Lenten thoughts from Stanbrook Abbey

For the second year in a row, and more by accident than design, Lent began for us at Stanbrook Abbey in North Yorkshire. Celebrating Ash Wednesday and the first week of Lent at Stanbrook is quite different from the usual experience of starting Lent amidst the various competing and distracting demands of a typically busy work and family life.  I was struck this year by the sheer excitement, promise and joy of Lent that one catches from the community, and its celebration of the liturgy. Over the years I have got used to a more ascetic, sombre, and rather anxious prelude to this time in the Church’s year.   

Not that Lent at Stanbrook is all plain sailing– conversations with visitors, for example, are restricted as compared with ‘ordinary’ time.  But there is a tangible sense of everyone beginning a momentous and important journey.  Which contributes to a feeling that the sort of classic Lenten abstinence we might consider. And then immediately but feel overawed by, is in fact entirely feasible, even enticing.  Adventures undertaken with this sense of purpose and wonder, are more exciting and life-giving, than ones approached with fear and trembling.  Time will tell if they are also more enduring (so far I’m hopeful!). 

So what is going on at Stanbrook that makes such a difference to the visiting outsider?  For a start the experience of being physically and, you might say, emotionally close - even for a few days - to a Benedictine community of nuns whose lives are entirely dedicated to prayer, self-sacrifice and a daily commitment to the business of growing in the love of God and neighbour.  Experiencing a taste of that brings a special joy and sense of wonder.  It is such a privilege to be invited to join the community for daily Mass and the Office which is sung five times a day – at Mattins, Lauds, Midday, Vespers and Compline. 

Photo credit: Stanbrook Abbey

Typically we begin the day walking up the hill from the visitor chalets to join the community for Mass at 9am, and then again at 6pm for Vespers (sung in Latin, but with English translations available for ordinary mortals).  These twice daily visits to the Abbey church steep the day in a sense of transcendence, tranquillity, rootedness and gratitude, which is echoed in more earthy ways by the farmland, woodland, and valley walks all around the monastery. This year we were particularly lucky with lots of warm sunshine and mostly dry days.  Experienced alongside the wonder and simplicity of the Stanbrook liturgy Yorkshire’s version of the natural world works a special kind of healing at any time of the year.

More than this though is the reminder Stanbrook provides of what it means to put the search for God, alongside a deep concern for all of humanity and God’s creation, at the epicentre of our lives.  Although few of us are called to live the life of an enclosed monk or nun we areinvited to open ourselves to God’s grace and the wonders of creation in whatever ways, and with whatever rhythms, for example of prayer, work for us. In essence we live the same calling just in very different ways.  It’s the same journey for every Christian, albeit travelled along a myriad of different paths. 

And then there’s the nourishment of what come across as the particularly thoughtful and almost intimate (Benedictine to Benedictine) homilies given each day by monks from Ampleforth who say Mass for the community.  The two monasteries are only a ten-minute drive from each other.   

This year, like last, the focus of these Lenten homilies was the joy of being invited to go deeper into the mystery of God’s love for us: his compassion for our failings and suffering, and the promise of outstretched arms welcoming each of us home.  During Lent we are not just steeling ourselves for the pain and cruelty of Jesus’ Passion. We are preparing ourselves to experience the fulfilment of God’s eternal promise in the Resurrection, and for life everlasting. 

And lest we forget the underlying challenge in all of this, Fr Bede in his homily suggested that we might consider Lent as a time to set aside the ‘compliant solicitor’ (this relates to a story in his homily) in all of us, to truly embrace our deeper calling to be and become ‘adventurous disciples’.  Lent, and our Christian life more broadly, isn’t a question of knowing ‘the rules’ and keeping them. It’s about accepting the invitation to venture into deeper waters, into the unknown, where a loving God awaits us.

Tim Livesey