Sarah Sands - The Interior Silence: My Encounters with Calm, Joy, and Compassion at 10 Monasteries Around the World

First published in the United States of America in 2021 by Chronicle Books LLC.

Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Short Books, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd.

Copyright 2021 by Sarah Sands.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-7972-1046-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7972-1048-3 (epub)

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Illustrations by Evie Dunne.

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To Tilly, for teaching me by example

O n a winters day, in which the sky hangs like a flat sheet over Norfolk, I look out at the remains of a thirteenth-century monastery wall in the field at the edge of my garden. Yew trees and ivy form a dark green curtain around the chalk-gray stone. There are two stone windows, in the shapes of a four- and six-leaf clover, and some smaller holes beneath. Sometimes jackdaws dart out of these holes, and earlier in the year I heard harsh squeals. I crept toward the sound and found massively dilated eyes in flat, fetal faces staring out at me. In time, the baby barn owls fledged and flew.

Behind the wall are hazel and walnut trees; in January, sun-yellow aconites; February, a mass of snowdrops; in March, primroses; April, bluebells; then foxgloves, ferns, and a crescendo of summer fecunditypoppies, nettles, cow parsley. I use a hacked branch of hazel to slash through a path. Its bark has been gnawed by the deer that leap over the field fence.

The wall is all that remains of Marham Abbeya Cistercian nunnery destroyed by Henry VIIIs marital ambitions and schism with Rome. It went in the first wave, because it had no bargaining power. It was poor, and it housed women.

A wall and a cascade of discarded stones. Some of these were used in Victorian times to build my hodgepodge house. I have kept various larger pieces of masonry as doorstops, and on the mantelpiece are a couple of glazed tiles, one pattern worn to yellow on a russet background. The shape could be many things but I trace it as an oak tree. The other is a much more detailed edging of medieval crosses and symbols.

When a friend and Norfolk neighbor, who is also an expert in historic buildings, came to see the house, he declared some of the brickwork in the chimney of historical interest. It was Tudor, retained by the Victorian builders. There was nothing else of note. I remember the term whenever I become too enthusiastic about the place. The wall is a scheduled monument, which means that you cannot build on it, but the house is not even listed by the conservation authorities. Henry VIII certainly found nothing of note here. The total loot was worth forty-six pounds (sixty-three dollars).

Yet the wall exists as a center of gravity in my life, and the lessons of monastic life are contained within it. The Cistercian order followed the teachings of the French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, who said: You will find in woods something you will never find in booksstones and trees will teach you a lesson you never heard in the schools.

The great English Cistercian monastery is Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire.

I read about it because my wall is a poor relation, and I want to know about the distant and grandest Cistercian community. It is about a five-hour drive from my home, and one day I set off with an inexplicable sense of purpose.

My route takes me past Lincoln Cathedral, rising like a thunderous organ from the flat landscape. I say to myself: I lift up mine eyes.

I drive on, listening to one of Bachs Brandenburg Concertos on the radio, along a monotonous road until I pass Wakefield, Leeds, Ripon, Helmsley. Then the roads become narrow and I miss several times the unmarked, unmade route, which is almost like a farm drive, past miles of skeleton trees, descending into a remote valley of the river Rye in the North Yorkshire moors. The hidden nature of Rievaulx makes its revelation all the more heart-stopping.

Alone, I wander through the vistas of columns and framed views of stirring Yorkshire countryside. I imagine the first monks who sheltered here under the rocks of the valley and among the elm trees.

The remoteness of monasteriesbest viewed from the heavensis in their essence; it is a rejection of the material world, its rhythms and its values. The monks lived by sunrise and sunset and spent their time between in learning, meditation, and manual labor. This inner concentration buoyed them in an extraordinary weightlessness. Saint Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx monastery, said: Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvelous freedom from the tumult of the world.

When I returned from Rievaulx, I was changed. I saw my wall in a different lighteasy to do, for the relationship between solid stone and the canvas of the skies is an everlasting painting. My sense of kinship with it deepened and my curiosity tingled. I saw that it was part of a network of monasteries across the country; ruined, silent, consigned to historythey all had stories to tell. There was wisdom in these institutions and there was medicine, for the body and for the mind. After all, out of the monasteries came both universities and hospitals, our most humane and valued institutions.

The principle of caring for the ill was cited by Shenoute, the third-century Egyptian monk: It is he [God] who will judge anyone who scorns those who are sick among us and among you. Furthermore, the monks showed an early understanding of what we now call mental health. Illness is not always visible. Many things of meaning cannot be seen, such as love. Another quote from the desert fathersthose who first founded monasteries in the scorched emptiness of Egyptis this: Nor let us speak insults to one another, such as You are not sick, lest God be angry with us because of our ignorance. For who knows what is inside man other than the Lord.

If monks fell ill, they would be cared for, while they were expected to exhibit stoicism in the face of sickness. Both knowledge of surgery and stoicism put monks at an advantage. Here is an account of a monk named Abba Aaronin from sixth-century Constantinople:

Once Aaron fell under a serious disease of gangrene in his loins; and he bore this affliction with great discretion, until his penis was eaten up and mutilated and had vanished down to its root, and his disease began to enter his inner organs.... But he, for his part, until his wound had worsened severely, held fastconstant in prayer and filling his mouth with praise and thanksgiving to God. Finally, when he could no longer pass water he was forced and so persuaded to reveal and make known his disease. Then the whole of his penis was found eaten away and consumed so that the physicians contrived to make a tube of lead and placed it for the passing of his water, while also applying bandages and drugs to him. And so the ulcer was healed. Furthermore, Aaron lived eighteen years after the crisis of this test, praising God, and having that lead tube in place for the necessity of passing water.