Today my friend Vicki wrote to me from Bellingham. Things had been going wrong; specifically, electronic things. She had been patiently dealing with them, replacing her method of internet access and adjusting to the new one. Then she sat down to do what she wanted — write me a lovely long email about the thoughts and ideas that interest us both — only to discover, when she tried to send it, that her account storage capacity had been exceeded. Still patiently, she deleted some things she could manage without; but came back to re-send only to discover her email had vanished without trace. By this time Vicki was feeling a little less patient, and what's more she had other tasks requiring her attention. Promising to come back later, she said:
"Practicing the presence of God, like Brother Lawrence did, and like Brother Michael, the infirmarian obviously does, is harder than it sounds. My spirit is not at peace as I ponder rewriting those thoughts I had articulated over a period of about an hour."
My simple instinct was to sympathise and agree; but to my surprise, because I haven't heard from him in a while, Brother Michael had something to say about that. I couldn't see him, which was disappointing because I'd like to have spent a while chilling out in St Alcuins' infirmary with him, but I know what he thought. Talking to these fourteenth-century monks is a little like talking to cats. The words just appear in your mind. You have to trust them.
And he said this.
"Please to tell Vicki this small something about peace and practising the presence of God.
"Here, we are taught how to practice peace and offer it to others. It's in how we walk, how we sit, how we gather and disperse, how we eat; externally like that, it's a discipline we learn — mortifying the eyes and giving one another preference and so on. It's easier in some situations than others of course, and it can be tiring in the early days, but it becomes a reflexive habit in the end, so that you almost forget how to do things any other way.
"But obviously that's just the outside of it. What's happening inside? There can be turmoil, a sense of injustice, irritation — that can be pronounced, even intense — or disappointment or just flat weariness. All of those; and none of them resemble peace. And then there's the frustration Vicki experienced, when patience has been applied repeatedly, and the work has been done faithfully, and even still it all goes wrong.
"You must absolutely pass on to Vicki that I am not as saintly as she thinks I am. Some days I am absolutely seething and the best I can do is not slam an ointment jar down onto the counter so hard I would break it, not say something so unkind and mean to one of our old men that I would leave him wounded to a degree it would be hard to mend later. The external discipline of peace we practice is my friend here; it allows me to stop short of doing something I could not undo and would bitterly regret.
"But what about practising the presence of God? Well, happily for me, God is practicing being present as well. At times when my sense of peace seems to have left the building, and the fountain of life within me seems to have unaccountably got blocked by wet leaves, so there is nothing left inside me worth sharing with another living being, God is still there. I know he is, because this has happened to me so often I've lost count.
"I turn to him then, my Good Shepherd, and say the only prayer of which I am capable in that moment — 'HELP!' And you know what? He always does. If things are really dire, I sometimes have to say it two or three times, which is not a bad thing because it helps re-orientate my attention towards him.
"The crucial thing — but please, I know your friend Vicki is a faithful believer, so I hope I'm not patronising her, I honestly don't mean to — the key to it all is that God is not the product of our practice, if you see what I mean. His presence with me and in me is not dependent on me; he initiates, he stands at the door and knocks, he leaves the ninety and nine on the hillside and comes to look for me.
"It only takes a moment. I don't even have to close my eyes or take a deep breath. In fact it would probably better I didn't, because that would give whoever I was with a distinct clue that they were annoying the hell out of me. All it takes is to recognise that I have run dry, and send a desperate plea for help. And God is with me."
I listen to this, and I say to him, "Thank you. Two things. One is that about three hundred years on from your time we had a famous battle in England called the Battle of Edgehill. In it, the Major General of the Infantry was Jacob Astley — Baron Astley of Reading. On the morning of the battle, he prayed: 'O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not thou forget me.' And then he said, 'March on, boys!'
"And the other thing was something that happened to me years ago when I was involved in a bit of a battle of my own — a church battle. Before I had to go into battle I phoned a friend. A phone... oh, well, I won't go into exactly what a phone is right now. What I mean is that my friend was neither with me nor (as it turned out) at home; I left a message for him, telling him about it and asking him to pray. And when I came home from the difficult thing I had to do, he had in turn left me a message, very simple. He just said 'I'm with you.'"
Brother Michael listens to this. "That's exactly it, " he says. "And would you kindly let your friend Vicki know that the angels of God, and I — Brother Michael — and all of us here at St Alcuins, we are on the other end of the line, out of sight, but we are with her."
Sometimes I wish Brother Michael could have the benefit of all these hundreds of years of the history of the faith. I say to him: "Centuries on from where you are now, there was a great man of God called John Wesley. He preached until he was in his eighties, he was still preaching a fortnight before he died. And then he finally ran out of strength. He was in bed, his life ebbing, and he told his family gathered round him that he loved them. And then — the very last words he spoke on this earth — he said, 'The best of all is, God is with us.'
Brother Michael's face lights up with a smile, but at this point in our conversation he absolutely had to get on, because I'd interrupted him right in the middle of his morning chores, which didn't seem to annoy him; though, thinking about what he'd said to me, I do wonder. Anyway, he said he simply must get on with his work or there'd be mayhem. But he told me to give Vicki a hug from him (and it didn't seem the moment to explain she lives hundred of miles away and the Atlantic Ocean is in the way), and said for her to hang on to the certainty that God is practising being present even when she can't hold up her end.
He looked at me and laughed. "March on, boys!" he said.
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