Sally Read - Nights bright darkness : a modern conversion story

NIGHTS BRIGHT DARKNESS

Sally Read

A Modern Conversion Story

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Scripture readings are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible,
Second Catholic Edition, 2006 by the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Cover image of St. Peters and the Tiber River
by Sergey Borozentsev

Cover artwork, design and layout by Milo Persic

2016 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-151-3 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-726-6 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2016931673
Printed in the United States of America

Gods silent, searching flight :

When my Lords head is filld with dew, and all

His locks are wet with the clear drops of night ;

His still, soft call ;

His knocking time; The souls dumb watch ,

When Spirits their fair kinred catch .

* * * *

There is in God (some say )

A deep, but dazling darkness; As men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear ;

O for that night! where I in him

Might live invisible and dim .

The Night, Henry Vaughan

I have changed the names and the details of the patients mentioned in this book to protect their privacy.

The reader will note that this is the story of a conversion, not an entire life. Any people close to me who have not been mentioned here, or who have been mentioned only briefly, should not feel this is indicative of their importance to me. I do not forget the fact that many people supported me during my conversion with their prayers.

It is also worth mentioning that those close to a convert have to undergo a conversion of sorts themselveschange is rarely easy, even if it is for the better. Bearing this in mind, I would like to thank my family for their support, particularly my husband and daughter, my mother and my uncle Kerry Lee Crabbeespecially for his enthusiasm for this book.

I would also like to thank Melanie Mulroy for journeying with me, in the year that she too entered the Church; Marie Cabaud Meaney for her invaluable help in all matters; Penelope Hewett Brown; and Catherine Pepinster, who encouraged me as a Catholic writer from the start. I will always be grateful to Monsignor Charles Morerod for his kind assistance. And to Cardinal Georges Cottier, who passed away this year, for his warmth and generosity. May he rest in peace.

Last, but also first, I would like to thank Father Gregory Hrynkiw for giving me more than we can ever know.

I would also like to acknowledge the rights holders of the following works.

Aquinas, Thomas. Compendium of Theology . Translated by Cyril Vollert. New York: Angelico, 2012.

Curcio, Beata Maria Crocifissa. Ricordi, Biografia e Diario Spirituale . Santa Marinella, Italy: Congregazione della Suore Carmelitarie Missionarie di Teresa del B. Gesu, 2011. Citation translated by Sally Read.

Day, Dorothy. The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008. Used with permission.

Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom used with permission of the Liturgical Commission of the Synod of the Ukranian Catholic Church.

Divine Mercy Chaplet used with permission of the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception of the B.V.M.

The Divine Office , vol. 1. London: Collins, 2006. Used with permission of A. P. Watt.

Eliot, T. S. Animula, Burnt Norton, and Ash Wednesday from Collected Poems, 1909-1962 . New York: Harcourt, 1963. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

_____. Collected Poems, 1919-1962 . London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross . Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991. Used with permission of the Washington Province of the Discalced Carmelites.

Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain . London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 1990. Used by kind permission of SPCK.

Read, Sally. Broken Sleep . Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2009.

_____. The Point of Splitting . Tarset, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2005.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle . New York: St. Martins, 1998. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle . Vintage Classics edition reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace . Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Rout-ledge Classics, 2009. Excerpts from pages 88, 89 used by permission of the publisher, Librairie Plon, and Sylvie Weil.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God . Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. Used with permission of Penguin Publishing Group.

The Father

An Irish nurse taught me how to wash and wrap a corpse. She shut the door of the room and spoke in a low voice as though the man on the bed was asleep. She spoke about the dignity of the dead. After months of charts and lectures on blood cells and free radicals, this sounded intangible and mysterious. As I stood, hushed, in the middle of the room she snapped, Take off his Band-Aids. Then she rolled her eyes when I gasped at the black blood that leapt out from one I peeled back. She was infinitely gentle with the dead man, though. She called him by his first name, with all the naturalness and polite merriment she used with any living patient. A mermaid tattoo stretched from his elbow to his wrist. It sat there on the wrinkled skin, discolored and faded, like the very old and irrelevant thought that it was. Sponge him, she told me, get off all the blood stains, and dry him well. Just because hes dead doesnt mean you leave him damp. Check his teeth are real; if theyre not, take them out. Take his watch off and bag it. I was frightened. This was my first dealing with death. I kept expecting him to grab meso, really, it was life that made me jumpy. The Irish nurse taught me to wrap him in a sheet. We turned him heavily on his side, and as we did so he gave a heartfelt sigh, and I scuttled like an animal or a child. Ah, she said, undisturbed, yes; they fart too. When we got to wrapping his head I almost could not bear to cover his face, the mouth which had so recently been full of breath and words. He seemed still brimful of lifein the air he expelled, but also in the residue of character and thought that hung in the room. But I drew the sheet loosely over his stubbly face, and sealed it with Sellotape; his heavy head fell against my chest, where I had no option but to cradle it before setting it down, carefully. The Irish nurse tidied the room, and drew open the curtains onto cool and sane daylight. Now we open the window to let his soul fly, she told me in just the same tone as she had given all the other instructions. The roar of traffic was mighty, the sun hectic in the shimmering green chestnut leaves. It all made the man smaller; he was no longer dominating the room like an outsized rock. How could this detail of the soul have remained in a modern London hospital, I wondered? There was no God above. The soul was long out of fashion.

* * * * * *

I was brought up an atheist. At ten I could tell you that religion was the opiate of the masses; it was dinned into me never to kneel before anyone or anything. My father taught me that Christians, in particular, were tambourine-bashing intellectual weaklings. As a young woman I could quote Christopher Hitchens and enough of the Bible to scoff at. My father would happily scoff with me. He was a large, powerful man, a fag in one hand, glass of red wine in the other, and was never short of an opinion. His laugh barrelled loudly around his chest and left him gasping, mirthfully, for air. He could shout loud and long too. He enjoyed a good row, he said. He was a man who would boldly cross the road and knock on the door of a house if he heard a fight and children crying inside. He believed in looking after the weakit was imperative, to himself as well as to me, that he was never numbered among them.