!”

  He sat up in his bed. “D’you know, if it had been daylight, I’m not sure I could have found it within myself to say this. It feels too personal. You are a master of the searching question! How you just put it—what did you say? That for me religious faith has a personal nature, almost like actually knowing someone? No—that’s not it. Religious faith is something a man has, like an attribute of that man. In one man it’s a thing of the heart, in another it’s a thing of the head. It’s a conviction, it’s whatever you like to call it, but it’s part of the man. But really knowing—meeting—finding Christ is not an attribute or a conviction. It doesn’t arise from the seeker. Christ is really there. He is someone I know, someone I’ve personally met. And I do love him.”

  “This is like a mystical experience that you’re describing?”

  “Well… more for every day than that. I don’t mean a caught-up-into-the-divine, glimpse-of-heaven type of thing. And it isn’t ‘like’ anything. It’s not an ‘as if’. What I’m struggling to say is, it isn’t any kind of metaphor. It starts as an encounter, and it continues as a relationship, and it’s real.”

  The room became very quiet as William considered this. The night stepped down even deeper.

  “So, can… I mean, could anyone…?”

  “Yes,” said John.

  Silence.

  “How do you…?”

  “It’s a matter of opening your heart. D’you remember—of course you do; how could you forget?—when you came before our community the second time to ask admittance, and you spoke to us about letting your heart be seen? ‘A casement that doesn’t open easily,’ I think you said. You opened it and let us see. It’s much the same thing. In the spiritual realm, nothing can cross a threshold without permission, so Christ waits. But all you have to do is open the door of your heart and invite him to come in. He isn’t passive. Ecce sto ad ostium et pulso. He waits and knocks—that means he is actively waiting to be invited.”

  “If I did this,” William said slowly, “then Christ would expect of me… that I be patient with Oswald and spend time with him and take care of him, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he?”

  In the darkness John smiled. “Aye, probably he would!”

  “Can I get this quite clear? You’re telling me that Jesus Christ is a living person who can be encountered as I am encountering you?”

  “Yes,” said John softly. “That’s the implication of the resurrection and the ascension. Jesus lives beyond the dimensions we know. He is not subject to the limitations we experience. He died in a natural body and was raised in a spiritual body, and he now transcends the limitations of time and space and so can be with us always.”

  “Has there ever been anybody who invited him in and he did not come?”

  “No,” said John.

  “Not even very sinful people?”

  “We’re all very sinful people. There is no difference. Eum qui venit ad me, non ejiciam foras.”

  “Is there anything special you have to say when you ask him?”

  “There is not.”

  “Does it have to be public? Do you have to tell anybody?”

  “No. But it doesn’t have to be secret either. It doesn’t have to be anything apart from sincere.”

  When William spoke again, his words were so quiet John didn’t catch what he said. “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said I’d like to do that. I want to find the way into how you live and how Columba lived. When we came here—the way they looked at me—I was conscious again of your sheltering me. I want to find my way to how you do it, how you find that spaciousness and generosity of spirit and that deep core of peace; it seems to me to have something to do with this relationship you’re describing. It’s like a secret, an open secret, something that can’t be seen except from the inside. From where I am, it just looks puzzling; it sounds unlikely. But if it’s true… then I want it very much.”

  “Then ask him,” said John, but he sounded sleepy now, and they lapsed into silence. After a while John snuggled down again and pulled the blankets up over his shoulders. Time passed. William listened to his abbot’s breathing changing as, in the first faint lightening of the dawn, John drifted off to sleep.

  William sat looking at the small square window set deep in the thick stone. He watched as the colour of night began to give way to the morning.

  “If you are there…” he whispered, then his voice faded into silence. He could not bear the idea that this might not be true, or even worse, that it might be true for others but not for him. Quietly, so as not to disturb John’s sleep in this last brief hour before dawn, he slipped out of his bed and knelt on the floor of the guest chamber. He bent low, kneeling, his brow touching the floor, his hands cupped open before him, in the posture of a supplicant. “Jesus… Lord Jesus,” he whispered, “I open my heart’s door to you. My heart is open to you. Please come in. Please make yourself known to me, as you have to these others. Please forgive the man I have been and the choices I have made. There is so much to forgive, and it is late to begin again… but please may I do that? Even if I have to take care of Oswald, Lord Jesus, please come in to me.”

  William had no idea what he had been expecting: to see a figure of a man appear, to feel nothing at all but have faith in an answer, to experience a sense of another person in the room? But he was startled, when he got up from the floor as the sun rose, to experience a rising tide of joy more intoxicating than he would ever have thought possible, filling and flooding and saturating and overflowing his soul. And he knew—not believed, but knew without any shadow of doubting—that this was the presence of Jesus whom he had welcomed in.

  He crept back into his bed and sat there very still. As the moments passed, he gradually became aware of another change. The impossible knot of blame and guilt lodged at the core of him had resolved. It had just gone. For as long as he could remember there had been this rooted tangle of things he had done wrong and things he thought he might have done wrong and things other people said he had done wrong even though he couldn’t see why, grown into his being so that he could never get free of it. And it was all gone. For the first time in his life he felt peaceful and clean. William sat there, afraid to move in case this was only a momentary gift, and when the ordinary day began it would be trampled and sullied, everything back to normal. He knew that he should wake his abbot, for the sun was well risen, but he was afraid that if he said any word or took any step into the mundane, he might lose this place of transfiguration forever. The way he felt now might evaporate like a dream losing its identity to the waking day. John, undisturbed by the office bell here in the guest house, slept soundly. William sat in silence, life and joy so full he could hardly contain it stretching the boundaries of his heart. Then he began to feel guilty as he watched the morning sun rise higher, tipping over the sill of the window to strengthen the light in the room. When he heard Oswald begin to move about in the adjacent room, he knew it was time to get up. He let the glory fold down into the storehouse of his heart, such a precious, precious gift. “Thank you, my Lord,” he murmured softly. Then he slipped out of his bed, patted John firmly on the shoulder four or five times, and went to find out what help Oswald needed to begin the necessities of the day.

  “What happened?” John asked later as they sat at table waiting for St Olave’s guest master to serve them with bread and ale, after they had washed and dressed.

  Oswald turned his face to John, waiting alert and still to hear what might be amiss. William met his superior’s gaze, and John observed the shyness, the reluctance to speak of experience too precious and deep for common talk across the table. He smiled. “You did it.”

  William nodded. “Yes, I did. I did.”

  Oswald asked a question, the content of which neither of them understood, but both of them guessed, and William turned his face away with a reluctant, hunted expression; he had no words for this. John realized that he was witnessing something outside his own experience and not quite within his comp
rehension: that these two men had managed to live in community together without coming either to know or to trust one another. It occurred to him that though St Dunstan’s may have revelled in luxury and licentiousness, it had known nothing of real friendship and could not have been a happy place, not even for those who benefitted substantially from the considerable material successes it had enjoyed.

  “He—may I say this, William?” John asked him, and William bowed his head in assent. “He has found his way through to touch the living presence of Christ for himself,” said John, his voice quiet and reverent. “He has asked the Lord Jesus to abide in all fullness in his heart, and it is done.”

  Oswald remained entirely still, his face slightly puzzled. There had been no tradition at St Dunstan’s that could accommodate a real understanding of what John had just said.

  The guest master came to their table and with civility, if not enthusiasm, gave them a jug of ale, a pat of butter, and a fragrant basket of bread rolls still hot from the oven. He had brought a cloth to protect Oswald’s clothing, and from force of infirmary habit John rose to his feet to tie it on and serve Oswald his food.

  “I’m sorry,” said William quietly. “I should have done that.”

  An infirmarian learning to be an abbot, a superior learning to serve, a fastidious aristocrat learning to forget table manners in favour of survival: it was a strange fellowship, and the three of them bound in it found it hard to keep their feet in the paths of propriety and observe the rightful order of their going. But Christ was with them as they broke bread and shared what they had, as they made the best of what they had not and countered the coolness of their welcome with warmth of their own. Each of them felt Christ’s presence, though Oswald knew only that he felt obscurely comforted.

  Abbot John and Father William both felt glad to ride out of St Olave’s after Mass, though courteous thanks were expressed in their parting, and St. Olave’s porter felt contrite enough to be uncommonly kind in his farewell.