This Cloistered Life
"For in this Rose containéd was / heaven and earth in little space.” (Medieval carol)
Today, as for the past fifty days, I am sitting in the bright ringing silence of our dining room in this town flat, where I also work and write. Lunch is over, work becalmed, there is nowhere to go and no-one can visit. Day after day, my husband and I observe the ceremonies of breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner; go out separately for short walks with the dog, and watch a film or TV series at night. Twice a week, I carry out a masked raid on the nearest small supermarket.
I’m not unhappy.
And I’m not alone in this feeling. Several family members and friends admit to finding this new, more limited life not only bearable, but in some ways preferable.
“We don’t have to give or accept invitations to lunch or dinner.”
“We’re saving a lot of money, the days have more space for things we want to do, a rhythm and peace.”
“No-one else is doing anything exciting or going anywhere ‘awesome,’ any more than we are.” (No mo’ FOMO)
“I can watch Holby City in peace and without feeling guilty…”
I am finding the reduced demands on my time, attention, energy and money surprisingly liberating. I feel protected from the many calls the outside world made on these commodities. I feel cloistered.
The Order of St. Clare (‘the Poor Clares’) was founded in 1212. Inspired by the preaching of St. Francis, Clare of Assisi, an aristocratic young woman, refused the marriage planned by her parents and embraced a life of poverty, seclusion and contemplation.
The Poor Clares are members of the strictest order of cloistered life, the Papal Cloister. Here, “the presence of strangers can be admitted only in case of necessity…it must be a space of silence and recollection, facilitated by the absence of external works…”1
Clare’s rules for nuns have come down through the centuries unchanged: “once her hair has been cut off round her head and her secular dress set aside, she is to be allowed three tunics and a mantle … she may not go outside the monastery except for some useful, reasonable, evident, and approved purpose.”2
Now my hair is growing out a fine penitential grey, and Clare’s ‘three tunics and a mantle’ have been transmuted into three interchangeable teeshirts and two pairs of jeans. As for ‘going outside the monastery’, my husband and I only emerge for the ‘evident and approved purpose’ of taking our dog on a toilet run, or buying ever stranger combinations of ingredients with which to conjure up cheering meals. Our days are bounded by customs that have become traditions, in a cycle as sacred as the canonical hours.
In ordinary times, so much resource goes into how I look to the outside world. I am amazed at how well I can live without all the stuff – clothes and cosmetics; particular brands and types of food and drink; travel and entertainment choices – all the things I thought were the minimum for the good life, before Coronavirus captivity both narrowed and expanded my views.
I’m looking at photographs on a beautiful website called Cloistered Life. The nuns appear to live exclusively in ‘the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. In her whitewashed room, a Sister kneels beside her narrow bed with its drab wool blanket, to pray. Above her, blessed light pours in through white-curtained windows. It is a scene from a medieval Book of Hours.
In another picture, a nun sits on a dark wooden bench, in a garden carpeted with lawn and furnished with flowers. Sunshine tints the mellow stone wall behind her copper-gold. Tranquility breathes from the very photos. Here in their different silences, “Vultum Dei Quaerere,” the nuns ‘seek the face of God.’ In the quiet of this warm-day siesta hour, I glimpse the healing force of peace and contemplation.
Back to the real (surreal) world, where to date nearly 3.5 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than a quarter of a million have died. There is grief, anger and worse to come. Yet fragile but positive outcomes are also emerging. For the first time in 30 years, it is possible for the people of the Punjab to see the peaks of the Himalayas, over 100 miles away. Up to 100,000 deaths could now be prevented if China’s slowdown continues to clear away the deadly smog hovering over its industrial regions.
Towns and cities all over the world – even some banks and businesses – have breathed life on the embers of community spirit and some are practising practical compassion for vulnerable individuals. Hard-pressed workers are catching up on sleep, regular meals and family life. Yet I and everyone I know talks about ‘getting back to normal,’ as soon as may be.
I long for Spain’s ‘estado de alarma’ to pass. I envisage a fresh morning and café con leche by the fountain in the plaza, our streets full of familiar faces again, the shops full of exciting ingredients. People smiling again, shouting greetings across the road, kids playing, dogs walking their people into town. Perhaps one day, I will have a good laugh with my brother and sister once more, all sitting together in a favourite London bar.
But behind this healthy wish, I harbour a shadow desire - that things will never ‘go back to normal’. Greed of gain of those already drowning in wealth; politicians mouthing dangerous platitudes to hang on to power and governments that have been hijacked by corporate interests; healthcare that is more ailing than the patients who need it; a new cohort of slave-labour emerging from a numberless desperation; travel anywhere, everywhere and for no good purpose. The resumption of the oblivious rush to the deeper doom of accelerating climate change.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). However that may be, I hope that when I emerge, when we all emerge from the ‘war on Covid-19’, that ‘peace’ and its attendant unleashing of appetites and activities, does not turn out to be the more dangerous outcome after all.
One of the Poor Clare’s four vows is the vow of poverty: “we are emptied of things to be filled with eternal riches; we are set free from slavery to materialism, secularism, and consumerism.” Denied the happy distractions of getting and spending, I have found the past few weeks to be surprisingly rich in moments of joy. Forced to turn inwards, I have found, at times, a “heaven and earth in little space.”
1 https://cloisteredlife.com/introduction
2 https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/inside-the-cloister
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