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  Robert de la Borde,

  Malgretoute,

  Les Deux Isles,

  West Indies.

  April 1988

  The Clothing

  Draw me in your footsteps, let us run.

  Song of Songs

  The Abbot sat on his throne with the prior and sub-prior, one on either side, one step down on the dais. In seniority, the other monks sat themselves around the chapter house. As the darkness of the early spring evening filled Ashton Park, those monks who sat facing the windows that overlooked the terrace could see the receding shadows of the day and the last smouldering light in the bare wood banked high above the fields.

  They all waited in silence.

  After the coughing had subsided and the arranging of the voluminous black cowls with their sleeves like the wings of archangels or enormous bats, depending on how you looked at them, had settled, the community waited, hooded, with heads bowed. The silence and then the swish of a cowl in the corridor outside still filled the older monks with anticipation. The soft, rapid footsteps which stopped at the door of the chapterhouse brought back longing to the older monks, and recent memories to the young professed monks and for the novices newly clothed who were sitting erect on the edge of their front benches. There was a firm knock on the chapter-house door.

  ‘Enter,’ the Abbot said, breaking the silence.

  After another moment of anticipatory silence, Father Justin, the novice master, entered. He walked to the centre of the chapter house, lowered his hood and bowed to the Abbot. He spoke, facing the Abbot on his throne with his monks around him. ‘Reverend Father, there is a young man at the door of the monastery who seeks admittance as a novice into our community.’

  ‘Let him enter,’ the Abbot answered solemnly.

  ‘Amen,’ the community recited in unison.

  Father Justin bowed and left the chapter house.

  The community waited. The early spring evening closed in. The shadows of the evergreens folded along the gravel path. Still, one last wood pigeon in the copse the other side of the park called to its mate.

  Then Father Justin went to the front parlour of the monastery, where Brother Jean Marc de la Borde was waiting.

  The young brother too heard the last wood pigeon of the declining evening: dou-dou, dou-dou, it sounded like to him. That a bird here should speak to him as he had been spoken to as a child moved him. Again, one last time, the wood pigeon sounded. It had flown to the apple orchard, to a branch sticky with new buds.

  The young postulant was dressed in the brown suit, white cotton shirt and brown tie that he had worn the day he had entered the monastery three months before in that winter of winters in 1963. They had been kept in the mending room, where the old habits were repaired and the new cassocks, cowls and scapulars were cut and sewn by Brother Malachi.

  His home clothes had been kept for this occasion. If he had decided not to ask for admittance to the monastery as a novice, but rather to abandon his vocation, he would have the clothes he came in to return home. Or it might have been still worse, if, as sometimes did happen, a novice had been asked to leave. Then he would have had his clothes to re-enter the world and the Abbot would return to him the money he had come with, so that he could get a train to Bristol or London, or wherever. What then?

  And some, would run off suddenly into the night.

  Dou-dou, dou-dou. A voice had come to live in the coo of a bird.

  Brother Jean Marc de la Borde sat on the green leather upholstered chair in the small parlour. Leaded windows with yellow and red glass depicting scenes from the lives of monastic saints caught the last light. He did not recognise these saints, English saints. The furniture smelt of new polish. He sat and stared at his black boots which had been his friend’s, Ted’s, as if he had just this day come to St Aelred of Ashton Park from Les Deux Isles asking for admittance. He stared at Ted’s black boots. But he did not think of him; no, not now, not at this moment.

  He remembered the stories he had read when he was a schoolboy and first thought that he had a vocation. He remembered the stories of the young boys Maurus and Placid who had come to Subiaco to join the first monastery of St Benedict. He wanted to be like them, young boys giving up all for this ideal.

  Then he thought of the story of the young Aelred of Rievaulx that Dom Placid had told him. And then, then he thought of Ted.

  He had made a general confession of his life’s sins in preparation for his clothing. He had confessed all again. He prayed for Ted. He was doing this for Ted. It seemed that way now.

  This afternoon, after working on the farm, helping Brother Stephen milk the cows, he had stood at the sink in the dairy and let the hot water scorch his hands and arms, washing off the sweet sticky smell of the fresh milk. ‘You’d better go off now,’ Brother Stephen said. ‘It’s your night.’

  He walked slowly up to the abbey from the farm. Spring was in the air. Bulbs which had come before Easter in Lent crowded the grassy ground between the pollarded lime trees. How quickly time had gone since then. Lent with pussy willows for palms on Palm Sunday; then early Easter, with all the new flowers he had to learn. He pulled at the rosemary bush, rolled the leaves in his palms, lifted the crushed leaves and inhaled deeply a new smell, the smell of Ashton Park.

  He entered the basement where the work boots were kept, wiping his hands on his denim blue smock. He washed again with soap, a rough detergent soap, yellow in the scoop of the old basin. The dimly lit place smelt of socks and leather boots, mud and silage. It smelt of the musty scent of sweat. He took off his Wellingtons, peeling off his work stockings, sweaty like in the boarding-school changing-rooms after games.

  They stood around him, the boys of then, the others. Even now he had to chase them from his mind.

  He fetched down off the shoe rack Ted’s black boots. He found his clean white stockings curled inside. No one in the community knew that these had been Ted’s boots. The soles were thick and new, new leather. His mother had had them resoled before he left home.

  In the mending room, he hung up for the last time the black serge cassock that he had been wearing as a postulant, and took down his brown suit, white cotton shirt and brown tie, which had been labelled and hung in the wardrobe marked ‘Postulants’; postulare, to ask for, to ask for entry. He had been doing that for three months. He was now asking formally for that from the community. He was seeking God.

  His brown suit and white cotton shirt and tie still smelt of his home far away. They smelt of his mother and father, his brother and sisters, whom he had left. They smelt of his country. They smelt of heat and sunshine and haze rising up to a blue sky above green cane fields and the shade of the cocoa hills. They smelt of wood smoke in the board-house villages of the poor rising from the dusty backyards and barrack rooms from where Toinette came. ‘Morning, morning, Dou-dou.’

  Toinette came to cook and clean, to wash and iron. Toinette came to mind children. He could still smell on his cotton shirt the suds of soap on whites in sunshine bleaching, the steam from the hot flat iron.

  He heard Toinette. ‘You get a lot of loving, oui.’

  What was he doing here? A moment of doubt.

  He smelt that smell of travelling in aeroplanes on the sleeve of his jacket. There was a musty smell of Ashton Park, then of his home Malgretoute: in spite of everything.

  He put his hands into the pockets of his brown pants. He half expected to find something there. Something. He remembered a letter pressed in there for a week before he could give it. Another, received, which burnt his leg.

  Brother Jean Marc de la Borde heard the swish of Father Justin’s cowl in the corridor outside the parlour. He saw his hooded form through the glass door. His heart was beating fast.

  Father Justin smiled as he entered the parlour. ‘They’re ready for you.’

  Brother de la Borde smiled nervously and pushed back the heavy dark brown hair from his brow and drew back the loose strands of hair behind his ears with his fingers. He had wet his
long hair in the washroom upstairs in the novitiate to keep it tidy. He followed Father Justin to the chapter house. He pressed his hair down again.

  Ted’s boots echoed through the cloister.

  ‘It will be fine,’ Father Justin smiled.

  As they entered the chapter house, Brother de la Borde noticed his guardian angel, Dom Benedict, smile. Yes, his eyes had gone straight to where he knew Benedict would be sitting. Ever so quickly, a stolen glimpse, and then his eyes were lowered. He had learnt the rule of St Benedict, passed his test at the Abbot’s Council, the Twelfth Degree of Humility: ‘whether he is in the oratory, in the garden, on the road, in the fields, or anywhere else and whether sitting, walking, or standing’, a monk ‘should always have his head bowed and his eyes downcast, pondering always the guilt of his sins.’

  Dom Benedict was a little amused at seeing his protégé dressed as he had been that first winter afternoon when he had arrived brown and bonny from a country far away. He was relieved that he had got through that terrible winter, that he had succeeded through his postulancy. His smile was one of encouragement, of congratulation, of admiration, and Brother de la Borde felt it.

  Now he knelt in the centre of the chapter house with folded arms and lowered his eyes to the floor in front of him until the Abbot addressed him, asking him, ‘What do you seek?’

  Brother de la Borde raised his lowered eyes and gave the formal response to the Abbot, the representative of Christ on earth. ‘I seek to serve God with Charity in this community.’

  ‘Come forward,’ the Abbot announced.

  Father Justin led Brother de la Borde up to the Abbot’s throne, where he knelt on the top step of the dais in front of the Abbot.

  Then the ceremony of the clothing of a novice began.

  The Abbot, assisted by Father Justin, took off the brown jacket. ‘You must take off the old man.’

  The community responded, ‘Amen.’

  The rubrics according to the ancient traditions of monasticism were once again followed. The brown jacket was folded and given to the acolyte of the clothing to be returned to the mending room. The Abbot unbuttoned his shirt at the top and removed his tie, reiterating, ‘You shall take off the old man and put on the new,’ this time intoning the exhortation.

  Again, the community responded, ‘Amen.’

  The tie was folded and also given to Father Justin, who folded it once more and hung it neatly over his arm, from where the acolyte took it and laid it to rest with the brown jacket.

  The young brother would not be stripped naked here. Later, he would remove his trousers and shirt when he returned to his cell.

  The Abbot then proceeded to clothe Brother de la Borde with the new man in the habit of a Benedictine novice. First the cassock: ‘I clothe you with the new man who is Christ.’ Then he unrolled the leather girdle: ‘I gird you with the girdle of chastity.’ He buckled it tightly around his waist. The scapular with the hood was placed over his head: ‘With the scapular of peace.’ Last of all, he shook out the cloak of the novice: ‘And the cloak of our brotherhood.’ After each instruction and gesture, the community responded with the response, ‘Amen.’

  Fully clothed in the ancient habit of the Benedictine novice, his novice’s scapular reaching only to his knees and not full length to the floor, Brother de la Borde was marked out as a neophyte in this community of celibate men.

  He was here to seek God according to the rule of the Holy Father St Benedict, who first wrote his Rule for Monks in the cave at Subiaco in the Italian hills near Rome in the fifth century: a young man, escaping the materialism of Roman society, his young passion tempted by the devil in the shape of a beautiful woman, so that he had to throw himself into a patch of brambles to stem that passion before moving to his monastery at Monte Casino. Brother de la Borde remembered his Lives of the Saints. They had been his fairy tales. His adventure stories had been the lives of the martyrs.

  Jean Marc de la Borde forged this ideal out of what he saw when he was small: his parish priest, Father Maurus, with veins the blue of the blue in marble, blood like Quink ink, resplendently white like an angel in the white habit of monks on the missions because of the scorching heat, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, performing the liturgy of the Mass, intoning the Gregorian chant whose inflections moved him with their antiphonal intervals. He knelt in the shadow and light of these memories.

  Later, when he went to his school, which was run by Benedictine monks, he came to love the measured order of their day, which he could observe closely, controlled by the tolling of bells: the angelus in the morning, at noon, at six o’clock in the evening and at sunset. He followed their call to the seven hours of the Divine Office: Matins and Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and finally Compline, chanted in the darkness of the choir.

  These monks, who seemed to float a few feet above the ground as if in permanent levitation, whose liturgy broke upon Jean Marc like the waves that broke upon the beach at Sans Souci on Les Deux Isles with the rhythm of the tides, became the heroes of his adolescence.

  The ideal formed to enter their choir, clothed in their habit, reclining on the misericord, offering back to his brothers antiphonally the inspired chant of Saint Gregory: ‘Dixit Dominus domino meo, sede a dexteris meus Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto… Secut erat in principio et nunc et semper, et in secula seculorum, Amen…’

  He convinced himself of all this. He saw Ted’s face and renewed his commitment.

  The moment of the naming arrived. ‘Brother de la Borde, henceforth you shall be known among us as…’ The Abbot paused for effect. The young novice held his breath. He could feel the community around him hold their breaths before the Abbot’s secret was revealed: his name, his monastic name, always a point of excitement for the old monks, who had known many clothings, and for the younger monks, for whom it was relatively new, reminding them of their own clothing ceremony. The Abbot continued, ‘Brother Aelred.’

  Everyone sighed, smiling with approval, and the Abbot looked around with almost a smirk of self-satisfaction that he had kept them all guessing. Would it be Chrysostom, who had just died? They didn’t have a Leo. Everyone had had their own theory on the naming in the preceding weeks.

  The new novice had an enviable name: the name of their monastery, St Aelred’s of Ashton Park; the name of the great English Cistercian of the twelfth century, Aelred of Rievaulx.

  The new Aelred remembered the story he had been told as a boy. He remembered his question then. Is love painful? He saw Dom Placid’s answer in the nod of his head.

  The Abbot drew him towards his embrace and gave him the kiss of peace on both cheeks.

  Then the acolyte of the clothing came forward with a pair of scissors on a silver salver and offered it to the Abbot, who took the scissors and symbolically cut off a lock of the new Brother Aelred’s hair.

  Fully clothed and named, baptised anew, the old man stripped off and the new man put on, Brother Aelred was led by Father Justin to the opposite end of the chapter house, where he sat on a stool especially placed for him.

  The chief cantor intoned the clothing sequence, ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est’: ‘Where there is love and charity, there is God.’

  As each verse was in turn picked up by the choir of monks, antiphonally, the entire community, led by the Abbot, came to Brother Aelred where he sat on his stool clothed in the black habit of a young Benedictine novice. Beginning with the Abbot and followed by the prior and even the old men of the community, they knelt, each one, and, using the silver jug and basin offered by the acolyte of the clothing, they poured water over the naked feet of Brother Aelred, who had, immediately on sitting down, taken off his shoes and socks, his friend Ted’s boots.

  They washed his feet and dried them with the linen towel handed by the other acolyte of the clothing and then kissed his feet. All the while, the choir chanted the clothing sequence: ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.’ Each member of the community performed this act, as Christ h
ad done to his disciples the night before he was betrayed and had said to them, ‘Do unto each other as I have done to you.’ It was on that night that the beloved John, he whom Jesus loved, had lain his head upon his chest.

  Then it was the turn of the simple-professed monks, led by Dom Benedict. Brother Aelred kept his eyes lowered, but he noticed, in the solemnity, the encouraging smile of Benedict, as he liked to call him when he thought of him, remembering how kind he had been over the last three months helping him to settle in; Benedict, his guardian angel.

  Aelred returned the smile of encouragement, lifted up by this wonderful expression of love and initiation into the community. His smile flickered over his lips as Benedict knelt in front of him and washed and dried his feet and then bent to kiss them. His lips on his bare foot. After kissing his feet he looked up and smiled again.

  ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.’

  Brother Aelred was so overcome by these acts, and by the chant of love and charity, that he was thankful for Brother Stephen tickling his feet in jest, bringing a small irreverence to bear upon the solemnity of the moment. Brother Stephen had whispered earlier in the day while they were working on the farm, ‘Make sure you wash your feet well before tonight.’ Brother Stephen was well known for these little pranks and Brother Aelred already hoped he would get to work on the farm again with the old brother whose way with the animals was almost as inspired as St Francis of Assisi’s.

  As the community filed out of the chapter house to process along the cloister to the church for Compline, the last office of the day, they each, starting with Father Abbot, stopped to give the new Brother Aelred the kiss of peace, the monastic kiss offered on each cheek with their hands firmly placed on his shoulders. By now he was again properly shod in his friend Ted’s black boots. The young monk, thus embraced, felt at one with his brothers.

  Then it was Benedict’s turn, and, quite spontaneously, they broke the formal embrace and hugged each other. Aelred’s heart grew as big as his chest. They held on to each other and their cheeks brushed against each other, first the right and then the left. Benedict squeezed his hand and filed by as he made way for the next brother. The monks coming after smiled, knowing that Benedict was Aelred’s guardian angel.