Fools for God Online - Two Nunraw Chapters on the Cistercians, I c1, V c.8

                      Compline is one of the most lovely offices, thanking God for the day.  

I was paying some attention to it, but mostly allowed the prettiness of the music, 

and the thin, scratchy, weak singing of one of the monks 

whose job it was to sing the solo bits, to wash over me.  

I wanted to try to pin some of the faces in the choir stalls more firmly in my mind.

I can still hear the melodies, and still find singular resonance 

in the words sung each night: 

Keep us, Lord, as the apple of your eye; 

Hide us in the shelter of your wings.

            

FOOLS FOR GOD
by Richard North   

Published by Collins, 1987
   richarddnorth.com/archive/books/downloads/fools4god.htm  

Part I

INTRODUCTORY

Zones of Silence 

In a civilization which is more and more mobile, noisy and talkative, zones of silence and of rest become vitally necessary.  Monasteries - in their original format - have more than ever, therefore, a vocation to remain places of peace and inwardness.  Don't let pressures, either internal or external, affect your traditions and your means of recuperation.  Rather, make yourself educate your guests and retreatants to the virtue of silence.  You will know that I had occasion to remind the participants in the plenary session of the Congregation of Religious, on 7 March last, of the rigorous observance of monastic enclosure.  I remembered the very strong words on this subject of my predecessor Paul VI:

'Enclosure does not isolate contemplative souls from communion of the mystical Body.  More than that, it puts them at the very heart of the Church.'

Love your separation from the world, which is totally comparable to the biblical desert.  Paradoxically, this longing is not for emptiness.  It is there that the Lord speaks to your heart and associates himself closely with his work of salvation.

John Paul II, 1980

Chapter I, pp. 13-20

The Cardinal's Room

The Cardinal's room was light, airy and bare.  There was a wash basin, hospital-style armchair in tubular steel, wooden office armchair, a large table, a public school sort of bed, an incongruous great cupboard, of a seaside boarding house type, a crucifix over the bed with an unmemorable Christ, plastic curtains which rustled at every motion of the wind, swing windows.

A timetable was on the table, as though the landlady of a hotel were advising her guests to be prompt to high tea.  Luckily, I had no idea then that I had been put anywhere quite so grand as the smartest set of rooms in the place, or I might have left there and then.

            The view from the window, in the south side of the modern Nunraw Abbey, looked out to gently sloping hills: conifers, grazing land and ripening corn.  Beyond, the Lammermuirs high moorlands, reservoirs, and winding narrow roads.  It was a stunning evening.  A butterfly wandered in, fluttered around hazardously and found its way out again.

This is a Cistercian monastery, home to thirty- plus Trappist monks - Cistercians of the Strict Observance - sworn to poverty, chastity, obédience, stabilité, conversio morum (the continual struggle for personal change).  Famously, the Cistercian is devoted to silence.  The quiet of the place was periodically disturbed by the ringing of a phone or the slamming of a door.  Every sound could swell itself along the bare, wide, high corridors.  It was a hospital kind of noisiness. I sat on the bed and then on a chair at the table. I lay down, stood up, unpacked my toothpaste, thought about writing a letter, opened a book.  There was nothing whatever that I had to do.

            I had arrived down the road at the Old Abbey, now used as a guesthouse, earlier that day.  After tea, a phone call had summoned me to meet the Abbot, up at the purpose-built monastery on the hill. I had given him a shopping list, downstairs in a big meeting room, which appeared to be neutral ground where the monks could meet the outside world.  A few meals in the refectory - would that be possible?  A talk with some of the monks?  Coming to the night offices?  Perhaps an insight into the work that the monks do?  Reading in the library?

He cut me short after these questions and said that naturally I would have to live at the monastery proper if I were to do any of these things easily.  A large, pink man, Abbot Donald McGIyn made any sort of timidity impossible.  When a man reminds one of a farmer going about practical business, and requiring not to,be slowed in it by deferential nonsense, it becomes easy to state what is required, and to accept what is offered without anxiety.

            Faced with something so unknown and unlikely as living with monks, and Trappist monks at that, I went into underdrive.  It may feel like that to be an overweight woman checking into a health clinic: a very pleasurable shedding of responsibility.  There was no point wondering how to pass my tirne with these Trappists: I had, for once, given up directing or pretending to direct - my life.

            Something rather like this may happen to cheerful old recidivists as the doors of Pentonville Prison clang shut behind them on yet another Christrnas Eve, with them safely on the inside, when otherwise they would have to face the perils of a festive season with nothing to celebrate.

            When I had come back from the guesthouse, the Prior (second in command) took a hand in things.  Red-faced, sharp-featured, with razored white hair stubbling his skull, he had a keen look to him.  Rather severe, I thought.  He was wearing the Cistercian uniform: creamy rough wool habit and black scapula.  He took my hand in a solid grip, and gave me a broad, conspiratorial wink.  It seemed almost to be saying that this was an exceedingly rum place, and that he and I were quite probably the only sane people in it.  This was kindly done.  We drove round to the garages behind the monastery: it was slightly odd to find that one could do this so easily.  Where the great whispering gates?  Where the grille with a lurking, half-seen face?

            Nunraw is built like an open prison without the fences.  It is long and low and penitential in its demeanour.  Coming on it from the village, from the north side, it turns out to be in a softly beige stone, rough cut, and a rather good mixture of the airy and the monumental.  In the west side, where the visitors park their cars, there is a scruffy wall where there ought to be a brand new church, and at each end an inconspicuous door.  One leads to the 'temporary' church, and the other to the noman's-land room, and the enclosure beyond.

            A drive swirls round from the western side of the building to the southern.  A small 'Private' sign is all that separates the sacred from the profane. There is a workshop and garage area which might belong to an army camp or a school, and from which runs a path through a little municipal-style lawn and flower beds, to a door which leads into the nether regions of the monastery.     The whole place is perched on the brow of a hill.  It is a very exposed position.

            'Up here, the wind fairly cuts through you in winter', said the Prior, Brother Stephen, as we walked from the car.  He insisted on carrying my suitcase.  His step was lively.  He installed me in my room, and showed me the route to the loos, the church, and the refectory.  The rest, he said, could wait.  The Abbot came and brought me some things to read: well chosen, useful books, and a doctorate thesis devoted to an American Trappist monastery, which had been printed as a kind of brochure.  As I went down to Compline, Brother Stephen found me, and told me he would come and call me at 3.15 the next morning to go to Vigils.  I told him not to bother but he said he had to get everyone up anyway, so it was no trouble.  

            I was famished, but the monks had had their supper, and knew that I had had tea and cupcakes at the guesthouse.  It was 7.30 p.m. and the end of their long day.  My biological clock wanted to go for a walk or have a drink or eat, but these things were not on offer. I had jumped onto their roundabout, and it had its own pace.

            Compline dismissed any small temptation to grouse.  Nunraw's church is a long, wide room.  It has no great majestic height.  All the way down one side there are floor-to-ceiling windows.  The floor is richly polished hardwood, the ceiling, fine, light, varnished pine.  The walls are white.  The choir stalls and organ are in some hardwood, perhaps walnut.  The linen of the altar, and that draped over the sacraments - as though over a domed parrot cage - is gleaming white.  The ivory of the candles is warm by contrast with the starkness of the walls.

            It is one of the most beautiful modern places I have ever seen, and the monks are not at all sure that they will ever bother to build the proper abbey church the architects have designed for them.

            Gathered in the church when I arrived for my first service was quite a gang of people I recognized from tea in the guesthouse.  Sister Breda was there: a girl in a nun's coif, and an ordinary, civvy-street skirt.  She was wearing a tennis-style aertex shirt with short sleeves, and looked rather sexy in a sports girl kind of way.  She was a nursery teacher.  An older nun was sitting in the same row: she had a more orthodox and grim outfit, and had said that she liked Nunraw because she could walk in the monastery's farmlands in safety.  It seemed somehow improbable that she would be particularly at risk even in rather less sacerdotal countryside.  This religious seemed to think that rape and pillage is absolutely normal outside the priest's house and the church.  It is a failing amongst the devout, and especially the enclosed, to believe that the outside world is falling apart.

            The robust man who had responded to her at tea with the remark that the hills, even out of sight of the monastery, were still God's bills and perfectly safe, was also there, with his wife.  Their children had turned up at home one day and told them to take a holiday.  A weekend at Nunraw's guesthouse had seemed the best way of taking the time out of time.  They were blissfully cheerful and gave me lots of smiles: this was a funny kind of place to take a holiday, but they made it seem rather splendid and logical - a pontifical Pontins.

            I had met a sad man at tea, the kind of man whose air of sadness seems rather beautiful and dreadful.  He was welldressed in slacks and leisure shirt, with a neat buckle to his belt and pretty shoes.  His teenage son and daughter were with him, and dwarfed him.  He seemed to be bowed down. He might, one thought, have lost his wife or seen her committed to an asylum.  He might have just received news that he or someone near to him was dying.

            He had said that Nunraw helped him with the difficult times of life.  With decisions, for instance? someone had asked.  With difficulties, he had stressed, and one could go no further.  His children had come to him and whispered their plans for the evening - wanting him to be free of concern for them, yet worried, it seemed, that they might be bothering him unnecessarily by interrupting his thoughts.  He turned to them in acknowledgement and dismissed them.

They treated him with respect and care, as though he had become temporarily a child.  They left his presence with no sign of relief: his dignity seemed to wash over them.  The girl was punkish and pretty, and the boy had the air of a sixth former with a future. I found him later inspecting the tyres of the smart family car.  He could not quite allow the family's tragedy - I was convinced something hideous had befallen them - to interfere with his pleasure in a brand new Japanese car.

            The sad father was in a pew, flanked by his children.

            But there were two stars of the congregation.  One was a spike-shouldered old lady who walked in just before the off . She was very thin and small, but soldier-erect.  She went down the aisle, sashaying slightly, and took a place on the outside of the left-hand side of the front row.  There she lowered herself to her knees.  It looked a very great distance to go for so old a person.  And then she simply hooked herself over the rail in front of her, flopping both arms over the bar and holding her service book in her dangling hands.  She wore a black veil over her head, a strangely Spanish, black cobweb over her fine little white head.

            A big woman next entered the church.  She was very tall and quite broad, and she walked with a rolling gait, as a cruel actress might mimic an ungainly schoolgirl.  She wore a cape and a beret and a lot of badges of one kind or another.  I had seen her in the kitchen of the guesthouse, rolling pastry and laughing cheerily with a helper.  She had obviously cobbled her uniform together for her own purposes and according to her own notions of suitability.  She looked pretty fine and very eccentric.  She strode down the aisle and took up her place on the righthand side of the aisle.  Her position exactly mirrored that of the old lady: front row, outside place.

            They were the lay sentinels, guarding their boys. There were various lesser mortals in the room: I think I recognized some of the men as being from the guesthouse, in indeterminate positions in the kitchens or whatever.  One, a man who looked as though he had been left in a warm damp place for so long that he was slightly warped - not positively bent or crippled or even arthritic, but just exhibiting a slight lean here, and a slight twist there-held his little order of service sheet in front of him and stared at it long and hard.  A small man with a deaf aid came in.  Various more or less plain girls in shorts took up their stations and looked incongruous, but not somehow impertinent: the Catholic faith expects a good deal of rough and tumble in its adherents and doesn't seem to demand quite the same standards of dress and decorum as the polite upstart Church of England.

            The lay congregation, then, had pretty well filled up the room behind the bar.  A bell tolled.  And then the monks came into their stalls.  Behind the altar and at each side of it there were two doors, and there was another in the wall at the congregation's end of the choir stalls.  The community filed in, and took places in two rows of stalls on each side, facing each other.  One pair of rows had their backs to the windows, and the other to the wall.  A postulant was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

            The Abbot stood waiting for everyone to be in his place, and then leaned down into the stall in front of him and made a small tap with a device there.  A monk at the organ began to play, and the toing and froing of the psalmody began.  The old lady stayed on her knees throughout, whilst the monks' voices played against each other.  The monks sat, stood, or faced the altar, moving together like a pair of sedate chorus lines, which they were. One monk was always, however, slightly ahead of the others as they stood up: just a touch too eager, I thought.  The congregation mostly sat, but the woman in the cloak did exactly as the community did.

            Sometimes the monks would bow low, and hang there, bent deeply from the waist, like pictures of Japanese geisha girls being super-polite. They looked very beautiful.  And there was the lady in the cloak, standing or bowing, exactly as the monks did, and not minding at all that she was blocking the view of those seated behind: perhaps she did not know, or care, or thought that the rest of the crew could perfectly easily follow suit.

The light from the windows grew softer as the sun, which had been shining fiercely into the room, began to sink.  Far away across fields and towns, the Firth of Forth seemed to be catching fire.  The big, weird geological lumps which litter the landscape between Nunraw and the sea looked particularly stark.

            Compline is one of the most lovely offices, thanking God for the day.  I was paying some attention to it, but mostly allowed the prettiness of the music, and the thin, scratchy, weak singing of one of the monks whose job it was to sing the solo bits, to wash over me.  I wanted to try to pin some of the faces in the choir stalls more firmly in my mind.

I can still hear the melodies, and still find singular resonance in the words sung each night: Keep us, Lord, as the apple of your eye; Hide us in the shelter of your wings.

            When the service was over, the monks filed out, and I had to walk down the aisle from my place at the back to a door which was on the monks' side of the low, token barrier between the choir and the congregation. I opened it and wondered what to do next. I faced the altar and bowed my head for a moment.  I found myself wiping my face with my hand, in a gesture which might just have had the makings of a fumbled crossing in it. I would have to sort out my entrances and exits better than that in future.

            But I knew that I had found a place profoundly to my taste.  And I understood something of why so many people felt drawn to it. I was often happy in the monasteries I visited, but that was a place where for the first time I very nearly tasted temptation of the monastic kind.

 Part V

THE MAJOR REFORMS

Chapter 8 

Nunraw pp. 220-227

It may be that the Cistercian monastery of Sancta Maria, at Nunraw, near Edinburgh, has the power to touch me simply at least partly - because the Abbot there was the first monk I came across who understood that writing this book would entail my getting properly under the skin of a monastery. There have been others since who let me behind the scenes, but Abbot Donald McClynn did so more comprehensively - and with less evidence of my seriousness - than I had any reason to expect.

            From the first, he struck me as a shrewd operator.  On my first evening, he asked me to give a talk to his monks about my monastic travels so far. He was letting the troops get a look at me, and letting each man make up his own mind whether he would speak to me.

            Nunraw is a new monastery.  It looks a very severe place: pinky-beige stone; regularly-placed windows; low slung.  The monks built much of the place with their own hands.  Early film and photographs of the enterprise show present community members, callow-faced and energetic, at work on the structure.

            There is a battered lorry in the monastic garage: the vehicle which trundled the lanes of the neighbourhood, fetching stone from the nearby quarry. Less glamorous perhaps than the canal which twelfth-century Cistercians carved in order to bring the stones which built Rievaulx in Yorkshire.  But it has the look of a fine old retainer.

            Brother Kentigern Heenan, one of the many Glaswegians who have been drawn to Nunraw's community of thirty-two, used to drive the lorry and oversee the quarry work.  He is a big, capable, quiet man; an ex-Para of the toughest Second World War vintage, for much of his time in the Far East. After the war he 'knocked about a bit for a couple of years', he says.  He looks the kind of man whose knocking would shake mountains.

            As they built the monastery, he became very expert in quarrying and stone masonry.  They worked deeper and deeper into the quarry, pumping away surplus water, and finding the stone improving the deeper they went.  Wandering round the quarry - he had not for years gone back to the scene of his triumph - he was nostalgic for the enterprise.  'We never did build the church for the new monastery', he says.  'The building looks incomplete without it, do you not think?' He would like to get his hands on some stone again.

            The monks who founded Nunraw from Mount St loseph's, Roscrea, in County Tipperary in 1946, began by living in a Victorian pile which had been a Red Cross depot.  They lived in the pre-Vatican II Cistercian way: silent, working often in gangs, sleeping in dormitories in their habits.  'I don't think you can have any idea what it was like in those days', says Father Martin, a ruddy, large, laughing man (English) who is the community's organist, choirmaster and chief cook.

            He joined in 1960.  'Everything was far stricter than it is today.  But the strictness was imposed on us from without and was accepted as part of the Cistercian thing.  Now we are asked to be more personally responsible.  There never was a vow of silence, as people think.  But we kept silence, using hand signs to communicate.  Actually, we wasted a lot of energy on communicating by hand, and people often got things wrong.  Then, in the wake of Vatican II, we were allowed what they called "brief oral communications".  In fact, of course, some of us talked non-stop for six months.  We talked so much we got fed up with it, and went back to being quiet.  Certainly, when we started talking, one of the good things was that we got to know one another better.

            'Now each man has to find his own way of silence.  It is much better this way.  Silence as a matter of discipline is useless:            silence without reference to God is useless.  Our silence is an instrument to make us more aware of God's presence, and majesty.'

            I never discovered what sort of a rule it was, but one somehow knew not to talk to people without appointment or agreement, or unless you were in one or two places in the monastery in which conversation was normal.

            Martin recalls also that there was a good deal of anxiety in the old days about friendships, especially those characterized as 'particular', and the homosexuality which might possibly result from them.  Now, it is accepted that people are bound to find congenial company and keep it; on the other hand, in a claustrophobic or at least close-knit community everyone has a powerful obligation to learn to get along with one another, without distinction.

            'I was more or less destined for the navy.  I went to a prep. school from which boys usually pursued that path.  But I decided I wouldn't stick the navy so I went into shipbuilding, intending to be a naval architect.  This was in the fifties, for about seven years. I was at a yard on the Tyne, amongst Geordies, of course, who were marvellous fun.  I found it odd that the men in the yard had an inferiority complex, especially when they heard my accent.

            'In the drawing office where I worked, there were three or four Geordies I got to know quite well and they knew about Nunraw and used to come to the work camp based in an old Prisoner of War camp to help build this monastery.  I wasn't then thinking about the religious life. I came with them for a fortnight's stay.

            'I put my suitcase in a hut which had been used 'by the PoW's and we trundled up the hill.  Almost immediately I came into the grounds of the monks' house I knew this is where the Lord wanted me to be.  This place was all go, go, go. I wanted to be a part of it.'

            Nunraw has less need of builders now.  Indeed, it is a less dramatic place altogether than it was when the monastery was being constructed, and the gales of change surrounding Vatican II were throwing everything into question.

            There has been an agricultural revolution, too.  Gangs of Nunraw monks would once stride out in double file to the fields. 'I have seen thirty monks out in the field, picking spuds', says the Abbot.  The bursar, Father Andrew, recalls the days when a thousand pounds of jam was made from the monastic fruit. (A gentle man, now eighty, from what he calls 'a religious mafia of a family', he has a brother who is a bishop, and was off to the ordination of his nephew when I visited.)

            The Abbot had been working on the farm before his election in 1969.  In the early seventies he pushed through a radical change in the way the farm was run.  'We used to have sheep, but they lamb at the very worst time for us: Easter, of course.  We had pigs, dairy cows, and poultry, at one time: but the building work meant we had to stop some of those activities.  Then the economics of farming changed and it made sense for us to concentrate on beef fattening.  We have between six and seven hundred head of cattle grazing the hills, and a mill to make our own feed.  Only by becoming that specialized could we stay profitable: most other monasteries have had to stop farming and switch to something else like perfume or beer. In the States, one of our monasteries runs a very famous bakery, but even they franchise out the name and process.'

            In any agricultural community there is the farmer who tries something new, and ends up creating the fashions.  Father McGlynn would have been such a character had he stayed in the world: as it is, he has laid the basis of the monastery's moderately comfortable finances.

After the years of dynamic expansion and construction, the community has had to adjust to the harder problem of consolidation.  Not that there is room for idleness.  The liturgical hours are kept vigorously: no sloppy observance here.  There is food to be cooked, music to be rehearsed, laundry to be done, the shop to be run, the sick and elderly to care for.  The guesthouse takes the energies of two monks.  The monastic farm needs three or four monks.  One of them has the very demanding farm manager's job, held by Brother Aidan, a man determined that the brother's vocation be respected for what it is, one of service to the choir and liturgy, even if the brothers' work keeps him in the barn or field whilst others are on their knees.

            Three of the community were in hospital when I was there.  'The problem is not finding jobs for men, but men for jobs', says the Abbot.  There was a sprinkling of young men at the monastery, though: two postulants, and one newly professed full choir monk.

Yet, at first blush, the 'waste' of energy and talent is the hardest thing to understand and accept: this community bursts with men who could be leaders, and they have instead devoted themselves to a routine which keeps them busy from 3.15 in the morning, when they rise for meditation and Lauds, right through till Compline and bed at very soon after 8 in the evening.  The modern Cistercian is not encouraged to go out and tame wildernesses: his job is to live in the wilderness within.

            Only slowly does a lay sceptic come to a full appreciation of the work monks do, and become grateful for it.

            Yet one meets rather little doubt in Nunraw: men there will say that things have been more or less difficult at different times.  Most are too modest to claim to be doing anything more difficult or glorious than the rest of humanity.  Father Martin says simply that 'I think man is naturally religious.  Up till now, God has always seemed very present.  I haven't always lived as though I knew that, but I've got to grow to do so.  People have real roots in Christ, even if they don't suspect or appreciate it.  It gives people a dimension.

            'If I ask myself why I must be gentle, or live in a moral framework, I believe it is simply that we belong to Jesus Christ.  My love of Christ has deepened over the years: my own suffering, people's troubles, or brothers who've been sick - they've all shown me that we either open our hearts more and more or we close them little by little.  And I've learned from all sorts of people that the intellect by itself is a cold instrument.  To be a lover, the heart is needed.  For me at this moment, my problem is the question of getting the heart on fire in prayer.'

            I didn't quite like to bother Father Ambrose, the oldest man in the community.  But he came to the Cardinal's sitting room, where I would receive my visitors.  He had a bad leg.  'The doctors are at it', he said stoutly, as he lowered himself into an armchair, leaning on a fine stick.

Born in County Clare in 1906, he became a monk when he was nineteen.  He says he has 'never, never doubted my faith.  And, no frustrations either. And this is not unusual, though of course every individual has his own course to follow.  My family very much approved of the step I was taking when I became a monk.  My father's brother was a priest, and his sisters - several of them - we re nuns.  I have done very varied jobs in the monastery: whatever was needed whilst we were building, for instance.

            'I do not think the deep happiness of this life can be understood by anyone who has not lived it.  Of course there is a rule to follow, which lays down what has become well-tried practice and been proved.  And then there is the individual's relationship to God.  We do trust that God is drawing us to himself, whilst he also respects our free will.  A man may resist the call to grace, but he cannot be fully developed unless he realizes that God is calling him to himself.  Some of us are called to direct service to God.  He calls some of us to work in groups, and some to be more individual.  This is something you find out when you are alone with God, when no one can come between you and God. We have rules, and are happy to live by rules, only because they help us with our individual call.

            'Each man will come to God and can come to God if he makes the effort of will.  This may be smothered for a while, but it will come.'

If Ambrose's religious connections are impeccable, they are nothing compared to those of my Lord Abbot's ('the community is not keen on the "Lord" Abbot part, he says).  His family have been small farmers in Donegal.  His childhood in the countryside was, he says, 'Idyllic. I was as happy as the day is long'.  Now, he has a brother who is a monk in Africa, and five sisters who are all in a missionary Order.  Left a widower in I959, his father, aged sixty, became a monk at Mount St Bernard, a Cistercian monastery in Leicestershire

            'There was at that time a novice master of great strictness there, and he would not allow the old man to become a fully professed monk, so he went back to Ireland where he lives on his own.

            'He came to the twenty-fifth anniversary of my ordination here.  But he says that he finds there isn't enough time for prayer here: he can do more at home.'

            Knowing Father McGlynn it is easy to imagine the days when whole families came over to monasticism: he is a ruddy, practical man.  If you saw him at a county agricultural show, or standing in some Irish bar - in mufti, of course - you would take him for a composed, perhaps affluent, farmer.

            'I was born in Glasgow, though I spent five happy years in Ireland during the war as an evacuee.  I came here from boarding school in England in 1952.  It was made very clear to us that we would be digging foundations for the new monastery.  We do sometimes wonder why this site was chosen. The then Abbot said on a television film that he wanted the monastery to be seen, standing on its hill, by the world all around.  There were two architects and the Superior: they made the decision.  Nowadays the community would expect a very much bigger say in such a thing, but that was the way it was then.

            'It was planned that there should be a guesthouse integral to the monastery: but instead we have the Old Abbey down the road for guests.  It sometimes gets very noisy there and I think people use the place almost for holidays: I am sure it does them at least as much good as coming on a formal retreat would.'

            Even now, visitors stay in the guesthouse, and contact with the community is at the church liturgies or in one of the parlours where they may speak privately with a monk.  In Cistercian monasteries, it is exceptional to be invited to eat in refectory with the monks.  And so I was very conscious of privilege as I was shown to my place.

            The refectory at Nunraw is large, airy, and plain: good panelling, with a carved wood sculpture at one end, and the abbot on a low dais under a stone sculpture at the other.  A Cistercian washes his knife, fork and spoon in his water cup and leaves them wrapped in a napkin by his place.  It was a small ritual, but a very pleasurable one in which economy was elegantly expressed.  I came to enjoy enormously the small empire of my place setting: as familiar after a day or two as though it had been mine for a lifetime.

            Monks listen, at lunchtime, to readings.  During my stay a biography of Dr Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury: much nodding and smiling would greet any waspishness.  One tea, on Sunday, Brother Martin was quite carried away during the playing of a record of The Nutcracker.  Of course, there was no talking, though someone might whisper very quietly some if I hadn't hint or other to me, to spare embarrassment understood some part of the etiquette.

            After tea, the evening services, and so to bed, which only at first seemed a peculiar place to be whilst the sun was still warm on the fields outside. And the interrupted sleep brought wonderful dreams, full of exotic and unaccustomed religious symbolism.  The hours, the meals, the dreams, the visits to the library, the conversations with monks, the rising of the sun nd its falling away again, looking out of the church windows a

towards Bass Rock, out across the sea: they became very rapidly my entire preoccupation.  It all seemed extraordinarily luxurious. I cannot say that I was sad to leave: my other, 'real', life is very attractive and imperative.  But my time at Nunraw seemed and seems quite luminous.