A long, long time ago, the first time I ever visited a cloistered monastery of nuns, the abbess who was leading our retreat told us to let our minds sit gently on the words of the psalms as they were being chanted in the Office. Don't try to grip it too tightly, that is force yourself to concentrate too hard, but let our minds take it in easily, like a cool breeze. She said that at some point during the retreat a phrase or verse might start to occupy our thoughts, and this was what was usually meant by allowing God to "speak to your heart".

Naturally, being young keeners, we three girls enthusiastically set about concentrating very hard on energetically allowing our minds to "float gently," which makes me smile now.

But Dom Calvet, (who once wrote an encouraging note to me) says here that this good abbess was quite right, and it has come about at last, now that I am no longer a young keener, that I also have a single line of the psalms rolling slowly back and forth in my mind, again and again.

Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at thy altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.

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ONE DAY, as we were asking a Carmelite sister to tell us how she made her prayer, her heart to heart with the Lord, she responded that, for thirty-five years, one phrase of the Gospel was enough for her, and she returned to it without ceasing. It seemed to her that drawing on another source would be to be unfaithful to her particular vocation, or at least to the attraction which the Lord had given to her for her time of mental prayer. It is very true that the interior life, more than a response to passing impulses, is chiefly an effort to persevere in the direction of a continuous line flowing from the first grace.

The phrase that our Carmelite was taking in this way was drawn from the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that whoever believes in Him, should not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). The whole doctrine of salvation is contained in these few words: the divine paternity, the redemptive Incarnation, the role of faith, the drama of reprobation and the perspective of eternal happiness. The ancients gave a name to this verse of the Gospel of Saint John: they called it Evangelium in nuce, the Gospel in a nutshell.

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Higher up and farther in

Hey all, my innernet allotment is just about spent for the month. Can't re-charge until the 25th so I'll be mainly off until July or so.

I woke up this morning at five thirty, and knew that the time for fooling around is up. I've been given a sort of reprieve, from cancer, from the consequences of my sins etc. and I have been instructed that I am not to waste it.

Sang Laudes this morning and toddled off to Mass. I had a sort of a ... thing ... this morning at Mass. First time I've been to a weekday Mass in ages. I just can't keep kidding myself that wasting time on the net is anything other than a vice, plainly put. I'll pop in now and then, but things are mainly slowing down for the time being.

I leave you with this: a psalm that seems to encapsulate a whole programme of life

How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!
My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.
Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.
Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will be still praising thee. Selah.
Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them.
Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools.
They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.
O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer: give ear, O God of Jacob. Selah.
Behold, O God our shield, and look upon the face of thine anointed.
For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.
O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee.

In other words, you can't get to Aslan's Country by staying on this side of the door.



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Reading like a monk

I'm in Horrible Old Rome for a few days running errands and getting a few big city things done. It's horrible. 30+ degrees all weekend (and of course, for the rest of the summer) and the centro is filled with filthy, skanky, party-animal tourists..."I have a right to listen to my music..." ugh...

And I just checked weather in Norcia and it's a lovely 24, with exciting and cooling thundershowers on the way. Sigh... Home again on Wednesday...

Anyway, at least we're off to the seaside for a day, which, for various reasons, I was unable to accomplish last month. And it is always nice to visit the gang.

Meanwhile, I'm finding that the City Desert blog is becoming my daily transport into the better world of monastic thought.

"Reading like Monks"

While scholastic “lectio” (reading) was typically oriented towards “quaestio” (inquiry) and “disputatio” (discussion), or knowledge and science, monastic reading aspired to “meditation” and “oratio” (prayer), or wisdom and appreciation. The relation of the monastic reader to the text was not detached and analytic, but close and rather physical, even muscular. It is often described with the word rumination: “It meant assimilating the content of a text by means of kind of mastication which releases its full flavour”.

In pulling back from news reporting, I'm finding I have to completely reorient the way my brain works. I've become so used to a reductionist way of reading, and even thinking... scanning for the basic facts for reporting purposes, digging under these facts to find other facts. All for the purpose of translating it into journalese, quick declarative sentences that convey these facts with no more depth than a dictionary entry. With my brain having spent 15 years of reading and thinking like a reporter it is going to be difficult to retrain it to go back to the old way of reading.

I remember it. I remember reading books to let whatever it said, whether it was information or a novel or poetry, catch my imagination, and allow me to be absorbed into the thoughts of the writer and in a sense mentally exit this world. To forget I was sitting reading, and to float into another person's thoughts.

More from a (rather overly optimistic) scholarly essay on the history of reading:

A striking example is the antagonism between the scholastic way of read- ing and monastic reading in the Late Middle Ages. Scholars and students in the scholastic universities that were developing the Late Middle Ages – from the beginning of the second millennium onwards – typically read compilations, i.e., collections of text snippets from the church fathers, Aristotle and other authoritative authors. Reading whole texts from beginning to end was rare in the scholarly world. There was no need for a love of reading; the important thing was to analyse the text and use it for critical discussions. (Hamesse 1999)

But the love of reading existed elsewhere, in the monasteries. Monks, often hermits, were engrossed in the reading of the Bible, the writings of the church fathers, and other spiritual books. They chewed, swallowed, digested, and recited the texts. They had an emotional relationship with the texts, and they had a love of reading.

Jacqueline Hamesse says, “In the Age of Scholasticism, the acquisition of knowledge became more important than the spiritual dimension of reading.” (Hamesse 1999, 118). One could rephrase this as follows: The strictly utilitarian aspect of reading was preferred to more adventurous reading styles. If one only reads to find exactly what one is seeking, there is no need for a love of reading. In fact, the goal of rational reading is to read as little as possible. Once you have found what you’re looking for, you can stop reading.

"In this case, reading is a function of information retrieval. The important thing is what we do with the acquired information in discussions and social media."

It is precisely this utilitarian, information-retrieval, kind of reading (and subsequent writing) that I think is harming us right now, restricting our ability to understand deeply what we do read, and discouraging further efforts to delve deeply into the written word.



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A stranger place than I thought...

It turns out that Norcia and the Sibillini mountains are a much, much stranger place than I had thought at first. I've spent way too much time today entranced by reading about the very strange and tangled legends and fairy tales surrounding the Apennine Sibyl, the mysterious and extremely ancient stories of a magical "Lady of the Mountains," "Queen of Sibyls," an enchantress or oracle, that are all over the local area.



The stories about this mysterious figure, who was said to have lived in a magical labyrinth of caverns high up above Castellucio at the peak of Monte Sibilla, seem to have some possible connection to the stories of the Sibyl of Cumae and the story of Aeneas, but there are hints that they could possibly go back even to predate the neolithic.

A rather garbled series of legends about her and her magic, wisdom and natural knowledge go back at least as far as Suetonius and persist with remarkable consistency through the Middle Ages to the 16th century. And there are dolmens and man-made megalithic stone constructions in the higher mountains around here that indicate pre-Christian worship had been going on since before agriculture came here.


For centuries the Sibyl's cave or fairy cave was well known, located on the Monte Sibilla about 2150 m above sea level. It was regarded as a place to go to learn ancient wisdom and secrets. Magicians and sages would bring their books to have them "consecrated" in the lake below the cave by the magical Lady of the Mountain.

As you see above, the cave is still well known, but what is left of it at the surface is quite shallow and was mostly closed by landslides and earthquakes, by the 17th century, but is still called a path to the underworld. The story, that goes back to the 13th or 14th century, is that this cave is only the antechamber to the vast system of caverns that go very deep, where she and her followers lived. She wasthought at that time to be a "fata" which is basically the Italian word for "fairy". There are medieval stories of knights going into the cave system and living there with the fate (plural of "fata" pronounced "fah-tay") and coming out with fantastic stories of an underground paradise and a fairy queen.

Legends of the Sibyl and her magical kingdom were well known among learned men until the 1600s. Most of the stories of her show her to be a benevolent semi-supernatural person who dispensed advice, prophecies and natural knowledge.


Abraham Ortelius' 16th-century atlas, Cartographia Neerlandica, describes her realm:

The Mountain Apennine here looms over the country with exceedingly high cragged tops, in which one finds that huge cave called Sibylla's cave, (in their language Grotta de la Sibylla) and which the poets would have the Elysian Fields. For the common people dream about a certain Sibylla [supposed] to be in this cave, who [is claimed to] possess a large kingdom full of gorgeous buildings and Princely palaces, covered with pleasant gardens, abounding with many fine lecherous wenches and all kinds of pleasures and delights. All of these she will bestow on those who through this cave (which is always open) will come to her. And after they have been there for the period of one whole year, they have the freedom and liberty given to them by Sibylla to depart (if they please) and from that moment, having returned to us, they state that they live a most blessed and happy life ever after. This cave is also known to our countrymen by the name of VROU VENUS BERGH, that is, The Lady Venus mount.

Among the legends of the Sibyl and her maidens/witches/fate is that they came out of their caves and down to Norcia (which would be a heck of a journey on foot) and taught the local village girls secrets of spinning and weaving.

The stories of the Sibyl lasted for a few hundred more years into the 14th century, and then a series of earthquakes and landslides closed off the deeper sections of the caves and now you can only see the remains of the shallow antechamber. In the 19th century amateur archaeologists tried to use explosives to re-open the system, but succeeded only in collapsing more of the first cave. Later investigators claimed that the earlier descriptions of a vast network of caves, forming the "paradise of Queen Sibilla," were nothing more than fanciful tales. In 1946, Caesar Lippi Boncambi wrote in his book "The Sibillini Mountains,"

"Few are the caves, and which do not show any interest in caving. I was able to explore a single cave, barely worthy of the name, famous for the legends which gave rise to the huge literature and historical, romantic and poetic that has flourished around it in Italy and all 'foreign from the Middle Ages to the present day..."

His diagram shows a drawing only of a single room a few meters high and deep.

But here's the kicker, modern geological technology has found that there really is a huge system of very deep caves up there, all interconnected with passages:

"Promotion Committee "Cave of the Sibyl Apennines", under the auspices of the Archaeological Survey of Marche (represented locally by Dr. Nora Lucentini responsible for the Province Picena), with the active participation of the Department of Earth Sciences of the ' University Camerino represented by prof. Gilberto Pambianchi and assisted by Dr. Angelo Beano, with funding of members and the Cassa di Risparmio di Ascoli Piceno, promotes the geological and geophysical surveys at the site "Cave of the Sibyl." The scientific report prepared by prof. Pambianchi and dr. Beano is kept in the records of the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Camerino. From the results of the GPR prospecting confirms the existence of a vast underground complex at the depth of 15 meters below the ground surface, made ​​of labyrinthine tunnels and cavities of the considerable length of about 150 m. The synthesis of the studies published in the Proceedings of the Conference (organized by Project Elissa) "Sibyl Shaman mountain and cave Apennine". The next phase of investigation, which would have provided the coring noninvasive points deemed most significant of the ground level facing the collapsed vestibule, was interrupted."

These legends are so ancient and so consistent that it seems impossible they weren't based on something real. But danged if I can imagine what it would be. It's really mind-boggling. It's hard to imagine how anyone at a neolithic level of technology could have survived for very long up there. The winter conditions are almost arctic with temperatures that can often go down to -40 C. Even now nothing much other than lentils and spelt can be grown in the short season on the Piano Grande at Castelluccio. But it could be remembered that Italy's mountains are all volcanic, and that caves up there could be geothermic, or perhaps could have been once upon a long time ago. Maybe...

Given that the legends of mysterious and magical wise women eventually gave way to more recent confirmed histories of saints and hermits who were mystics and visionaries, I can't help but think I may have come to a genuinely "magical" place. The world is stranger than we think, and while we may not understand it, there is a lot more going on out there than we usually imagine. There is certainly something that strikes you about the place immediately. I've spoken with an American who has lived here who agreed that it had struck him the same way, that it was a lot like living in Narnia or Shangri La. Of course, he only meant it poetically. But now that I'm thinking about it, all this has really got my "Ancient World was Stranger than we Think" antennae going all a-quiver.

At any rate, I'm completely captivated to find these stories right on my doorstep. All through my childhood, I was obsessed with the fairy stories about magical underworld fairy realms that you could get to through certain "weak or thin" spots in the world between our world and theirs. The Twelve Dancing Princesses, the fairy legends of Ireland, and Narnia itself, of course. I thought at that age that I really could find a magic door or stone, and if I just knew what to say or how to say it just right, I could go through. And now it seems I've found a real one, albeit abandoned by them a long time ago.

There's a book about the local Sibyl legends in the trekking book shop. It's in Italian, but that's getting to be less of a problem. There's bits and pieces here, but there's not very much else in English. Here's the Wiki page in Italian about the Sibyl's Cave or the "Grotta delle Fate".

"In the Museum of the Cave of the Sibyl at Montemonaco, is kept a dark stone, called "The Great Stone" which is engraved with mysterious letters and found near Lake. According to legend, this would be the lake Averno from which you enter the world of Underworld."

And the Lake of Pilate that was once called the Lake of the Sibyl and has long been associated with magic and necromancy. Here is a little article by some trekkers on their trip to the Grotta della Maga

When I said I had come here to look for the Door to Narnia, I was more or less speaking metaphorically. But it now occurs to me that I have come to one of the places in the world that are always described as "magical" for more reasons than the scenery and sunsets. If nothing else, I've already got stories and maybe a novel forming in my brain...



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Through the Wardrobe Door

So, this afternoon, I took a step.

At about three pm, I stood in the bay window of my sitting room, with the late afternoon sunshine breaking out from under the clouds and pouring in, and sang the Office of None, partly in English (psalmody + Ants) and partly in Latin (everything else). And it was wonderful. A pause during which time stood still and the heavens opened and everything else in the universe (most particularly my little struggles) was rendered trivial. It lasted 20 minutes.

At about 6pm I intend to do it again with Vespers, though, since I hear the birds already singing good night, it will be dark by then.

The notation inside the front cover of my Anglican Breviary (not what it sounds like) reminded me that I had bought it and started using it in 2004. That was the same year I stopped working in the Campaign Life Coalition office in Toronto, and started working from home for LifeSite, while continuing to look after John Muggeridge in what was to be his last year of life in this world.

That was also the year I decided that there was no place to go to fulfill a religious vocation.

I was mistaken about that, but didn't know it at the time, and probably would have failed to hear or understand it had someone told me. After that, I settled for thinking that it was too late and I was too old, and too cranky and that the Church was too corrupt to make it worth the search.

After that my mother died, and I lost all interest, for a time, in the Faith and left Canada for England vowing (no, not really Vowing) to let the window close and all of that old desire to fall into the past like things left behind on the shore of a fast-moving river.

Then some other things happened, and some more things, and I had thought that it was all gone. Then cancer happened, and I spent two years wondering if this was Time's-Up. It turned out not to be, but All That grated away a good deal of the crust that had accumulated on me and was threatening to harden into an impenetrable shell. And the upshot now is that I learned that it is impossible to walk away.

How can one "walk away" from The Real? It is ever ready to barge in again. Like a Lion into a tiny house, at the least hint of an invitation, He will get His nose into any crack or window, and will shove until His shoulders are through, and then will pick the whole thing up and shake it apart until it is nothing but matchwood.

So, being now 47 and a recovering cancer patient with that sword of Damocles hanging over me (maybe it will fall, maybe it won't... who knows?) I began to ask again, How can I draw closer to You?

On Saturday afternoon, I composed a letter of inquiry to the Oblate Master at the monastery at Norcia. I have been assured, several times and by several different people, that they are not just tres, tres PLU, they are, in fact, us. And they have oblates. So... So today I sent the letter.

"I believe firmly in what I have come to call the ‘rat-in-a-maze’ school of vocational discernment: you can smell the cheese and you know it’s in here somewhere, so you just keep trying doors until you find one that opens. I have described my whole life as a long search. When I was a young child, raised on the Narnia stories, I remember quite consciously searching tirelessly for a door to a magical world.

The desire to find that Door has never left me, and I think I may now understand better what its real form is, and how not only to find it but to go through. As it has been pointed out to me, God does not want me to have “options”; He wants me to find the one thing I need to do and do it steadfastly."

I dunno. Maybe something new will happen now.



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