Remember Me (6 page)

“And the Eucharist heals us. So what has intrigued me about it has been trying to see how and what it was balancing, that it can be such a healing thing.

“Now, you probably recall, from your studies of St Augustine—um… the African one—that he taught his catechumens, when they received the bread, the host of the Eucharist, to respond to the words ‘The body of Christ' by saying ‘Amen,' as we all do. But he told them, ‘Let your
Amen
be for
I am
.'

“See? ‘
I am
the body of Christ.' That's… quite momentous. But it's true enough. We—you, me, all of us together—we are the body of Christ.

“So let's think about this a bit. Jesus, at the Last Supper, when he tore the bread to pieces, said to his disciples, ‘This is my body, broken for you. Do this to remember me.'

“Do what? Not just consecrate bread and wine, eat and drink, as he did; I think he meant more than that. I think he meant that we should gather as they did, that we should share as they did, that we should hold together and walk the way in faithfulness as they did, eat together, pray together, discuss together.

“But of course, as soon as we do this, what do we notice? Before very long it becomes apparent to us that this bunch of brothers is immensely annoying. You sit in silent meditation and the man next to you keeps holding his breath and then letting it go in a sigh—every couple of minutes, until you think ‘Oh, shut up, you idiot! Just
breathe normally
!' You sit at the meal table and try to focus on the reading from the martyrology as you've been told, but you can't because the brother beside you is bashing his dish so vigorously as he scrapes out his pottage that you can't hear what the reader is saying, and you think, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—what's the matter with you, man? Do it
quietly
!' And then you sit down in your stall at Vespers, and you have this little tickle in your throat that makes you keep clearing it, and you're trying to be discreet, but you suddenly catch the eye of the man opposite you, and you think ‘What? What's his problem? I'm doing my
best
!'

“Living in community isn't easy, especially when the only material for the job is us lot.

“There are people we can't stand the sight of, men we're afraid of, brothers we're frankly jealous of, and some who make us feel so inadequate we wonder if the place wouldn't be better off without us.

“The body of Christ—yes, we may be; broken, we certainly are. And we may be limping along to begin with, but when Christ takes us into his hands he breaks us again—tears us to shreds at times. He has to grab hold of our pride… arrogance… contempt… cynicism… hardheartedness… He has to break those things up, or there would never be any humility, no compassion, no gratitude.

“So the body of Christ is broken—in the bread, on the cross, and in the community; it's dismembered, it isn't well. That word ‘well'—it's an old word, and it means the same as ‘whole'.

“And what Jesus is saying—at least, I think this is what he's saying—is that as we gather together like this, suffer him to break us like this, then Christ, who has been dismembered in crucifixion and in sin, is re-membered in our gathering, made whole in our community, in our communion. Comm-union, comm-unity: they mean being as one together, being reconciled in a fellowship of humility and forgiveness. The brokenness of his body (and we
are
his body) is healed in our love, in our common life—which is his love, his life, in us.

“So—do you see? There is a balance. We are made whole in Christ, but also—I hardly dare to say it—Christ is made whole in us.

“When we refuse to love and accept one another, when we break the communion of love, we dismember the body of Christ. When we come here in the Mass, embrace each other humbly and honestly in the kiss of peace, kneel in humility to receive Christ's body in the host, a miracle of healing happens. When the brokenness of Christ's body touches the brokenness of our souls, the blood of his love flows from one to the other, mingling our life with his. We become one body, one blood with Him. We are accepted. We are forgiven. We are healed.

“It's about maintaining a state of balance in the community as a body—like breathing in and breathing out—the humility to receive from him and the generosity to give of ourselves. Wellness can happen because life balances for healing again as we remember him.”

Brother Robert, probably the least promising of Theodore's novices, listened to this, rapt. He had absolutely no idea what his abbot was talking about, but he liked Father John. He sensed his kindness, and his strength. In the short time he'd been in the novitiate he had watched his abbot battered to his knees by grief and distress, and watched him get up again and carry on. He thought Father John probably knew what it meant to be broken.

In the silence for reflection the abbot left before they moved on, Brother Robert looked at the faces of his brethren in community. Father Theodore, his face gentle and still, sat with his eyes closed. Brother Thomas was evidently bothered by a splinter in his thumb, which he was trying to get out. The abbot himself sat with eyes downcast, motionless, his hands folded into his sleeves. Brother Robert's eye lighted on the cellarer—or was he the cellarer? Wasn't Brother Ambrose the cellarer? Anyway, the man who had come to the community just a few months back during Lent. Father William. Intrigued, Robert looked at the tense, hard lines of his face: composed, yes. Peaceful? Not at all. He gave the impression of simply enduring being alive, and Brother Robert wondered why. Wasn't he happy here?

How do people know when someone is watching them? William glanced up quickly, straight into Robert's eyes, and for a moment the young man felt suddenly frightened, for no real reason at all, just the look in William's eyes, which scared him. And then the community stood for the
Credo
.

The Eucharist was the heart and soul of the way these men had chosen, and it sat as a central jewel within the setting of the monastic hours. Lauds and Vespers, the cardinal offices (named after
cardo
, the word for a hinge), opened and closed the central working hours of the day. Compline folded their tired minds and bodies under the wing of God's silence at bedtime. The night office was the mysterious trysting hour that kept watch with the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps. The offices of Sext and None reminded them that they took their meal only after they had prayed, and that the work of their lives was their focus on God, not the occupation of their hands in their various tasks—those must be set aside when they heard the bell ring for the Office, however pressing or absorbing the task had become.

And beyond the rhythm of the monastic hours was the private prayer of each man, the moments in which his heart became the hallowed ground where he tasted the Love beyond all loves that he had sworn to serve—sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, sometimes full of dread like an ember that threatened to scar and sear his soul, occasionally blissful, sometimes a time of tears and seeing his own shame.

Every one of them knew that prayer would be the lifeblood of the way he had set himself to walk; without it his heart would wither and his soul would die.

So on the other side of the choir from the Lady Chapel, the south side, an inconspicuous door led into a small oratory for private prayer—a simple, quiet chapel set apart for silence and meditation even on feast days when the place bustled with visitors. There were times when the whole church was a waiting space empty of people and full of light and holiness; other times it filled up with footsteps and song, the leisurely river of chanting and the musical murmur of liturgical responses. Whatever the case, the small oratory remained folded away as a place of prayer, the heart hidden inside the ribs of this living place of worship, where a man might quietly and privately seek his God.

To the small oratory came the kitcheners or the infirmarians or the guest master, when their duties had obliged them to stay at their place of work and fail in their attendance in chapel for the office. Especially this was true for the infirmary brothers when anyone in their care was critically ill or an emergency arose; and of the kitchen brothers when, despite their best efforts to plan ahead, they had to skip Sext because it fell just before the midday meal or missed Vespers because it fell just before supper. Then they would come quietly into the small oratory and say the office alone as opportunity permitted.

The oratory was for anyone. People in the parish bearing burdens of grief or troubled mind would come and sit there in its hush, allowing the prayer that had seeped into the wood and the stones and hung upon the air to seep in its turn into their own souls, strengthening them. The small chapel was always open.

On that summer afternoon Madeleine found herself with no particular task urgently pressing, and she came with her rosary to the little oratory, to sit for a while and allow the gaze of Christ to search her heart. Father Theodore was her confessor now, and tomorrow she would go to him, as she had a month ago in mid-July, to seek his good counsel for her life. There is no point in having a confessor from whom one keeps secrets, and part of what had drawn Madeleine to the small oratory today was the difficult decision of how much it might be advisable to tell Theodore, and how much to keep to herself.

She had asked Father Theodore to be her confessor when she had been about three weeks at St Alcuin's because she liked his face, and she saw that he was shy and gentle. She thought he would be an understanding man. She had met with him for the first time in mid-June, when her heart had been filled with mixed emotions: profoundly thankful for the security of her new home; still reeling from the horrors of the night after which she had fled her burnt cottage in Motherwell; and comforted and cheered by the new friendships she had found—especially with Father William, who was so good to her.

A month later when she saw Theodore in mid-July, the nightmare memories of Motherwell—and indeed almost everything else in life—had blurred into a vague backdrop roughed into the perimeter of her days. Her thoughts, her dreams, and her longing were filled incessantly by the bond that had grown between herself and William, overwhelming and unexpected. She felt like someone standing thigh deep in a place where the pounding breakers crash upon the shingle in the wild high seas of spring, struggling with only partial success to keep her footing, every moment increasing the likelihood of being swept away completely.

She knew she had come to live here as a blameless and godly spinster, to go unobtrusively about her calling of healing the sick, living under the shelter of her brother's integrity, eminence, and magnanimity, with humble gratitude. She understood very clearly what was expected of her, and nothing in her remained at all blind to the obvious unspoken condition that under no circumstances would it be thinkable that she should even give houseroom in her fantasies to the prospect of having an affair with one of the brothers of John's house.

Madeleine was grateful. She trusted in God, and she took seriously Christ's standards of honesty and good faith. She grasped the implications of her position, and she loved her brother. She had been glad to come to St Alcuin's, glad of the chance to work among the villagers keeping mothers and babes safe when a child was born, easing the path out of this world for the dying, curing the ailments and crises of those who fell ill. She had not meant to fall in love, nor had she been discontented to live as she was. It felt lonely sometimes, but she had found companionship among her neighbours, especially old Mother Cottingham in the cottage next door—she had never in her life been restless or unhappy without a man of her own. The prejudice against her and her mother had forced upon her the vulnerability that threatens a woman with no wealth and no husband in any community. But though she had sought protection and security, it had never occurred to her to look for a husband, nor had she imagined that in her early forties she would have been successful if she had. Madeleine was not a natural celibate; she was not indifferent to the comfort and companionship of marriage, or its pleasures. It was just that her path had not travelled that way. Until now—when by some cruel twist of circumstance, she found herself wholly, completely, irrecoverably in love with a man she could not have.

In July when she had met with Father Theodore, she had thought it prudent to confide in him nothing of this. She had expressed her thankfulness at her new situation and told him that the memories that had tortured her had faded with remarkable speed—for which, thanks be to God. She had chosen not to say that what made her new home a heaven, made her days sweet and healed her soul of every wound, were the daily visits to her cottage of Father William. Madeleine knew well that all of us see what we want to see and reconstruct reality according to our own point of view. She knew that of no one is this more true than a man or a woman in love. She had accordingly hung onto enough common sense to accept that her feelings might not be reciprocated, and she knew that a feeling is not a sin. She was not obliged to confess it therefore, and she kept it to herself.

Now in mid-August as she prepared again to meet with her confessor, everything had changed. It was not about feelings anymore but about love expressed in a passion of kisses. Lodged in her heart was William's groan of longing as he held her close in his arms, his body melded to hers in the utter surrender of his love and the irresistible ardour of his desire. There was not a shadow of ambiguity in which to take refuge, no question at all concerning the nature of their relationship. There was no point in having a confessor if you kept something of this magnitude hidden from him. Presumably William was supposed to confess his state of soul to his abbot; Madeleine felt entirely certain that he would not be saying anything at all of this. So she did not know what to do, and she came to the small oratory to prepare for her confession and think through the implications both spiritual and practical of the possibilities open to her. One thing that she considered to be of crucial importance was that she absolutely trusted Father Theodore. She could read the faces and weigh the souls of her fellow human beings, and she knew in her bones that whatever she told him, he would not give her away. That meant her dilemma was not further complicated by uncertainty about her confessor's reliability. On the other hand, if she had not trusted him to keep silence, it would have made the decision easier; she would simply have kept silence herself.