And where did you go for your holiday?

Counter Culture
Leonie Caldecott
FOR SOME REASON, the girl who cuts my hair likes to quiz me about my religion. I don't mind, only 1 fmd I am not at my brightest and most inspired under these conditions. Last time, she wanted to check something she had heard a priest say during the funeral of a friend's smallchild. "He said she had gone on to a better place," she told me. "But how can it be better to be dead than alive?"
Right. Yes. 1 realised that in order to get anywhere with this one, I would have to explain what heaven was. How do you do that with someone who is completely focussed on the world, and hasn't the foggiest idea that there is something else, infinitely better, happier and lovelier than this vale of tears?
I couldn't even begin (luckily by now the hairdrier was whirring and I had a moment to think), without locating for her those experiences in her own life to which one could point and say: start there.
"Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely..."
The search for the One who is found in these things, however, goes against the grain of contemporary culture. Not long after this, during our summer holidays, we spent sonic time in conversation with the nuns of an enclosed Benedictine abbey. It was a truly delightful experience, and I couldn't help wishing that I could teleport my hairdresser there and show her what people are like, who turn their lives over entirely to this mysterious quest for God. Though they are removed from the hurlyburly of the world, the sisters are well-informed and intelligent women, full of warmth and genuine concern for their visitors. Love of God flows over here into love of their fellow men and women.
Through their welcome for us, they were carrying out the instruction of St Benedict: "Any guest who happens to arrive at the monastery should be received just as we would receive Christ himself, because he promised that on the last day he will say: 'I was a stranger and you welcomed me."
After showing us a slide show about life inside the abbey, the nuns asked our daughters if they had any questions. One of the girls began to grill them about the most basic details of monastic life, and the two novices present responded in a delightfully down-to-earth fashion. They demonstrated how they adapted their habits for manual work, and described how they organised their work around the rhythm of prayer, sharing their gifts, both material and spiritual. "Are you allowed to bring your musical instruments into the cloister?" asked my daughter. Oh yes, they replied, we play for each other at recreation or on special feasts. "Do you play an instrument?" they enquired in turn of their youthful interlocutor. "Yes," she replied, with a grin. 'The harp."
AFEW DAYS later, RS we attended Mass at the abbey, it struck me how the presence of the cloistered religious such as these is at once something given to God, and also to the rest of us. Not only do they inspire us by their "sincere gift of self' and their community life (expressed so well in the discipline of the plainchant, which requires you to listen as much as sing), but they also carry us in prayer in the most effective way.
There is a kind of exchange, I thought (as we and they took it in turns to sing the lovely phrases of the Missa de Angelis), by which what we do out in the world, as the arms and legs of Christ, is made possible thanks to the beating of the contemplative heart hidden away in the cloister.
As we departed once more to plough our little furrow at home, I noted that the abbey faces out towards the sea, a reminder that living prayer reaches out towards a vast horizon. Never have we needed it more, in these days when so few seem to orient themselves towards that "better place".