Apparently stained glass purifies the air in church. As light passes through a window there is an ionizing effect caused by the tiny particles of gold in the glass. That's true of medieval stained glass, but is it true of modern? Church-going for the sake of one's physical health, as well as one's spiritual health? Now there's a thought.

It's notable that the Church keeps the birthday of St John the Baptist as a Solemnity and his martyrdom as a humble Memoria, but it seems to fit the Baptist's life and work. He is the forerunner, and once the Lord is present, he must decrease, so that even his death (or as we would say, his entrance into Life) is, as it were, muted. (Freudian turn of phrase: wasn't John the Voice crying in the wilderness who condemned Herod's sin, which is why he had to be silenced, ever the response of totalitarian regimes to those who speak out fearlessly against lies and injustice.) Later this morning we'll have Mass in the medieval chapel of St Amand and St John the Baptist. I suspect my thoughts will stray to another, more ancient church on the Aventine for, according to the old calendar, this is also the feast of St Sabina and as readers of this blog will know, I love the basilica of Sta Sabina. I was trying to find a good photograph but find I have none, and the Dominicans, who have their Generalate there, don't seem to, either. Another surprising example of humility!

Yesterday we kept the feast of St Monica, today that of her son, St Augustine, and for once I feel too daunted to write about either. It must be the weather. There is a good summary of Augustine's life and work here. For us as Benedictines, of course, the short work known as the Rule of St Augustine is an important source for the Rule of St Benedict, but my guess is that most people know Augustine from his "Confessions" or short extracts in the Divine Office. The two works which fascinate me most are "The City of God", which I read for the first time during Tripos (a distraction), and "De Trinitate", which only began to make sense when I encountered modern physics. That is the problem with Augustine: he is one of the most difficult as he is one of the easiest early Christian writers. Had he lived in this century, no doubt he would be constantly popping up on radio and television to give thoughtful and eloquent responses to questions of the day.

One just never knows what is going to turn up next. We were telephoned by Radio Berkshire yesterday and asked if we'd do an over-the-phone interview about an Italian priest's idea of holding a nuns' beauty pageant on the web ( I kid you not, but it is the Silly Season). On the grounds that nuns don't often feature in the "God slot" of British broadcasting, we agreed, and we'll post the clip on our web site in due course, provided the BBC gives permission. The interesting question for me was, where does the idea of nuns being rather stern, disapproving people come from? Many people expect us to be very austere and are immensely disapproving of any suggestion that life in the monastery may have its lighter moments (they drink wine on Christmas day, how shocking!) or are subject to the same stresses and strains as themselves (she may have been up 36 hours nursing a sick member of the community but how dare she snap at me!). I think they're making a false equation between asceticism and joylessness. The renunciations of monastic life are real enough, but because they tend to make us freer, they make us more joyful, too. If there's no joy here at Hendred, we might as well give up.

The opening psalm at Vigils on Tuesdays often passes in, not a blur exactly, but, shall we say, in less than sharp focus. How wise Benedict was to insist that Vigils should begin slowly! Yet there are a couple of lines which sometimes emerge from the mist with peculiar force, partly because they are lovely in themselves, partly because they express a very poignant emotion:
". . . your servants love her very stones,
are moved with pity even for her dust." (Ps 101.15)
The psalmist was singing of Sion, remembered in exile as a place of holiness and beauty, but the sentiments are familiar to every adult. Nostalgia for what we have lost, for the land of childhood or the scenes of youth perhaps, afflicts everyone at some time or other (even cloistered nuns). This most adult of emotions need not be negative. It can inspire heroic effort or great art, lead to the achievement of something really worthwhile, be truly creative. My own thoughts often turn to the church at Stanbrook on a summer's evening, when the western sun shimmers and shines through the choir, illuminating the tabernacle with a shaft of bright light: a reminder that the Lord alone is unchanging. For as the psalmist also says, speaking of the heavens and the earth,
"They will perish but you will remain . . .
. . . you neither change nor have an end." (Ps 101. 27, 28)

The short reading from Romans at Mass today is a great favourite. There is so much to wonder at, in ourselves and in the world about us, so much that allows us glimpses of God. We live close to Harwell, where researchers are contantly pushing the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding . . . but, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing reminds us, God cannnot be grasped by thought alone. It is love which unites us to Him. I've always liked George Herbert's calling prayer "the heart in pilgrimage". Somehow the idea of prayer as a "research lab" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Can anyone suggest a contemporary image that would be helpful in expressing the inexpressible?
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Lay awake last night listening to the sound of a farmer working into the small hours in an effort to get the harvest in. Spent the time thinking about all sorts of irrelevant things (although the thought of the farmer's weariness was perhaps not irrelevant). I hadn't expected the post on St Bernard to spark so much interest, although I am very gruntled to find it so. St Bernard is one of my heroes and largely responsible for the fact that I am a nun. As a Ph.D student, I had to read his collected works as "background" (four hefty volumes in Migne) and was entranced by his use of language: Bernard's Latin is extraordinarily supple and dynamic, although my old Latin teacher would NOT have approved. It "sowed the seed", so to say. As to the Ribalta, some may remember that it was included in an exhibition of Spanish painting of the Golden Age held in London in the 1970s, where it was hung very effectively and had a huge imapact. When I lived in Madrid I used to go and look at it most Sunday mornings in the Prado. Those shadowy figures, the angel and the young man in the foreground, are deeply mysterious, half-revealing, half-concealing a very private experience. The iconography of St Bernard is a fascinating subject in itself. For a definitive study of every known medieval image, I cannot recommend too highly James France's learned and immensely readable Medieval Images of St Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies 210 (Kalamazoo, 2007) which is accompanied by a disk of the images referred to in his book. (The fact that our copy is inscribed by James with engaging humility as "from a fellow-devotee of St Bernard" has nothing whatsoever to do with my opinion, which is utterly objective and disinterested. Ed.)

Today we keep the memoria of St Bernard of Clairvaux, the last of the Fathers of the Church. Everyone knows his story: how, as a young man, he took his father, brothers and a total of thirty companions to Citeaux and saved the monastery from dying out; how he became not only a great teacher and preacher but a major influence on Pope Eugene III and the political events of his day; a founder of 163 daughter-houses and doughty champion of the nascent Cistercian reform; and less happily, a preacher of the Crusades and bitter opponent of Abelard. We admire his ardour and his eloquence. Who has ever written more tenderly of Mary, the Mother of God, or at greater length on a single sentence from the Song of Songs?! But it is not this side of Bernard that I wish to draw attention to today. Francisco Ribalta's painting of Christ embracing St Bernard reminds us of something else, that hidden life of prayer on which all St Bernard's activity was based and which is the raison d'être of monastic life. Unless we, too, are women of prayer, of deep, persevering prayer, all our activity is worthless. Prayer is the measure of our fidelity to our vocation. Let us join our Cistercian friends in saying, "St Bernard, pray for us."

I had five minutes to spare after Lauds today, so I've added a custom search engine to our homepage and to Colophon. You can use it to search this web site alone. It should help if you are trying to find a particular blog entry, or all the comments on a subject such as vocation. If you find it useful, please let us know. We are still at work on the FAQ section. If there are any questions you would like to see included, do please email them. No promises, but we'd like the section to be genuinely "helpful".

Today's first reading at Mass, from the prophet Isaiah, seems singularly appropriate for us at Hendred. Today is the 143rd anniversary of the dedication of the parish church, built by the Eyston family (descendants of St Thomas More), and the anniversary of the death of D. Gertrude More, the saint's great-great-granddaughter, one of the founders of the Cambrai community. D. Gertrude's life is an inspiration to every novice or nun, especially in apparently hopeless moments when prayer seems to dry up and God seems far away. She wasn't terribly keen on being a nun at first; witty and mischievous, she was given to speaking first and thinking after; she made fun of the saintly Vicarius of the Cambrai community, Fr Augustine Baker, and was filled with mounting despair when, by God's grace, she suffered a conversion, found with Fr Baker's help the way of contemplative prayer and died in the odour of (genuine) sanctity at the age of twenty-eight. The "Life of D. Gertrude More" shows the effect of Fr Baker's teaching, the sanity and humanity of the English contemplative tradition, and the wise and generous roots of post-Reformation Benedictine life in England. We can forgive D. Gertrude her weakness for expressing herself in endless doggerel. Liker her mentor, she too is someone who can teach us to be joyful in God's house of prayer.

I've just finished rereading Gijs van Hensbergen's excellent biography of Antoni Gaudí. There is something almost medieval about his strange genius. I wonder if there is any architect alive today whose work is so completely suffused with Faith; and if there is any bishop employing an architect of such rare quality! (Note: No podcast today as we put up a video on Thursday and may release another sometime this coming week.)

Tomorrow we celebrate the solemnity of the Assumption of Our Lady with real coffee for breakfast (oh bliss, oh joy, oh rapture) and some wonderful chants in choir (oh bliss, oh joy and . . . hard work). D. Teresa is now feeling much better, so she has been coaxed into sharing some reflections on the theology of the feast. We would have liked to have included all the Alleluia from the Mass but it was too long for the video, so there is just a snippet at the end — enough, however, to express the joy and gladness of the Church that Mary has been assumed, body and soul, into heaven.

Some people thrive on routine; some people don't. Monastic life has a large element of routine built into it (fixed times for prayer and meals, for example) which are sometimes experienced as liberation, sometimes the opposite. But it also has an innate flexibility about some of the detail. Benedict is well aware that the demands of hospitality are unpredictable, and he sees such importance in the person of the guest that he allows the abbot to break his fast so that the guest may be properly entertained. We had a number of visitors to the monastery yesterday, and in each case we tried to be welcoming. For some, there was just coffee and biscuits and a few minutes' talk; for others, there were shared meals and a longer time spent answering questions and trying to explain those elements of our life which are particularly difficult for an outsider to understand; there was time spent answering emails and letters — all this on top of the normal round of prayer, work and study. But the point is, of course, that welcoming others to the monastery IS part of the normal round. It's what we try to do with this web site and blog. And we gain so much from those who come, even if, at times, we feel pressurized or convinced that we are making a hash of things. Perhaps we concentrate too much on giving answers instead of asking questions of those who come. Among our visitors yesterday were two delightful boys from the village with a rather portly bulldog in tow. They didn't ask any questions, but they shared their friendship and pride of ownership in the dog. The young have something to teach us all.

Am I alone in thinking that war in Georgia at the same time as the Olympic Games is a terrible irony? There does seem to be a contradiction between proclaiming peace at the Olympics and aiming bullets and bombs at one another. The Benedictine motto is "pax" or "peace", surrounded by a crown of thorns — a reminder that true peace is only attainable if we are prepared to suffer for it.

The weather is less muggy this morning, so I thought I would devote a few minutes to analyzing our web site and seeing if I could track down some coding errors that I know exist but have not yet put right. The search terms used to find us are always fascinating. There are more spellings for "monastery" than I would have thought possible, but most people have no difficulty with "nun", except for one confused soul who put "nunk" (I sympathize, believe me.) Someone googled "new potatoes" and found us. That must have been unexpected, to say the least. Someone else navigated to us via a most unlikely link about political gossip in Washington D.C., which makes one wonder whether the Pentagon is interested in our emails (answer, probably: not much escapes surveillance these days). But it was when printing out the email requests for prayer that I was brought up short. I always find them moving, but this morning there was one that wrung my heart. At the end the writer asked the Lord "to forgive my sins of poverty". It is an evocative phrase which can be understood in many ways. Monastic "poverty" can be beautiful: an absence of clutter and the uglier artefacts of our age, but that is not what the writer meant. St Clare of Assisi, whose feast we keep today, knew poverty as a joyful freedom; but that is not how most people experience it. The "sins of poverty" can be ugly and brutal, and only those who know what it is like to be hungry or diseased or enslaved really understand. Fortunately, we have the psalms. They are the cry of the poor to the heart of God. When we pray the psalms in community, we are articulating the prayer of Christ to the Father, "who does not despise the poverty of the poor" and who has cancelled our debts by his death on the cross. It is a great and humbling vocation.

I have to confess that I dozed through the homily at Mass this morning; I can't remember a single word of the book I was reading; and I have an awkward feeling that prayer this afternoon was spent in what we call "the prayer of gentle drift." Before people start emailing about the dreadful laxity of nuns nowadays, I suggest everyone takes a second look at today's reading from I Kings. God isn't always to be found where we expect, nor is he always expected where he is to be found. I had to spend part of today doing something I heartliy dislike, and to my shame, I did so with much interior grumbling and resentment; but if I can claim to have met God at all today, it was in that unwelcome task. God was so gracious and I so ungrateful, but part of me is immensely glad to have been reminded that the search for God is always a response to something he has begun. The opening words of the Rule of St Benedict command us to "listen" and "bend close the ear of the heart". When we're really straining to hear, a whisper is all that is needed, no matter how great the din that surrounds us.
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Can a philosopher become a saint? Can love of wisdom lead to love of Wisdom? Today's feast shows that the answer to both questions is a resounding "yes". I was going to recommend the work of our friend Joanne Mosley, but many people are blogging about St Teresa Benedicta today so this post will concentrate on something nearer home. Yesterday Jane Curley celebrated her 100th birthday by joining us for Midday Prayer and then having a party in the parish Meeting Rooms. It was a squash trying to get everyone in as our oratory is small, but people cheerfully lined the corridor; and the celebratory lunch afterwards was a nice blend of "parish" and "village". Photos will be going up on the parish web site at www.catholichendredandilsley.org.uk, but here is a view of Jane getting down to the serious business of cutting her cake . . . and another of Duncan setting off in search of a stray sausage or two.

The symmetry of today's date seems fitting for the feast of St Dominic — such an engaging saint, with both an orderly mind and a warm personality. Benedictines and Cistercians like to gloss over his critique of the monastic mediocrity of his day and concentrate on finding links with themselves. Not difficult in the case of S. Domingo de Silos. But there is, I think, a deeper affinity between the followers of St Dominic and the followers of St Benedict. Our ways of doing theology may differ in some respects, but we agree that love of God and love of learning are two aspects of one quest. So, greetings and good wishes to all our Dominican friends and prayers for their flourishing. May they continue to be true hounds of God!

Long ago, when trying to revitalise the press at Stanbrook, I experimented with eBooks. Not the "Get Rich Quick" kind you can download from a thousand dodgy sites on the web, but books that were artistically and typographically interesting: electronic Fine Printing, if you like, at a supremely affordable price. Since moving to Hendred I haven't had time to carry the experiment further, but I regularly use Issuu for the parish newsletter so I thought we might do the same on this web site. Therefore, drumroll, our first offering is a little booklet we printed a couple of years ago in honour of Our Lady and as a small gift for Friends and Benefactors. I was first alerted to the classical beauty of Robert Slimbach's typefaces by John Dreyfus, who was generous in giving encouragement although he never saw this particular booklet and might have smiled at one or two elements, especially the retro features of the design. But we work with what we have, not what we don't. The printer's flowers used here and there bear no comparison with the wonderful variety and quality to be found in letterpress, nor are the swashed letters all that might be desired. Electronic printing is still in its infancy, however, and I'm sure we'll see great things in the future. To view Lady Flower, follow this link.

The feast of the Transfiguration, always a great favourite in the monastery, coincides with the annual beanfeast: broad beans, runner beans, French beans, the garden is full of them. Inevitably, our dinner plates are full of them, too. Any little mumblings from those not keen on beans twice a day are quelled by the reminder that the great abbot Hugh of Cluny took his turn in the kitchen and cooked . . . beans. (Contrary to poular belief, the everyday diet at Cluny, at least during the earlier period, was mainly bread and beans.) This historical nugget will be useful today as the Transfiguration is in origin a Cluniac feast and the festive dinner is going to feature, yes, BEANS! (Perhaps some summer squash and spinach as well so that there is no "justifiable grumbling". Fortunately, the liturgy will be splendid even if the dinner isn't.)

We have had to buy a new telephone system as the old one was experiencing too much interference. It took two nuns a whole hour to digest the operating instructions (not a good sign) and a further thirteen hours to charge the handsets. All should be perfect, and in a way it is, though not as the manufacturers intended. The new handsets look very handsome and illuminate in different ways according to the kind of call being made. The only problem is, all incoming calls are being diverted to the answerphone and we have so far failed to retrieve the messages. I fear another hour with the instruction manual may be required.

Reading this morning's section of the Rule has made me examine my conscience again. I spent all my "free" time yesterday trying to catch up with correspondence, but I seem to have made barely a dent in it, and I know some people will be thinking I/we don't care or regard their requests as trivial. No request made in good faith is trivial, but the urgent is always displacing the important and one inevitably feels a bit guilty about it. That is part of the "problem" with Benedictine hospitality. We try to be a warm and welcoming community, but there are times when tiredness or illness or the need to do something make it difficult to respond to others as we (and they) would wish. I'm sure it must be the same for all overworked mums and dads, busy carers and just about everyone else on the planet. St Benedict says that Christ is welcomed in the person of the guest. Undoubtedly. But perhaps we could get rid of some unnecessary feelings of guilt and failure if we remembered that it is Christ who does the welcoming, too.

I like Sundays. They are always special: filled with special sights and sounds, special tastes, and if we are lucky enough to have Mass in the oratory as distinct from the parish church, special smells, too (incense, in case you are wondering). There was once a Jewish rabbi who spent the whole week preparing for the Sabbath. If a good book came his way, he put it aside to be enjoyed on the Sabbath; if some good food or wine arrived, he stored it for the Sabbath. I suppose we do something similar. The parts of the Office that we chant on weekdays are sung on Sundays; we try to make space for more prayer and reading and keep household tasks to a minimum (bad planning on my part means I am always Sunday cook!) But this delicate balance is easily upset. Our 24/7 culture means that people are quite likely to want to transact business on a Sunday, or call in "on the off-chance" to discuss some project or other, and it can be difficult not to let one's disappointment or irritation show. One of the hardest things about Sunday is trying to keep it holy, so no wonder God made a commandment about it.

Today's chapter, about praying the Divine Office wherever one happens to be on a journey, made me reflect. Muslims are much less inhibited than many Christians about praying in public. I have not quite been reduced to slipping my Office book into lurid covers like the priest in "The Power and the Glory", but I admit to doing a rather embarrassed shuffle sometimes. Perhaps it is only the British fear of drawing attention to oneself. What we're really doing, of course, is drawing attention to God; so why should anyone be reluctant to do that?