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: the same faces, the same 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, whether a local, an asylum seeker or a posh priest from Oxford.
I remembered something I’d read about the command 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, like sheets of paper with different words on them but all carrying the same faint watermark you only see when you hold them up to the light. The chatty visitor, the Brothers, me – beneath our various performances, the same mark.
Notes from a Room 