Lockdown and Sanctity
I am led by my recent experiences of the Covid lockdown, and my subsequent slow re-emergence, to reflect whether it has been an opportunity for me to develop my ‘liturgical’ relationships with my fellow oblates and our Prinknash community in general. The lockdown for instance freed me to sit back and reflect and write about my views on Christian Meditation, based on my many years of reading and thinking on the subject. Very good but not much for four years isolation. Did my dislike for on-line conferencing, which I acquired in a different context, undermine others’ attempts at developing our companionship? In my recent first attendance at our annual oblates conference for four years I was just glad to be still recognised. Could I have done better and how?
It occurs to me that October 1st is the Feast of St Therese of Lisieux. I am prompted to look at her religious development in a rigorously closed religious community in the light of the dynamics of our own lockdown. Her story is well known, and I won’t go into it in detail. I am not proposing any major insights but merely some possible answers to my question: How was a very ordinary petit-bourgeo is spoilt brat, a daily irritation and concern to her family and friends, transformed in the nine or so years of her religious life into a seriously saintly person? And what can we learn from this. She left behind her a large corpus of letters and interesting poems but her main contribution was a diary.
This diary is notable for its clarity of thought and although it was widely criticised at the time for the style of its writing it is clearly a well thought out and a very mature exposition of her insights. I have a rare facsimile of it and the one thing that sticks out is that it is written in one sweep (in 3 sections) with no corrections at all. She was born in modern times, and she could have written it on a Remington typewriter, but provided instead a steady clear handwritten manuscript in paper and ink. Modern equipment was allowed, and her sister Celine had brought a very good modern plate camera and darkroom into the convent with her and she took most of the 40 or so photographs we have of her more famous sister.
Therese was very demanding and determined to get her own way. She had to be dragged off the feet of poor old Pope Leo XIII, while demanding that he arrange for her to be admitted to the Discalced Carmelite convent at Lisieux although she was still canonically underage for the religious life. She finally got her way and joined her two sisters there. The third, Celine, joined them later. She entered a strict regime of isolation from the world and was expected to remain within its walls until death. It is this isolation I would like to consider.
When lockdown was declared recently in England, and elsewhere, a number of monks and nuns said ‘at last we can be truly a conventual community in physical isolation from outsiders.’ Rather like the Carmelites of Lisieux. Perhaps this was partly true but the downside is of course being locked in more closely with some colleagues who are largely there with their own agendas and not anyone else’s. Therese had to cope with a bunch of crabby old women. She apparently did it very well.
Therese decided to make the best of it. Her heroine was the battle hardened Joan of Arc who was canonised just some five years before she herself was. She became widely read and took to the Old Testament (very unfashionable then), St John of the Cross and others. In fact, her close conventual confinement allowed her to develop intellectual and social depths that she may not have acquired in the ‘open’ world. Similarly, how did lockdown affect us individually and as a community of Benedictines? Did we see it as a liberating opportunity to engage further, or did we see it only as a ‘claustrophobic’ burden?
I feel sure that for Therese her ‘lockdown’ was a source of inspiration. However, I must finish my question with an observation that may be relevant, although I am not exactly sure how. Therese was made Novice Mistress, but she herself never left the noviciate. She was still a novice on the day she died. This of course meant that she had been canonically quite free to leave the convent at any time and finally to avail herself outside of the palliative care that was refused her at her painful tubercular end– but she didn’t. A daily choice to stay engaged, perhaps.
Christopher K D Rance OSB
Oblate of Prinknash
