Day 32: A Company of Angels

December 16, 2010

To call them angels would be just too trite. But the Benedictine sisters of Jamberoo Abbey have that quality in their chanting that takes you effortlessly into a place of serenity. At last, a place of silence.

Lauds (Morning Prayer) on Thursday starts at 9.30am. I arrive just after 9am and find my way to the church, located behind the reception hall and gift shop where we were greeted by two nuns yesterday. The back of the sanctuary is a semi-circle of four metre high glass, opening out to the intense green of the bushlands that surround their monastery. Other than that, the sanctuary is simple, with a handcrafted life-size crucifix in the centre of the windows and a simple polished slab of local timber for the altar.

The sisters emerge one by one from the door on the other side of the sanctuary to where the guests are seated, the area known as the transept. They bow to the altar then find their seat in the semi-circle of beautifully wrought timber choir stalls. Each has a rustic sawn slab of timber as a back rest. There are twenty members of this community, the majority past middle-age. Their habits are a dusky blue covered by a darker blue stole. They wear a simple head scarf which covers most of their hair. A young woman, 20-something, enters in civilian clothes and shyly takes a seat between two of the nuns. Perhaps she is a postulant, someone who tests their vocation as a monastic before taking any vows.

There is a distinctly feminine quality to this ambience that differs from the hard angles of the New Norcia monks’ oratory, where they sing their daily prayers, six times a day. The soft trill of the nuns chanting is like a chorus of early morning birds, beckoning you into the day. I want to sing with them, as I always do at New Norcia, but the order of service is unfamiliar, and I don’t want to disrupt the singular beauty of their sung prayer. So I sit with the others guests and quietly listen.

The experience is so new; it is hard to surrender to its simplicity when there are so many things to observe and take in. But after communion, I shut my eyes and wait in the silence they hold for maybe ten minutes before the Benedictus is sung and the final prayer offered.

I envy these sisters. Silence is their norm, where I have to work so hard to find it – and then protect it. I wasn’t made for this noisy world and all its distractions. The idyllic life of a monastic intrigues and beguiles me. Since coming in contact with the Benedictines almost ten years ago, I’ve held a deep hidden fantasy that one day I might join such a community.

I urge Johan to come to their next prayers with me – “Don’t you want to see where I’m going to spend the rest of my life if you die before me?” He laughs. “You wouldn’t last,” he quips. Well, he’s probably right. The price of such a life is steep – the surrender of one’s freedom to make choices about their life. The surrender of self-will; ultimately, the surrender of self, as is the goal of all monastic traditions, in order to find the true Self. Monastics spend a lifetime grappling with this dilemma. 

 The Benedictine women's monastery at Jamberoo.
The next two pictures are from their website as I didn't want to take photos in the church.