Laborare est orare
IT HAS been a month of visits and visitors. I met T, once my pupil, off the train. Why was he trailing a wheelie suitcase, I wondered, when I thought he was coming only for lunch? Was this ominous? But all soon became clear: he had spent fewer days than expected in a monastery in Essex, and would fly back to his home in Lisbon after he left me.
As soon as I started the car, he launched into the chronicle of his doings: his weeks in Armenia, grappling with the language; his passion for Armenian religious art and architecture; his search for a spiritual home — perhaps in a monastery; his dissatisfaction with Pope Francis (whom I rather admire); his attraction to the spirituality of the Orthodox Churches; his uneasiness with many of the features of the Roman Church in which he was brought up. . .
Once at the house, his passionate conversation follows me into the kitchen. “It’s all Tertullian’s fault!” he cries — something of an oversimplification, I think quietly, while I carry on cooking my regular offering for pupils: sausages, bacon, beans, eggs, black pudding, potato cakes, toast, marmalade. Food quietens him for a bit. Dear man, sometimes you will hear more if you are silent.
I suggest that, when he gets back to Portugal, he start on the task that lies to hand, which he has been ducking: clearing out the derelict farmhouse that his grandfather left him. Slash, I suggest, the aggressive shrubs trying to reclaim it for wilderness; work with his youth and strength, away from the noisy city; go to bed dog-tired; let the silence of the countryside fill him with space to be still — and perhaps know.
It was a good visit. As he was leaving, he gave me a thick little prayer book. Its beautiful binding and fine paper hold a long (definitely Trinitarian) prayer sequence of 24 linked prayers, a sequence that is repeated in 53 languages. It will be good for my brain muscles to use the Latin version from time to time. Dear T: such generosity; for he knows I love beautiful things, and I can give so little back, save prayers for the wanderer.
He sent a photo a few days later of the vegetable carnage that he had wrought in the old farmyard. Good lad.
Dark before dawn
LUNCH with Richard and Rupert, in a restaurant by the cathedral. It serves the same wonderful and generous menu as it did when they were my pupils, decades ago. They have made noises in the world in their so-different careers, while I have stayed put, trying to persuade generations of my victims to take reading literature seriously. You win some, you lose some.
Rupert, a fine and learned musician, has driven up from Sussex for a college reunion, which has also brought Richard from Riyadh. He flew in this morning, and drove straight up from the hellhole of LHR to meet Rupert, and to see Rosanna and me. I have not seen him in person since he graduated, but — thanks to the boon of Zoom — we have talked, talked, talked; and all of us meet as old friends who have so much more to discuss while there is still time.
Richard has news of the Alsama project (alsama is “dawn” in the Arabic that he is painfully learning), which he and his wife have organised. It runs a school in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. These children have never not known war: war in Syria which destroyed their homes; the constant threat from the — shall we say, disagreements? — between Hezbollah and Israel; and many of them lived their early years under the cruel rule of Islamic State.
They love this school: it offers them not just teaching, and a community where they are taken seriously, but also hope of escape from the entail of hatred and vengeance. Hope is the greatest gift that they can be given. Alsama has this year been able to send the first few to university.
It was a good lunch, indeed. My haddock in cream, garlic, lemon, and dill sauce was superb. As we sighed, replete, all now well with the world (it isn‘t at all, of course, but some illusions, even if temporary, are precious), Richard said, out of the blue, “Charles, would you come out to Beirut and teach a class?” Something in me demanded that I say “Yes.” I sensed rather than felt Rosanna stiffen: surprise? alarm?
Not turning a hair, he asked, “What will you talk about?” Not thinking, I hear myself say, “They have been through war. Make them read the greatest war poem of all, the Iliad, before I come, and I will spend a morning with them on Book VI: the tragic, inescapable clash between male values and identity, and female values and identity: polis-v-oikos. And how they need — depend on — each other.” (And little Astyanax in Andromache’s arms cries, frightened by the plume on his father Hector’s helmet . . .)
Nunc dimittis, now
TO OUR dear friend S, who has been waiting in the departure lounge for far longer than any of us thought possible. He was given what he needed for the journey by Fr R more than a fortnight ago, but his flight has been delayed; no reason given, but he accepts the postponing of his last adventure with a serene patience. He asks us about our Labrador, Milo, whom he loves; eagerly hears the news from church; and has wise, even acerbic, things to say about what the PCC is currently discussing.
The French door of his room in the hospice is open on to the little garden. A warm breath of spring stirs the flowers on the table, and sunlight streams in. Jane, his daughter, down from Scotland, has planted a pot of primroses –— he loves them — in full flower in the border, where he can see them from his bed. Chaffinches are helping themselves delightedly to the little pile of seeds that Jane has scattered. Then a thug of a wood pigeon flies down and scatters them, and guzzles. S chuckles: “That bird deserves an ASBO.” I hold his hand: skeletal, but warm. His brown eyes seem bigger in his parchment face. “You will make it to your 90th on the 30th,” I say.
“I may. I never thought I would. My brother lands at Southampton the day before. We may see each other, after all.” I think of Catullus’s heart-wrenching poem about his journey across many seas, through many peoples, to his dead brother’s grave, to speak in vain to the silent ashes.
Rosanna and I get up to go; for we do not want to tire him. She kisses him, and hugs Jane, silently. I say, meaning it while knowing it may not be possible, that I will try to come in a day or two and bring Milo. He smiles blessing. I murmur, as much to check my own emotion as for him to hear, “Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo.” I have learned so much in watching Death’s slow courtship of him.
Dr Charles Moseley is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge.
