1
Today on the train I got that frightening old feeling again. Suddenly it’s as if I fall out of life and the things around me are unreal, far off. Nothing in particular seems to bring it on. My body was in a seat, making the usual movements, but I was somewhere else. I looked at the other passengers – people staring out of the window or into space – and wondered whether they’d felt this too. Did their jobs, families, routines, surroundings ever suddenly seem strange and senseless to them? Did they ever slip out of their own lives for no reason?
I was coming back to Norwich from the House of the Resurrection monastery in Felkirk, where I’d spent a week with the Brothers, going to church and eating with them, mostly in silence. The community isn’t exactly isolated. There’s a college, visiting retreatants and staff. It’s by a busy road and the town is nearby. Sometimes you hear a train horn. Yet the Brothers commit to spending the rest of their lives there, undergoing the same daily routines. The backbone is the four daily offices: mattins, mass, evensong and compline. You’re given a schedule of services, meals and silent hours.
The number of Brothers in the community has dwindled. Thirty years ago there were a hundred, now there are twenty. They seemed stern at first, like dons or schoolmasters who’d put their lives in order, but they were happy to chat when it was allowed. In the refectory we sat in rows at long tables, eating in silence during breakfast and dinner. We were bodies sitting in rows, chewing: the Brethren in their cassocks, me in my jeans. Whatever went on in them when they bowed their heads for grace and efficiently cleared the tables, it was out of sight. They were gracious and refused help: they had a system, they said. The pamphlet in my room said their shared life was intended to be suffused with prayer: eating, singing plainsong in the church, gardening, greeting guests. Near-identical routines done patiently, day in day out. From the outside the timetable can seem impossibly dull and empty. But this is just the bit above the waterline, I thought; most of their life is somewhere I can’t see. Had they slipped out of their lives, when they were in the world? Was that why they were there?
I’d set out to follow their schedule for the full week. I lasted four days before I had to go to the pub. Getting a taste of their discipline, if only as a tourist, did me good, but now I felt that weird emptiness again, a thinning out. I got confused when I had to change trains. And yet it felt oddly pointed, that absence, like a doorway left open, as if the gap itself might leave space for something else. What?
*
I remembered the Spanish man I once met in the cell attached to Julian’s church in Norwich, where the medieval anchoress sat for decades meditating on her visions. He smiled and his eyes shone. He was blissful. He said he could see her and talk to her, that she’d called him to this place from Spain. He’d been staying there all day for a week, he said. I mumbled some polite words and went on my way, dismissing him as mentally ill. I think about him sometimes, now I’ve started going to mass there, and wonder what became of him. Did Fr Richard talk him down, like he sometimes has to with enthusiastic pilgrims? Did he go back home, gradually return to his familiar life and forget about Julian of Norwich? Did he end up in a psychiatric ward? Did he change his life, leave everything behind to become a priest or monk?
*
Julian most likely grew up in Norwich. She would have felt at home here. At the age of thirty she received the showings for which she’d prayed as a young woman. In the course of these visions she nearly died, with her mother and others at her bedside, along with a curate who read her the last rites. She recovered, and asked to be enclosed – to be formally called out of ordinary life, in a ceremony that involved the singing of the Office of the Dead, as if it were her funeral. Though her cell was close to the river and Norwich was a lively, trading city, she lived a life apart for the rest of her days, in prayer. A woman in a room. Outside, a small garden where heavy-laden folk turned up at her window to unburden themselves to her and ask for counsel. Inside, a different, hidden life. What would those people really have seen? Did they come away satisfied?
*
I started going to the Cathedral last year, seemingly on a whim. At first I only went to evensong. I felt empty and bored. I didn’t know about the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis. I didn’t bother to look up the Psalms they sang in the Book of Common Prayer. I just sat there. It was a chore, but for some reason I kept going. It was something to do before I went to the pub.
After a while, the language worked its way into me. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and in thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night… I started going to Communion in the mornings. Since work was drying up, I had plenty of time.
I began to feel something, but I knew my feelings weren’t to be trusted. It was to do with the building, the words, music and liturgy. I now took more of an interest and even looked forward to them. The words grabbed me, especially during the weekly services in the side chapel when they used the old language. The Eucharist became an event, even when tourists walked by chatting. I started learning the routines, memorising the prayers, crossing myself at the appropriate times. During Lent the next year, I spoke to one of the Cathedral canons about getting confirmed at Easter. The priests were distant, formal. I liked that about them. They weren’t friends but envoys, as it were: go-betweens.
After Easter – when I hadn’t spent too long in the pubs the night before, chatting to strangers – I kept going to services, from low to high churches. I began to realise that this strange tradition can lead you into a middle place where neither the things here below nor the things above seem quite real. When I leave the busy streets and go into a church, I step into a place that remembers a death and claims a presence. I cross myself at the door, and the sign I make is meant to hold both together: a dead man nailed to a tree, yet somehow God with us. Then I pass back into the streets where I see no trace of him. But the prayers and readings speak of what lies ahead, if we press on: treasures laid up, a mercy that’s out of this world, love folding over love. Not eternal rest so much as an ever-fresh moment, a life in the spirit that never grows old, and can sometimes be felt even here and now.
Notes from a Room 