Othona
All that matters is to be at one with the living God
to be a creature in the house of the God of life
Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace…
DH Lawrence
I’ll tell you about Othona in small pieces, like the treasures that make up Dorset beaches, or the different leaves and pine cones that layer the forest floor as you down to the sea, or the snatches of remembered hymn amongst all the words you forgot, or the fragments of bread that make up the simplest of holy meals.
Partly because a lot of what I might say would overlap with the privacy of others, and partly because if you ever go, I’d want you to discover it for yourself, and partly because, when I look back, that’s what I remember - a wide love like the sky - snatches of beauty, like birdsong.
Earlier in the year, I’d booked a place on this quiet week at Othona. It’s going to be silence, I told people who asked where I was going, and I think we go for walks and there’s poetry. And we get to swim in the sea, if we want to. I did want to.
I’m part of some online groups sharing contemplative prayer each week. They are sacred, beautiful, generous spaces, and each zoom that passes I’m more grateful to have this connection and shared silence. It’s also helpful when people are spread across the country or the globe, or it’s early morning or a dark evening, or a lunch break, to be able to be together online. And it’s different, to holding silence together in person. So I hoped at Othona, we’d do this too.
And we did. Long, gentle stretches of contemplative silence together, sea swimming, walking deep in conversation like those folks on a road to Emmaus, and walking quietly, listening to the birds and the ocean and the bees and to God. Considering where love lives in land and sky, in the water and stars, in old familiar hymns and warm sunshine and needed cups of tea and unfamiliar poems. Noticing the peace of trees, the healing powers of a bold kitten, the goodness of a group of strangers gradually learning one another’s stories.
Like I said, maybe you’ll go there one day, and discover its beauty for yourself.
But perhaps I’ll tell you about the books. A whole library, not just of books ‘about God’, but a library made by someone who seems to feel, like Madeliene L’Engle, like me, that all good books are about God.
And perhaps I’ll tell you about the silence we held from the end of evening chapel, to the end of breakfast the next morning, and how I learnt something of how sacred it is to sit and eat and pass the toast without adding words, how brave to just be yourself, quietly eating porridge.
In case it all sounds very holy, we also ate cream teas and laughed at stealthy deadpan jokes, and had awkward moments and tried and failed to find graceful ways to get changed under a towel in the sand, and there were times I was lonely, and times I was deeply sad. Yes, unsurprisingly, I think all of that is holy too.
Othona has wide love like the sky, a community that accepts each person wholly as they are, extraordinarily beautiful and beautifully simple, full of care and practicality, of creativity, of being held together by gentle rhythms and and homemade soup and assorted armchairs and long practised ways to get groups of people to clear up after dinner well.
And Othona has snatches of beauty like birdsong, like the gift of a tiny cuttle bone covered in lines like a map, of a hug from someone who has seen you, of people willing to sit by a fire together and watch the stars into the night, of a new-to-me book about another pilgrim, of the kind questions of people who want to know one another, the thoughtful answers, the shy sharing of ideas and new poems and pieces of art and requests for prayer; and a little procession of people who wanted to gather around a campervan and its maker, their curiosity, their delight.
And communion round a fire, under the trees on a warm morning, the sun breaking through the leaves, the kitten pouncing on something, the untiring gift of a small piece of bread and sip of homemade apple juice from the hands of someone willing to look into another’s eyes and tell them, this is for you, you are loved.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the mimims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console a lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkess outside. Inside the radio’s prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
Carol Ann Duffy
(one of the unfamiliar poems)
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver