Monday, April 19, 2010

find a road to a humble abode where both of our routes meet


On Monday, Jack and I left for the train station at about ten o’clock in the morning, and got there in plenty of time for my 11:03 train. Actually, the train was late and didn’t get there until almost 11:15, so I had even more extra time. So I sat in the café sort of place.

When the train got there, I went to the coach I was supposed to be on to look for my reserved seat, but someone was sitting in it, and there wasn’t a card saying it was reserved. So I just picked a different seat.

The transition from train to Paddington Station to tube to King’s Cross made me feel like an old hand at traveling, now that it was my second trip to Oxford. This time I was smart and used the loo on the train so I didn’t have to pay 30p to use the one in the station…

I was reading Ivanhoe on the train. The boy across the coach from me was reading a book by Thomas Hardy. I wanted to make some sort of comment about how cool and intellectual we were, but I never did.

At the Oxford station, I had to try to figure out how what bus to take because I didn’t remember which one Sister Susan said. This was difficult. I got a map of the bus routes, but it was hard to understand.

Eventually I got on a bus. I meant to get off at High Street to change for the bus that I needed to be on, but I missed it, so I went a little out of the way. I knew what road I was on, but I didn’t know where on it I was. When I was looking at the map a lady asked if she could help, so I asked her, and showed her where I wanted to go. She said it was a long way to walk, but showed me how to get to the road I was supposed to be on. I was going to try to get on the right bus but I just ended up walking to the convent. Which made me sort of proud of myself, because of the lady saying it was a long way to walk. It was short compared to walking from Summertown! Because Ali and Jane and I are tough chicks. Yeah. (I’m in a really weird mood, can you tell?)

I was originally going to go around Oxford before going to the convent, but I realized it made much more sense to drop off my stuff first because it was heavy, so that’s why I went straight (well, besides bus errors) there. I came in through the back gate like I did before, because I didn’t want to ring the bell in case they were in a service. So I went to the deliveries entrance and knocked, and Sister Rosemary (though I didn’t know her name until later) came to the door and I explained who I was. She unlocked Fellowship House for me, which is where Ali is staying, and Ali was there. So then I set down my stuff and Ali and I sat and talked for a while before I set off into Oxford again, armed with my day bus pass.

I went to the Covered Market because that’s a place that people recommended and that I hadn’t been before. It’s lots of little shops, like a mall except no big chain stores. I wandered all around, but I didn’t buy anything.

After that I went to Primark because Jane said that they have cheap clothes there. Unfortunately, they close at 5:30, so I only had about fifteen minutes to look around which was not enough time, and I didn’t find a white shirt which was what I wanted to look for. I did, however, find tights, which was the other thing I wanted. I got a black pair – which I’ve been wearing a lot this week – and a purple pair. I have not scandalized the nuns with my purple tights. Mostly because they don’t match the shirts I brought. Not that the nuns would probably be scandalized, anyway… Oh, and I bought black socks. Because I don’t have any, and I’m forever needing them, and I figured £2 for seven pairs of socks wasn’t a bad deal.

I had been planning on going to Summertown to buy a new .3 lead pencil because I lost mine when I went to the Wash the first time (which was very depressing) but I was in such a muddle about getting on the bus back to Oxford that I forgot about it. Oh! And I was really hungry so I went to Sainsbury’s and bought four miniature mince pies for 45p. Oh yeah. I know how to find good deals.

I got back to the convent at about quarter to six, and Ali and I had supper. It was a good free supper because Pat and Mary, two ladies who were also staying at Fellowship House, had leftover pizza in the fridge that they didn’t want. Ham and pineapple, hurrah.

After we ate, a sister came by and brought me to the house where I’m actually staying, which is St. Seraphim.



It is on the opposite side of the convent from Fellowship House. I wish I could be staying with Ali, but having my own place is nice. It’s really something else –

my own bedroom,


sitting room,

complete with prayer-place:


kitchen, and bathroom! I’m pretty sure the kitchen is bigger than ours at home…


I went to the Compline service at 8:00. After Compline is the Greater Silence, which means nobody talks. I went back to St. Seraphim and went to bed. It was only a little lonely.

On Tuesday morning, I woke up in time to get ready for the Eucharist at nine. I was slightly late, though, because I thought that it started at 9:05 (because Compline starts at 8:05) but it starts at 9:00.

A pretty tree outside my house:


I had a very nice breakfast of some homemade (convent-made?) muesli. My house is equipped with that along with cornflakes, digestive biscuits, oatcakes, milk, tea, homemade bread, apples, oranges, bananas, jam, butter, peanut butter, and marmalade. (I don’t like marmalade, unfortunately.)

This is the main entrance to the convent:


Eucharist was good except that I wished that I could see better. The visitors chapel is a sort of alcove off the main chapel,


forming the right horizontal part of the cross shape.


Which means you can’t really see the nuns, and it made me feel rather out of it.

Later in the week, however, my mind suddenly re-orientated from seeing the area where the nuns were as the central focus to seeing the altar as the central focus. And then the place where we were seemed like a privileged position rather than other wise, to be so close, tucked in near, so that if I am in the front row and kneeling I am almost kneeling at the altar.

After Eucharist I went back to my house, but soon after, one of the sisters stopped by to see if I wanted to work that morning, which I did. Someone had asked me the day before if I was afraid of heights, because some high-up dusting needed to be done. So of course I said I wasn’t. So this sister – I can’t remember which one it was – said that she’d let Sister Eve know, and that I could come at 10:30 which is when the usually start work.

Sister Eve actually then stopped by shortly after that, at a little before ten, so I told her what the other sister had told me and she said that was fine, but that since it was a nice day she was going to have me wash windows instead, if that was okay. Which it was.

So at 10:30 I went and found her, and she showed me the windows that needed washing. It was a set of six windows, that had outer old windows that opened in the middle with each side having nine panes, and then inner modern windows that slid open. Sister Eve said that the outside of the outer ones gets cleaned, and the inside of the inner ones gets cleaned, but the middles never do. So that was my job.


I was very thorough, and it was nice to work outside. I got them quite clean, even though what those old windows really needed was to be sanded down and repainted… but at any rate, I made an improvement, and the sisters were impressed. I only got three of the windows done before it was time for lunch, so she said I could do the rest the next day.

The sisters don’t talk at meals. Which is difficult when you’re a visitor because you have to figure out what to do without asking unless it’s important enough to be worth the awkwardness of breaking the silence.

The food was very nice, however, and one of the sisters reads from a book during lunch. It was in the middle, and it was non-fiction, someone’s story about traveling in the middle east, and I couldn’t really follow it so it was dull. But the tables have a board as part of their structure, underneath, that is just the right height for me to prop my feet on. This greatly increased my comfort, given the shortness of my legs, especially since the benches don’t have backs.

After lunch, I went back to the house and read for a bit and then practiced ballet until it was time for none, at 2:00. After none a sister came to me and said that she could introduce me to Mark, the gardener, because she’d heard that I wanted to do gardening.


So I went and met Mark, a kind-looking man of about fifty, medium build, medium height, with brown hair with a little gray. He taught me how to hoe, and then I went and changed into jeans because I was wearing a skirt, and also got my mp3 player. So I hoed, while listening to the soundtrack to The Secret Garden, and enjoyed myself very thoroughly.



I was somewhat astonished when a sister came up, after I’d been working for perhaps forty-five mintes to an hour, and said concernedly that I didn’t have to exhaust myself; I could stop whenever I was tired. I reassured her that I was enjoying myself. I think they must have expected me to give it up after fifteen minutes or something… Anyway, the sister started working from the other side of the onion patch, and we worked until we were done.

After that I had about an hour and a half before vespers and dinner, so I went back to the house, and read for a little and then took a nap.

Dinner was nice, if silent.

Everyone has their own cloth napkin:

This is where we eat:


I was glad to go to Ali’s house after dinner and chat with her until Compline.

This is the path from Ali's house to the chapel:

Outside Fellowship House:


The place between the chapel and Fellowship House where Ali and I sit and talk:



And then Compline, and then reading Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, and then bed. Oh! I forgot one thing. I can’t remember when during this day, but at some point Sister Susan stopped by to make sure I had everything I needed, including books to read. She saw that I had picked that one out, and said that in general, people either love her or don’t like her at all. I love her. Sometimes she sounds a little crazy, but it’s that good sort of crazy, the mad-about-God crazy. The kind that you both want to hide from nonbelievers, because they’re going to think all Christians are wackos, and at the same time are kind of jealous of. And the way she talked about Christ’s passion reminded me of the way I have felt at Easter drama, and made me feel like the way I had felt and the thoughts I had weren’t a bad thing or crazy or me being overdramatic, or anything.

Wednesday followed the same rhythm as Tuesday, but was even more enjoyable because things were familiar.



I finished washing the windows, just in time for lunch. Several sisters told me at various times that I was doing or had done a wonderful job. One said that she didn’t think they’d been cleaned since before I was born. I felt that I lived up to my Holtzhouse heritage.

Lunch was much more interesting because I followed the story more and it got interesting because the main character was taken captive! He had been invited into their sort of lair as a guest but then all of a sudden he was blindfolded and carted off and had no idea where he was going or why. And then “Suddenly, the blindfold was removed.” And that was the end of the chapter! And the reading nun stopped! The just-barely-perceptible murmur, that was the nuns’ version of “HEY!”, amused me greatly.

After lunch, I again read a little and then practice ballet until None, and then gardened from None until Vespers. This time I was weeding some bushes. I meant to ask what the bushes were, but I forgot. I listened to the rest of the Secret Garden, which I hadn’t finished while I was hoeing. One really cool thing was that there’s a part in it about a robin, and while I was weeding this robin kept occasionally landing really close to me. Did you know that English robins are not the same as American robins? They are smaller, and lighter, and only the top part of the breast is red and the rest is white. I didn’t have my camera while weeding, so I didn’t get a picture, but you can probably google it.

Then Vespers, and supper. Ali and I had supper together at Ali's house instead of eating in refectory - it was a crazy supper, because it was just a compilation of what we had on hand. Which meant chips that Pat and Mary had left behind, heated in the oven, along with brocolli, shallots, and potatoes all fried together in butter. Then hanging out with Ali, until seven-thirty.

At seven-thirty on Wednesday nights is the Jesus Prayer - it is just the chapel, quiet, and a nun saying "Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me," again and again. It was so soothing and humbling and true.

Then Compline, and bed. I love Compline - we sing what I think of as the “bedtime psalms” – psalm 91, and also the one about the people who are in the house of the Lord at night, and also the one about I will lie down and sleep in peace. And the plainsong tunes for Compline are all minor-y. When we left I sort of felt like I was floating.

On Thursday, since the windows were done, I finally got to do the high dusting. Apparently my native habitat is with my head a foot from the ceiling of whatever place I happen to be in…

It wasn’t really very high, though. Just dusting off the lights in the hallway, and using a long-handled duster to get the cobwebs off the ceiling. And trying not to knock the spiders down on my head.

The sisters have no objection to spiders. I did not know this, and was trying to squish one that fell with my duster, when a sister came by and said, “oh! I’ll put it outside.” And then I was chagrined. And annoyed with myself, because usually I’m the one putting spiders outside… I don’t know what came over me to be squishing them. I guess because there were like six or seven of them and it would have taken forever to catch them all.

I managed to finish before lunch (during which we found that the main character escapes safely, incase you were worried), so that was good. I can’t think now what I did on Thursday afternoon, because I didn’t garden, and I don’t know why or what I did instead. I don’t remember spending a whole afternoon just reading until Saturday. Oh! I remember! Ali wanted to go for a walk! I knew I did something. So Ali and I went for a walk along the river. It was so pretty.






And we walked through that part of Oxford to a church – oh, everything was just lovely!









And back in time for Vespers and dinner, and then hanging out at Fellowship House, and Compline, and bed.

Friday is Ali’s day off, so we were to meet Jane at about two o’clock and spend some time with her. We wouldn’t have minded spending all day with her, but the combined forces of Jane needing to work on her thesis, and the lure of homemade macaroni and cheese on the menu for lunch at the convent, resulted in a later-planned meeting.

So I did my ballet practicing in the morning, and after lunch went right to St. Seraphim to gather what I wanted to bring. Then Ali and I walked to Summertown.



It is a fairly long walk. I needed to use the loo, and Ali wanted to stop at Oxfam to look for books, so when we came to a public toilet I stopped and she went on.

I wouldn’t mention the toilet, except that it had the coolest hand-washing machine ever. It’s like something out of a science fiction story.



The buttons say "soap", "water", "air", in case you can't see.

We didn’t get to Jane’s until about 2:30, but since she was working on her thesis she didn’t mind. We had tea, and we talked, and we watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which I’d heard about a million times but never seen before. It made me smile.

At about five-thirty, Ali and I left. Ali wanted to stop at a store to look for something, and then I got distracted by other things in the store and had to decide whether to buy them, so she went on to the other Oxfam that is close to Jane’s.

This was something that I decided not to buy, because it was very scuffed up, but I took a picture because it made me happy.


But when I finished and came (like fifteen minutes later…) it turned out Oxfam had closed at five-thirty before she got there and now she was cold and waiting and that was unfortunate.

The good thing was that it was still sunny out, and the walk back seemed shorter than the walk there to both of us.





We made ourselves a dinner of pasta, tomato soup, corn, and cheese. Ali had those things separately, and I had them all together. Delicious.

Then I skyped with Thad and my mom for an hour or so, and then went on back to my own house and went to bed. (There's no Compline in chapel on Friday nights.)

2 comments:

loisgroat said...

I wish I was a writer, so I could tell you how wonderful your blog is, and how much I enjoy it, but I am not, and I can't. (Especially with this everlasting migraine. But I do love it, every word, and every picture.)

PS: I love the purple door.

jane said...

we are SO hardcore. i'm glad you could come visit for a bit. :)