The Interior Silence by Sarah Sands

Author:Sarah Sands
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2021-08-12T05:33:00+00:00

Chapter 6

simplicity and the inner silence

marham abbey, norfolk

The order of these chapters has changed from my original plan. Easter week was meant to have been spent in Salzburg, at the Nonnberg Abbey—otherwise known as the setting for The Sound of Music.

But then, in March 2020, the country went into lockdown, along with much of the rest of the world. Flights were halted, hotels closed. Monasteries continued in their customary state of self-isolation, and I was unable to reach them. Newspapers carried photographs of vats of beer and wine being emptied away. This was the London economy—bars and coffee shops. Farewell to my working life.

The existence that I was trying to escape in this book suddenly seemed unbearably delightful. I watched television scenes of dinner parties or concerts as if through a looking glass. My bank statements read like an historical archive. Soho House, Joe the Juice, Caffè Nero, Daniel Galvin, and, in the final days, Wigmore Street Pharmacy, Boots, Boots, Boots.

Like everyone else, I was separated from what and whom I knew and loved. Zoom entered the popular vocabulary. My younger son FaceTimed me from Hong Kong. He told me that he would not be coming home for his summer break because of the strict rule of quarantine.

My elder son sent me a photograph of my grandson, only twenty miles away, but beyond reach now. My daughter went into lockdown in London, the epicenter of the virus. Every family had a story to tell of separation.

Monasticism teaches that you can love and participate, while being absent. This was what I had to learn: to appreciate relationships in the abstract. To delight in the existence of others without physical engagement in their lives.

The government demanded that the population return to their homes: Mine was in Norfolk, in the remains of Marham Abbey. A monument to mortality and the futility of secular ambition. Henry VIII destroyed this monastery but could not destroy its meaning; perhaps because its endurance was based on acceptance of powerlessness.

The mood of the country was suddenly very Dark Ages. An intensive-care doctor on the radio described the strange, sticky properties of the virus. “I have not seen anything like this before—it is medieval.”

I read an account of the impact of the Black Death by Henry Knighton, in 1348.

In this year and in the following one there was a general mortality of men throughout the whole world. It first began in India, then in Tharsis, it came to the Saracens and finally to the Christians and the Jews. The King of Tharsis, seeing such a sudden and unheard of slaughter of his people began a journey to Avignon to propose to the pope that he would become a Christian, thinking that he might mitigate the vengeance of God upon his people. Then, when he had journeyed for twenty days he heard that the pestilence had struck among the Christians.

The Black Death raced through the monasteries: “There was not one of the English hermits left in Avignon.”

As hospitals were filled

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