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Of all the novels by Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede is, in my opinion, her masterpiece. Brede Abbey is the home of cloistered Benedictine nuns, and it is their various stories that Godden presents in this magnificent book. Coming from all walks of life, ages and temperaments, the nuns of Brede create community through their single-hearted devotion to spirit, and to each other. This is a novel I return to again and again, finding new treasure for my spirit with each reading. In this excerpt, Dame Philippa (professed Benedictine nuns are called Dame) is visited by a former co-worker and friend, McTurk, who brings with him two Buddhist monks from Tibet. They spent the day and came to Vespers and Benediction, sitting in the sanctuary, the Lama on a golden cushion, young Tsarong on a scarlet. In their plum-colored robes, the sleeves and vests of the saffron-coloured under-robe showing, they were so immobile and dignified that their faces seemed carved in the candlelight. "This is the real thing," Lobsong Rimpoche told Philippa in the parlour afterwards. "I did not dream that such a life existed in England." After Vespers, young Tsarong and McTurk went to the large parlour to talk to Dame Edith and the Abbess about printing, while Philippa entertained Lobsong Rimpoche in a small parlour next door. She was called out for a few minutes, and when she came back, the old man had taken a prayer wheel, small, of copper and silver, from the pouch in his robe and was turning it as he sat. He did not put it down but continued to turn it as they talked, and Philippa remembered the prayer wheels that the Japanese peasants sometimes set in streams, so that the prayers ran on as they worked; prayers that spun through the hours, days, months. "Brede years are like that," she told McTurk. "The year of prayer, of liturgy, revolving within the natural year." On her seventh Christmas, she wrote, "There is a story about Newman that I like very much. In his room he had a picture – I think his landlady had given it to him – of the Blessed in Paradise praising God, and every time he came in and out, he used to smile at it and say, 'What! Still at it?' That about sums up life at Brede..." |
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