Rumer Godden's Brede and Dame Gertrude More

Dorothy Cummings McLean reviews Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede for Crisis Magazine:

Novels are what we read when we should be reading something else—or are they? Currently I should be reading Henri Nouwen’s “modern spiritual classic,” The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, but in fact I have just finished Rumer Godden’s novel, In This House of Brede. And I feel no embarrassment in saying that the laywoman’s novel taught me far more about the way of the heart than the priest’s meditations. After decades of preaching the virtues of a low fat diet, nutritionists now tell us our dietary culprit isn’t fat. Apparently we have always needed good fat in our diet. Godden’s novel runs with rich oils; Nouwen’s book strikes me as sugary.

I first heard of In This House of Brede when I went to the Solemn Profession of a young nun to the Abbey of Saint Cecilia at Ryde on England’s Isle of Wight. Saint Cecilia’s, I was told, was one of the models for Rumer Godden’s fictional Brede. As my visit to the abbey was one of the most edifying trips of my life, showing me how beautiful enclosed life can be, I resolved to read this book.

The abbey Godden more closely based her work on was Stanbrook Abbey, which is now in a different location than when she knew it, but has its roots in the English exiles of the Reformation and Recusant eras, who founded the house in Cambrai. One of the founders was St. Thomas More's great-great-granddaughter, Helen More--Dame Gertrude More in religion:

St Thomas More's great-great-granddaughter, Helen, left England at the age of seventeen as a key figure in a new venture: the foundation of a monastery for Englishwomen under the aegis of the English Benedictine Congregation. Suitable, though dilapidated, buildings were found in the city of Cambrai. There, together with two of her More cousins and six other young Englishwomen, Helen was clothed in the Benedictine habit on 31 December 1623 and professed as Dame Gertrude on 1 January 1625. The monastery of Our Lady of Consolation, now at Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, had come into being.

Dame Gertrude herself was utterly miserable. A lively extrovert, she was not born to a life of prayer and had not particularly wanted to enter a monastery, though she had kept that to herself. She tried to read spiritual books, consult different confessors, but in vain. In November 1625 she was so desperate that she went to the man she had hitherto ridiculed, Father Augustine Baker.

Within a fortnight her life was changed. What had seemed impossible was 'made by him so easy, and plain,' she recalled. Once she had learnt to put aside self-will, she was free to recognize God's voice, the 'call' or prompting of the Holy Spirit in her heart. Her fear and despair gone, Dame Gertrude was at last flying 'freely with wings of Divine love'.

I certainly agree with McLean that Godden's novel is a masterpiece. I read nearly all of Godden's books and always appreciated her excellent story-telling and sometimes adventurous technique, usually dealing with time and place (Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time; China Court: The Hours of a Country House, etc). Little, Brown has been re-issuing some of her novels in paperback with new covers as part of the Virago Modern Classics series.

David Augustine Baker, OSB

 

Benedictine priest and monk (David) Augustine Baker died of the plague on August 9, 1641. He was a missionary priest in England, a spiritual director of English Benedictine nuns in exile, and a mystic, writing books on Catholic spirituality.

 

As this site notes Father Baker, "was one of the earliest members of the newly restored English Benedictine Congregation. He has three claims on our attention.

• "He supervised the link between Sigebert Buckley of Westminster and the old English Congregation and the new English monks from Italy.
  
• "He collected a huge amount of historical material to support the claim (against newer orders) that the conversion of England was from the beginning essentially Benedictine.
  
• "He explored deep into the spiritual world of prayer, teaching many, especially among our nuns, the fruitful realities of the life of prayer. In this his influence is incalculable, and is still with us today. Apart from the language in which it is set out, which is, not unreasonably, a little dated, it is a spirituality which sits well on the more recent columns of the church's inner structure. It grew in the Counter- Reformation world, but has older roots and survives when some of the more enthusiastic accretions of the seventeenth century have largely evaporated."

This blogger comments on Father Baker's spirituality and life of prayer:

Like the Fathers of the Church, Dom Augustine regarded continuous prayer as the whole purpose of monastic life; but he did not reserve contemplation to monks and nuns alone. For St Symeon the New Theologian it is as connected with holy communion as baptism is connected with conversion. Dom Augustine wrote of the solitude that is a necessary condition for contemplation:

Now this so necessary solitude can be found more perfectly and permanently in a well-ordered religious state … yet it is not confined to that state but that, in the world also, and in a secular course of life, God has oft raised and guided many souls in these perfect ways, affording them even there as much solitude and as much internal freedom of spirit as he saw was necessary to bring them to a high degree of perfection.

Just as he believed that people can be called by God to contemplation in all walks of life, so he believed that a monk can pursue his goal in any conditions imposed on him by obedience. Being sent on the Mission was not unmonastic if the monk has sufficient spiritual maturity not to be diverted from his contemplative goal. Indeed his argument with Dom Rudisind was that life in a monastery can also be a distraction from contemplation in someone who is too concerned about the externals of monastic life. I believe that, if the teaching of Dom Augustine Baker is complemented by the teaching of P. Jean-Paul de Caussade SJ with his “Abandonment to Divine Providence” and his “Sacrament of the Present Moment”, and if this is set within the context of a sound understanding of the Liturgy and, hence, of the Church, then the English Benedictine Congregation will be seen to have a common goal, a coherent doctrine how to achieve it, and a flexibility to adapt the monastic observances to whatever circumstances may arise.



The Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne on the Son Rise Morning Show

Today I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at 6:45 a.m. Central/7:45 a.m. Eastern because this is the memorial (in France) of the Carmelite martyrs of Compiegne, victims of the Committee for Public Safety and French Revolution, executed in Paris in 1794. Brian Patrick and I will discuss the sacrificial martyrdom of these Carmelites, who swore to offer their deaths for the peace of France. The Catholic martyrs of the French Revolution are probably as little known as the martyrs of the English Reformation have been, although I hope I've made a dent in that ignorance. Many priests and nuns suffered torture, execution--and exile during the Reign of Terror.

The Carmelites' story also has a great connection to the English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The exiled French priests and nuns who fled the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the dangers of the Terror provoked feelings of sympathy in England. The fact that they were allowed to practice their faith while English Catholics were not contributed to the Catholic Relief movement in Parliament. Among those exiles were actually English Benedictine nuns from Cambrai--they were English nuns in exile on the Continent who then founded a new monastery at Stanbrook Abbey. The foundress of the Cambrai house was none other than Helen More, the great-great-granddaughter of St. Thomas More. Her name in religion became Dame Gertrude More. The Benedictines of Our Lady of Comfort in Cambrai wore the secular clothing of the Carmelites on their journey "home". Stanbrook Abbey was the inspiration for Rumer Godden's novel, In This House of Brede, one of my favorite books. According to her New York Time's obituary:

To do research on ''In This House of Brede,'' Ms. Godden lived for three years near Stanbrook Abbey. Her experience with the nuns there contributed to her decision to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1968. In many of her stories and novels, Ms. Godden would write about the rewards and perils of the contemplative life.

A couple of years ago, I went on a mini-pilgrimage in Paris to the site of the Blessed Carmelites' execution and then to the cemetery behind which their remains were dumped into mass graves: here are links to those posts: the site of execution and the chapel at Picpus, the cemetery grounds at Picpus, and the mass graves.

There were sixteen martyrs in all on July 17, 1794:

Choir Nuns
Mother Teresa of St. Augustine, prioress (Madeleine-Claudine Ledoine) b. 1752
Mother St. Louis, sub-prioress (Marie-Anne [or Antoinett] Brideau) b. 1752
Mother Henriette of Jesus, ex-prioress (Marie-Françoise Gabrielle de Croissy) b. 1745
Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified (Marie-Anne Piedcourt) b. 1715
Sister Charlotte of the Resurrection, ex-sub-prioress and sacristan (Anne-Marie-Madeleine Thouret) b. 1715
Sister Euphrasia of the Immaculate Conception (Marie-Claude Cyprienne) b. 1736
Sister Teresa of the Sacred Heart of Mary (Marie-Antoniette Hanisset) b. 1740
Sister Julie Louise of Jesus, widow (Rose-Chrétien de la Neuville) b. 1741
Sister Teresa of St. Ignatius (Marie-Gabrielle Trézel) b. 1743
Sister Mary-Henrietta of Providence (Anne Petras) b. 1760
Sister Constance, novice (Marie-Geneviève Meunier) b. 1765

Lay Sisters
Sister St. Martha (Marie Dufour) b. 1742
Sister Mary of the Holy Spirit (Angélique Roussel) b. 1742
Sister St. Francis Xavier (Julie Vérolot) b. 1764

Externs:
Catherine Soiron b. 1742
Thérèse Soiron b. 1748

[Image Source: wikipedia commons--from the Carmel in Quidenham, Norfolk!]