What is the point of the contemplative life? Wouldn’t you be better running an orphanage than stuck inside a monastery praying all day?
On the other hand, who can calculate the effect of all the prayers that are voiced on our behalf? And the lives of contemplative Religious send out ripples.
I found this for myself recently. After we ran an obituary in the Telegraph of a remarkable nun called Sister Mary David Totah, I took our two older children to stay at Quarr Abbey, the Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight. That incredibly valuable experience was a result of putting together Sister Mary David’s obituary and talking to her friends. She had a “charism for friendship”, her abbess said.
She grew up as Michele or “Mickey” in a close-knit family of Catholics who had emigrated to Philadelphia from Ramallah, near Bethlehem. She took a DPhil at Oxford on literary modernists, meanwhile throwing herself into the social life.
Towards the end of her work on her thesis she stayed at St Cecilia’s Abbey, a few miles east of Quarr on the north coast of the Isle of Wight. It is an enclosed community belonging, like Quarr, to the Benedictine Congregation of Solesmes,
founded in 19th-century France at Solesmes Abbey as a beacon of liturgical renewal.
She “felt drawn like a magnet”, and entered St Cecilia’s in 1985. Eventually she was made novice mistress, then prioress (second in command). “The flourishing of the novitiate at St Cecilia’s,” we said in the obituary, “under the influence of her loving guidance and rigorous teaching, was a source of marvel to other religious communities.”
This summer she died from cancer, aged 60. She wrote to her friends: “All that I have done in my life I have done for love, and this love is not an abstract reality but a Person, Jesus Christ, to whom I vowed my life on my Profession day. St John of the Cross famously wrote: ‘In the evening of our life, we shall be judged on love.’ I hope, then, despite my many failings and weaknesses, to be received into the merciful Father’s embrace, where I shall continue to hold each one of you dear in my heart. Please don’t forget to pray for my soul – I don’t think I’ll gain much merit, because I’ve loved it all so much!”
At the suggestion of one of Sister Mary David’s friends, I went with the children to Quarr, with its stupendous abbey church, its massive square tower topped by a cone-shaped bell turret, and behind it a monastery – all brick, built to the designs of the monk-architect Dom Paul Bellot (1876-1944), whom Pevsner called a “virtuoso in brick”. The monks – of whom we spotted eight or nine in choir – have pigs, bees, an orchard, acres of woodland and now a thriving coffee shop too.
For a day we went along to St Cecilia’s and heard the serenely beautiful Office there. No wonder when Sister Mary David first visited she told her friends back in America: “I cannot forget that beauty”, which as it happens were also the words of Vladimir the Great’s 10th-century emissaries after witnessing the liturgy at Hagia Sophia. We met two nuns for a “parlour” – they were on the other side of a grille – and you could see the fruits of all their prayer in their beaming faces.
Quarr is surely ripe for a revival. After a period of slight instability without a permanent abbot they have elected a new and dynamic one, a holy French scholar called Dom Xavier Perrin (he has a new book out on Mary). Any young man seeking to try a vocation would do well to investigate Quarr. It has a good spirit, of people doing the work of God with great simplicity. It also offers a radically pure contemplative life – unlike Benedictine houses like Ampleforth, the monks have no schools or parishes. I hope that novices will be drawn there and that their vocations will stick.
The visit affected the three of us in varied ways. We left after four days, tired, but with the see-saw rhythms of the monks’ chanting in our heads. Alice, who is 11, woke me on the last morning at 4:45, so that we could walk over in the chilly darkness to Vigils.
What I realised is that Sister Mary David went from one loving family to another, which was why in the preface to her edition of writings on The Spirit of Solesmes, she quoted Dom Paul Delatte, the third abbot of Solesmes, who brought the monks from persecution in France to settle at Quarr in 1908: “All natural and supernatural things are carried out on the level of the family, the form of life of society both in time and in eternity.”
Andrew M Brown is the obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.