Astray 2

At Felkirk there was a visitor who riled me. He talked during the silent meals. The Brothers reminded him to keep silence. He made a show of saying sorry but forgot the next minute and continued to whisper about his hometown’s local politics, the food, anything. It was as if the silence was intolerable to him. The services seemed easier for him to bear, since there were readings and visitors can join in with the hymns and antiphons. I listened to him and felt irritation rising – then got a hint of how the Brothers checked themselves. One of them glanced at him, then away, his face settling back into neutrality. I imagined it was a minor inconvenience to them compared to whatever else they had to endure in that place, some of them for decades: daily denials within the same walls, faces, routines grinding away at their self-image. The communal life seemed shaped to prevent anyone marking themselves out from others. The cassocks, the rows at table, the patterns of standing and sitting together during the offices: all designed to help them cast off their social costumes, speak to God in their true voices and welcome each guest as an equal before God, whether it was a local, an asylum seeker or a posh priest from Oxford.

I thought about this on the train back. We meet people in the guise of roles and tend to treat those with a firm foothold in the world as realer than the rest. Even someone who’s renounced worldly goods to become a monk or nun has a role. They’re a monk or a nun within an institution whom people gravitate to, go to confession with. They’ve achieved a life, even if it’s a life of renunciation. But at bottom the Brothers’ routines seemed aimed at something else. I remembered something I’d read about the commandment to love your neighbour – not certain types of people or those you happen to like, but whoever happens to be there. Each person bears a hidden maker’s mark on his soul, like sheets of paper with different words written on them but all carrying the same faint, common watermark that only appears when you hold them up to the light. The chatty visitor, the Brothers, me – beneath our various performances, the same mark. I felt that dizziness again, the thinning out. If roles weren’t solid, what was? The Brothers lived as if they knew. I couldn’t see it, only the gap where it might be.