The Rest Is Silence Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 Kevin Scully

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  ISBN 978-1-84396-554-1

  Also available in paperback

  ISBN 978-1-68715-859-8

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  Contents

  Cover Page

  Copyright & Credits

  By the same author

  About the author

  Title Page

  The Beginning of an End

  Editor’s Note

  The Water’s Edge

  Editor’s Note

  Growing Pains

  An Aside

  Feed my Sheep

  The Journey Gone

  Seeds in the Garden

  A Closer Walk

  The Cloud-Filled Sky

  An Aside

  I Nothing Am

  An Aside

  A Row of Books

  Editor’s Note

  Old Chapel

  An Aside

  Wash Me Throughly–1

  Come into the Parlour, Maud

  Spines Displayed

  Wash Me Throughly–2

  An Aside

  The Day the Music Died

  An Aside

  Support Us All the Day

  An Aside

  Though We Are Many

  An Aside

  Packing Up

  Papering Over the Past

  Whither the Still Small Voice?

  In Thought, Word and Deed – Wash Me Throughly–3

  The Narrow Door

  Not With a Bang

  Ringing the Changes

  The Rhythmn Method

  An Aside

  Ruins and Boundaries

  Tick-Tock

  Crisp and Even

  Be Still and Know

  Sins of the Fathers

  Sacred Plots

  A Mysterious Meditation

  Changes

  Editor’s Note

  Office Work–1

  Office Work–2

  An Aside

  Dropping Stitches

  The Place of No Return

  Cat and Mouse

  The Dying Vigil

  An Aside

  Precious Moments

  Obituary

  The Court of Earls

  The Bearable Lightness of Being

  The Letter

  Editor’s Note

  Coda

  Acknowledgements

  By the same author

  Fiction

  Harbour Glimpses

  Non-Fiction

  Sensing the Passion

  Women on the Way

  Into Your Hands

  Five Impossible Things

  to Believe Before Christmas

  Imperfect Mirrors

  Simple Gifts

  Three Angry Men

  More information can be found at

  www.kevin-scully.com

  About the author"

  Kevin Scully is the author of a range of published and performed works. They include one novel, Harbour Glimpses. His non-fiction includes Sensing the Passion, Women on the Way, Into Your Hands, Imperfect Mirrors, Five Impossible Things to Believe Before Christmas and Simple Gifts.

  His radio dramas Verbal Assaults and A Grain of Rice were broadcast in Australia and Ireland respectively.

  Ten works, including There’s One in Every Unit, The Glint of the Irish and Hard Up have been seen on stage in the United Kingdom and Australia.

  His short stories won a number of awards and some of his poems have been published.

  Three Angry Men, a spiritual memoir of his father, Ken, who was also known by his pen name John Dawes, is available through his website, www.kevin-scully.com.

  Kevin is a former journalist, with experience in newspapers, television and radio. He trained as an actor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney and worked professionally on the stage, film, television and radio for ten years.

  He is a priest in the Church of England and is married to the opera singer Adey Grummet.

  Image copyright © Sean Pines

  THE REST

  IS

  SILENCE

  Kevin Scully

  Dwyer Editions

  The Beginning of an End

  Father Aidan the Abbot is going down to die. If and when he does, the monastic order to which he has given his life will die too. I am going to die with him. Yet it is likely, too—unless God has plans for me that I cannot discern—that I will survive him. Even so, when he leaves this life, my life—at least in the religious sense—will come to an end as well. Because I will be the only member left of the Community of Saint Candida. And a community cannot consist of one. Or can it?

  Yet what will I be? My vows will still stand but who will oversee them? I will be permanently cut loose from my brethren. Can I renounce the CSC? Perhaps I should ask our Visitor. But, as a bishop, he is distracted by allegations of sexual impropriety of a parish priest in his diocese. Would he want to continue as Visitor when Father Aidan and I move from Dorset to London? Or would he transfer our oversight to a local wearer of purple? And no matter who takes on the role, a similar question remains: can you be a Visitor to a community of one?

  Is it possible to resume the life of a man cast aside nearly fifty years ago? Though even then I did not cease to be who I was. I became a new man, with a new name, a member of a community in which an individual finds meaning as a brother, but still with all the baggage I brought with me. Should I abandon this identity, whose name is Brother Columba, assumed in 1972? Even the name was part of a collective process. It was chosen for me by Brother Anthony, the Novice Master of the order, at my profession.

  ‘You were washed up here in a wheelbarrow much as Columba was washed up at Iona in his coracle. You would do well to aspire to a life of service like his,’ he said.

  So Columba it was. I had hoped that I could opt for the Irish form of the name, Colmcille, but Father Abbot, to whom I had appealed for the equivalent of a deed poll change of name in religion, was adamant. ‘If you are returning to your English roots, the Anglicised name will be enough.’

  Father Aidan was already an experienced, or so it seemed to me, member of the monastery on my arrival—yet well in advance of his being elected abbot. He had been professed fifteen years earlier, having given up his academic career—recusant Catholicism in the Elizabethan era was his specialism—to take to the cloister. Even then he was still sought after as an external academic supervisor, a task whi
ch Father Abbot both sanctioned and rationed. He took the view that it would keep Aidan abreast of developments and bring in some useful income to the community.

  But things move on. And now it was come for us, the last two members of our order, to move on with them. The plans had been made by the Trustees who constitute the Management Committee of our community. This mixture of religious and secular great and good, with Father Abbot being the community presence, had overseen the exit strategy. This would solve the challenge of meeting bills for a vast set of buildings in a large rural setting. The plant was being sold off—something agreed to but not engineered by the Abbot when he was clear in mind (something that he is now, sadly, not)—and the proceeds would support the dying number of us—we happy two—until we die.

  And so I find myself sitting with Fr Aidan as we await our transport to Bethnal Green.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  What you have just read comes from a pile of scribbled pages which had been stuffed into an envelope and handed to me at the front desk of Care Home, a facility I go to as part of my pastoral duties as Rector of the parish of St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green.

  It was given to me by the receptionist as I was on my way in to take a mass in the first floor lounge room, something another priest or I try to do each week. The envelope did not have my name on it. Indeed, it had no markings on it at all. I had a brief look at its contents. When I asked the woman behind the desk why she had given it to me, she said the manager of the home had told her to do so. I put the envelope and its contents into the bag which held the chalice, paten and other necessaries for the Eucharist I was on my way to celebrate.

  The weekly Eucharist at Care Home was, and remains, a high point of my week. St Matthew’s parish is rapidly, and sometimes bewilderingly, changing. The mass provides a still point in the turmoil of the world and especially so in the loosening minds of some residents of the home. Ritual can somehow reconnect otherwise lost elements of memory and culture. Hymns bring voices raised in joy and certitude, as does the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. As the officiating priest, one gets a sense of reintegration of fragmented parts of former lives. Such is the power of religion.

  When I got back to my study I gave the contents of the envelope a more considered looking over. They were random jottings, thoughts and memories, from a monk who had been for a little over a year a resident in Care Home. As I scanned them, I was struck by a sense of intrusion, that I was looking in on thoughts and events that should be kept private.

  They were written, as you have read, by Columba CSC. (That stands for the Community of Saint Candida.) He had joined another monk, Fr Aidan, who had made a journey from rural Dorset to Bethnal Green. Columba tells us that Aidan had lived at the St Candida’s Monastery since he withdrew from academe. Some years earlier he had left the East End of London, taking a circuitous route to Oxford where he read Theology, in which he gained a first, and then pressed on in research. A devout young man, forged by the great Anglo-Catholic revival in the inner city, rural Suffolk and Oxford, he decided to test a vocation to the monastic life. It clearly suited him but, as I came to learn, as other mental faculties degenerated, he developed almost a compulsion that he should die near where he was born. He got his wish thanks to those who oversaw the winding up of the monastery. And through the efforts and sacrifice of Brother Columba.

  Columba is the last of a line. When he dies—after Fr Aidan’s death he moved from Care Home to the clergy retirement centre of Lazarus House in Sussex—so will the community of which he has been a professed member since 1972. I asked Columba why the two of them had not moved directly to Sussex when the monastery closed. He said it was Aidan’s wish and, since Fr Aidan was still abbot (despite his fading mental grip), he felt he must honour it. I questioned the wisdom of that. Columba’s response was that I did not live under a vow of obedience.

  I made contact with Columba at Lazarus House; indeed, I have been to visit him a number of times. I miss his quietly supportive contributions to our weekly mass at Care Home, and his prayerful presence at our Sunday services. I have repeatedly offered to return his jottings. He doesn’t want them back. They were, he tells me, merely attempts to pass the time, essays to avoid the constant buzz of television and radio, in the home where he was effectively an additional unpaid carer. This was to Aidan mostly but, by virtue of his clarity of mind, he was also something of an advocate for other residents. He was one of only a few on his floor who did not live with dementia.

  He has approved of my making them public, on certain conditions, though he has given me precious little steerage as to the sequence in which they should be presented. When I asked him for some such assistance, he simply shrugged and said there was no hierarchy of thought in them. Nor could he tell me if he had written his personal memories in sequence. They were undated as to writing or record, so any chronology was guess work. The order is simply my following a hunch or a failed attempt to construct some artifice. Any fault in this is entirely my own. I have also tried to refrain from too much comment—though sometimes I have struggled with this, as I do in much of life.

  Columba’s memories, in spite of their appeal, are not always accurate in fact and sequence. Research has confirmed that, but I have decided not to take issue with his narrative and comments. At times he repeats himself. Such rumination is normal, if not very literary. But to edit out the repetitions would be to sacrifice some other revelation or thought that flows from them. I simply offer what he has to say. There are also inconsistencies in his use of capitals for words like Community, when referring to the Order—or order—of which he was a professed member. I have left such variations in their original form.

  He also has a habit of referring to fellow monks by the posts they held at the time—Fr Abbot, Guestmaster, Novice Master, Prior, Brother Garden, Brother Kitchen, Infirmarian, Sacristan, Librarian. At other times, particularly in reference to his novitiate, he uses Christian names of those ‘in the world’, as monastics say. It is potentially confusing as any given incident, depending on what Columba recalls, may have occurred with the same person in various roles or under different names. This is particularly true of abbots.

  I have, where I have felt it useful, made some notes, often relating to embedded scriptural references in Columba’s writing. I have also sought to unravel some of Columba’s personal, historical and religious elements that may elude the casual reader. This has been done in the form of footnotes. I do this gingerly, having been entranced by Anthony Grafton’s ‘curious history’ of the footnote. As it says on the book’s dustcover, ‘Like the toilet, the modern footnote is essential to civilized historical life; like the toilet, it seems a poor subject for civil conversation, and attracts attention, for the most part, when it malfunctions. Like the toilet, the footnote enables one to deal with ugly tasks in private; like the toilet, it is tucked genteelly away—often, in recent years, not even at the bottom of the page, but at the end of the book. Out of sight, even out of mind, seems exactly where so banal a device belongs’.1

  There were also random notes, torn from other pieces of paper—notebooks, newspapers, scraps—on which were sayings, jottings, thoughts, comments, quotations and recollections. These present a greater challenge and so I have sought to do no more than place them within the body of the papers as it appealed to me. There was no key to how they related to the rest of the material. Their placement is pure whim on my part.

  Some aspects of them are possibly shocking, one incident extremely so. But, as a fellow Christian (and an Australian-born one at that), I believe Columba’s disjointed narrative points to a truth about ourselves—no matter how unpleasant events, experience or thoughts are, they are facts of life. To attempt to alter them would be dishonest. I offer them because they chronicle something of the dying landscape of the Church of England in the early part of the twenty-first century.

  1. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote, Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1997.

  The Water’
s Edge

  Bensville was a paradise. How my parents chose this glorious, isolated place was a mystery to me. It was quiet, its stillness sometimes reflected in the unruffled morning surface of Brisbane Water. Perhaps this is where the seed of silence in my life was sown. It germinated, as did my life itself, thousands of miles away. Then it was an unwelcome gift—fraught with fear and possibility, something which I only wanted to flee.

  The Central Coast hamlet was remote, especially by road. Travel was mostly by boat. It was leisurely, but more swift than relying on irregular bus services. I foolishly thought I had outgrown its confines. Later in life I found freedom in so many restrictions, often imposed in silence. There, in a world where green met blue, I was unknowingly readying myself for the community that I now lead in everything but title.

  The other isolating factor was my age. It seemed there were only two of us under the age of twenty—Marian and me. I thought our parents ancient. They weren’t, as I now know. They must have been considerably younger than most of Bensville’s other residents, who had retired seemingly to fish and garden themselves towards death.

  We each took the Pioneer ferry that my father piloted on behalf of the Sisters of St Joseph, who ran an orphanage at South Kincumber, a short haul across the water from Bensville, also known locally as Sunnyside.

  My father would go down the wharf—or should I write The Wharf, it being the centre of our community?—his handmade wooden box holding the magneto over his shoulder, place the device into the shaft, put a leather strap over a raised stud on the flywheel, pull, and kick the engine into life, then chug over the bay to collect the ferry.

  On board Dad would make the rounds to various bays and inlets, collecting passengers, parcels, papers and post on the way to the glittering Woy Woy, where he would exchange his cargo for that which had made its way up the coast on the train from Sydney or down from Newcastle. On the return trip shopkeepers, newsagents, postmasters and assorted locals would await him on jetties servicing the small communities that gorged on freshly caught fish and sunshine. His ultimate destination was the orphanage.