Seventy-Five Years of Vox Benedictina
By Elspeth Durie
Varenna, Italy
There is a condition, or a gift, called synaesthesia which
is defined by the Oxford Companion to the Mind as “confusion between the senses
[as when] some musicians experience colours for particular notes.” There are
people who involuntarily taste shape, hear colour, see sound, and neurologists
who believe that the extraordinary immediacy and indivisibility of their
sensations is the surfacing in a few of a normally inaccessible limbic process
common to all.
[i]
There is a synaesthetic aura around Vox Benedictina where this kind of son et lumière is far from rare.
Music is visible to, one among many, Gherardesca of Pisa, who during Matins has
a vision of “the heaven of angels … And stars appeared which emitted a
marvellous brilliance and above the head of the abbot and two others there came
a sphere, like the sphere of the sun, and stars. The brilliance of all remained
constant … So it befell that when the first Nocturn was finished, her soul was
carried to heaven and was there with the Lord.” And her visions are scented:
“taking the infant Christ again, I sensed such a remarkable fragrance of scent
that immediately I desired to treasure it in the secret chamber of my heart.”
[ii]
In thinking of synaesthetes, human or in the shape of a
personified journal (try referring to VB as “it”), one should
focus on a variety of cross-modal associations, have a go at tracking the
crossed wires and short circuits of the limbic, emotional, charge at the roots of
creativity, intellectual energy and spiritual insight. It is probably necessary
to move tentatively, crabwise, touching lightly on this aspect or that, on this
person or that – Augustine, a saint in Hippo, say, or Margot Hoeschen Bujila
King, an editor in Toronto, or, as she would anthropomorphically put it, the
mother of VB.
All of us in that scattered community who set aside
everything else when VB turns up on the doorstep
resemble the saints and scholars she brings with her in at least one respect: we
are, like Augustine, looking for what we remember we forget.
[iii]
As we grasp her Ariadne thread and plunge in to her amaze, we may find
ourselves roaming from the long corridors and austere grey cells of the
far-out, wide-ranging mind of a twentieth-century recluse and theologian like
Maggie Ross (“Our most profound commonality with our selves, with each other,
with the creation, is not affected by what we can know, but by what we can’t,
the communing engagement with Otherness, ours, another’s, the creation’s,
God’s”)
[iv]
to the thirteenth-century honeycomb of the monastery at Helfta, where “the
audible, tactile, fragrant troubadour-Christ … sings and plays his harp for [Mechthild]”
[v]
to
the radical self-honesty of fifth-century desert cells (“Abba Poemen said: ‘Teach
your mouth to say that which you have in your heart.’ And they knew that this
is the hardest thing anyone can ever do”)
[vi]
to the secret magic of a twentieth-century child’s world in a circle of
lamplight in Moscow during the “thaw” (“What was it then that we were learning
on those quiet evenings?”)
[vii]
to an Annunciation on the eve of the twenty-first century, a Rapnificat, “Hey
Mary, good news …”
[viii]
VB’s
silver thread binds and links cells and centuries, opens them to one another,
leads us in and through and guides us out. Her cord reflects, refracts and
confers gleams of a common luminosity, an unmistakable and characteristic
shafy¯uta, to use the wonderful Syriac word translated by Sebastian Brock as
“limpidity, lucidity, luminosity, clarity, purity, transparency, sincerity, or
sincerity of heart.”
[ix]
Emerging into Now, memory on the tip of the tongue, we are once again at one
with Augustine: “It might be correct to say that there are three times, a
present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future
things.”
[x]
Elena Glazov Corrigan, crystalline memories of Moscow in
mind, slips sideways in space to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, the present of her
present things. If she walks down a certain street by the river on this summer
day as I write in Italy, she might feel a slight breeze in her hair, catch a
whiff of winter, as she passes through a corner, a comma, a pleat in a present
past.
A gentleman in a deep pile overcoat removes his hat at the
approach of a tall woman, the shoulders of her dark coat mantled in white. She
gives him her hand. They chat earnestly before she proceeds on her way and he
resumes stamping his feet against the cold. He must be at the corner of Lorne
Avenue – or is it Cherry Street? – and
Saskatchewan Crescent. He must be waiting for a bus. The snow is feathery and
falling fast. The sky is a pale luminous grey. There is no one else in sight.
It is 1919.
The lady is Margot’s Minnesota German grandmother, Margaret
Kalkman Hoeschen, thirty-six that year. The gentleman is Corbet Durie, my
father, forty-two, a Scotch Canadian Presbyterian barrister in desperate
mourning for his twenty-four-year-old German Roman Catholic bride, a victim of
the awful influenza epidemic. No one knows better than Margaret Hoeschen about
the kinds of intolerance and pressure generated by World War I
[xi]
which might have set a beautiful young woman to martyr herself nursing the
sick.
A current of comfort passes between them in the cold
afternoon and my friendship with Margot begins, although a present future for
either of us must at that moment be rated very low on any conceivable scale of
probabilities.
I offer this time slippage across our personal
pre-beginnings to long before we were born in the ‘30s simultaneously to
qualify myself as a Margotist among mediaevalists and to illustrate the
evanescence, fragility and mystery of beginnings, middles and ends – of people,
and of journals. Like all of you, I will miss the unique surprise of each issue
of Vox
Benedictina: the surprise of her contents, the surprise of her
arrival – early or late or even, most surprising of all, on time, whatever that
is. We will miss the voice of the editorial, the very speaking voice of the
editor, now Mary, now Martha, now exalted, now weary, but always Margot, always
herself, and always, herself, surprised.
I have read ten volumes of VB, cover to cover, and
perused decades of the page-turning saga of Margot King. There are times when
the two are inextricably tangled in my mind, which seems a natural and
desirable state of affairs: the life of an editor as the river on which the ark
of her work is floated. Margot, however, has come to feel this equation of one
with the other – MK=VB – as downright alarming.
A recent reconnaissance found her tossed up high and dry on a sort of personal
Mount Ararat, tucked tidily into the VB ark while the buoyant
floodwaters of her past, her psyche, her self, her soul, receded away across
the drying plain. In radical obedience to an inner command, she jumped ship and
set off in pursuit of the waves, a Noah inconveniently nostalgic for water.
Post facto, she was heard to rationalise in an uncharacteristic descent into
psycho-babble that she had “no identity” apart from VB-Peregrina.
No identity, that is, beyond a ten-year felt experience so
intense that it fairly lifts off the pages, an ongoing individuation sprawled
on to paper with reckless vulnerability encompassing all and everything in a
synaesthetic, indivisible whole: her favourite holy fool perched in her holy
foolishness in treetops, Christina of Saint-Trond; the desert mothers of Liège;
the Greek Orthodox mothers of Buckinghamshire and Yorkshire; the pilgrimage of
Holy Wisdom; the calvary of Bernadine, “the spiritual grandmother of VB,”
and name after name rescued, brought alive by the dedicated scholars she seeks
wherever she goes, through the transparent, self-abnegating discipline of
translation.
On January 29th, 1969, the day after Margot’s thirty-fifth
birthday, an Orthodox nun, in her desert monastery of the Assumption, her skete
in Buckinghamshire, wrote “I wonder whether just one tiny bit the wind might
change when the book is out. Now, my life and I are always considered apart
from my life’s work, as if writing were a child’s play, a luxury … But when
‘the peace of the end’ came into sight for a moment then I knew again that in
the end it will count . . . and will not be passed over so lightly. My whole
life I have again and again poured into my writings, to give the very best I
was, and all, all I had.”
[xii]
An anguished voice leading a centuries-long procession of “silent” foremothers
whose all, all is not destined to be lost.
[xiii]
Into the mix swirl dogs, children, cats, friends, colleagues, mentors, aunts,
so that Benedict and Bede, Hippolyte Delehaye and Caryll Houselander, Bernard,
Christina, Jocelyn, Syncletica, Perpetua, Fletcher, Margaret Hoeschen, Mother
Thekla, Auntie Mung, Thomas de Cantimpré, Hildegard of Bingen and more and more
now connect and flash in many more minds than Margot’s, a spreading and
sharing, a generous cross-modal carnival, a meeting of minds.
All of which can be a problem to someone whose throwaway
sampler line, “Holy simplicity has ever been my goal”
[xiv]
is paradoxically true, in the way that houses packed to the rafters with the
accumulated possessions of four generations of Hoeschens, Bujilas and Kings are
truly, if wistfully, called Gyrovague.
Vox Benedictina has not
ceased to surprise us, but she has, I surmise, for the present present, ceased
to surprise her editor. And that must be the root reason, insofar as a “reason”
can be pinpointed, why we will be deprived of our periodic fix of spiritual and
intellectual excitement, of the discoveries, and of the fun. Meanwhile, we have
this volume to remind us of, and send us back to, the fruits of the past ten
years of what a typically funny and felicitous VB typo once called
“spiritual growning,” a growning encapsuled in careful calibrations of subtitle
from “A Journal of Translations from Monastic Sources” through “Women and
Monastic Spirituality” to “A Journal of Feminine and Monastic Spirituality.”
We left Margot, you will remember, chasing the receding
waves: she has caught up, I think, and on a newly delineated shore is already
labouring out of, in Mother Maria’s phrase, “active humility”
[xv]
at the construction of a new ark. Her last was as capacious as Noah’s – whose
gopher wood vessel was 450 feet long, 75 feet broad, 45 feet high, with a
displacement of 20,000 tons c. and capable of holding 45,000 sheep-sized
animals plus the Noah family and several boxcars of food
[xvi]
to hold us all. Her model now, perhaps, is a little bookcase depicted in a
fifth-century mosaic of exquisite beauty in the mausoleum of the Empress Galla
Placidia (388-450) in Ravenna, which holds four books, marcus, lucas, mattias,
johannes: an ark of a new covenant, or testimony.
In September, 1991, Margot and I stand in what seems to be
the heart of a sapphire. Above us the gold cross anchors whirling concentric
circles of stars to the dome of heaven, harts drink from still waters, an imperial
Good Shepherd caresses an adoring lamb and we face the book case ark of the new
covenant, a flaming altar and a dancing Jesus carrying his cross and the open
book of the seven seals.
[xvii]
We know that Dante stood here, Paradiso in his heart and all
around him as he whirled from the altar to see “ … ‘Da quel punto/ Dipende il
cielo e tutta la natura.”‘
[xviii]
We know that the father of synchronicity, C.G. Jung, stood here and projected
his anima on to Galla Placidia
[xix]
before he strolled over to the Orthodox Baptistery and had a vision of Peter
walking on the water. And then we don’t “know” anything, because we are not
outside but inside this Byzantine vision, literally carved in light, which
wraps one around like a cloak.
Galla Placidia Augusta has some claims to holiness, not
least this vision, shining with ineffable joy, pristine, miraculously preserved
inside its crust of red Roman brick for fifteen and a half centuries.
[xx]
She
died in 450, at Rome, on November 27, a birthday in heaven she shares with – as
the Peregrina Calendar of Holy Women tells us – another lady with an inspiring
legacy: “November 27: Margaret Hoeschen, 1883-1979: beloved mother, grandmother
and friend, at Saskatoon.”
---
[i]
For a thorough and fascinating discussion of synaesthesia, including its possible
connections to mysticism, see Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 1993;
London: Abacus, 1994).
[ii]
“The Life of the Blessed Gherardesca of Pisa,” trans. Elizabeth Petroff, Vox Benedictina 9/2 (1992): 278–279.
[iii]
Augustine, Confessions 10:19: “For we
do not entirely forget what we remember that we have forgotten. If we had
completely forgotten it, we should not even be able to look for what was lost”
(Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin
[Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961], p. 225).
[iv]
Maggie Ross, “Sexuality, Otherness and the Truth of Self” Vox
Benedictina 10/2 (1993): 354.
[v]
Therese Schroeder-Sheker, “The Alchemical Harp of Mechthild of Hackeborn” Vox Benedictina 6/l (1989): 49.
[vi]
Columba Stewart, “The Desert Fathers on Radical Self-Honesty” Vox Benedictina 8/l (1991): 15.
[vii]
Elena Corrigan Glazov, “Moscow Childhood: The Make-Up of a Generation” Vox Benedictina 8/2 (1991): 377.
[viii]
Susan Whelehan, “Rapnificat” Vox Benedictina 8/l (1991): 177.
[ix]
Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on
Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987),
p. xxviii. Reviewed in Vox Benedictina 8/1 (1991): 184–186.
[x]
Augustine, Confessions 11:20; trans.
p. 269.
[xi]
“In the days that followed the sinking of the
Lusitania, there was even a possibility that the war against the Germans would
be waged on the home front and the threat of retaliation against local German
or Austrian people was apparently strong. A rumour was spread that alien
workers at the Hoeschen-Wentzler brewery had held a supper in celebration of
the sinking of the Lusitania. The story swept around the city like wildfire,
gaining in size and anger at every telling … Saskatoon’s mayor … said all Germans and Austrians ought to be interned and put to work on the
land under guard” (Don Kerr and Stan Hanson, Saskatoon: The First Half Century [Edmonton: NewWest Press, 1982), p. 155.
[xii]
Mother Maria, Her Life in Letters, ed. Sister Thekla (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1979), pp. 134–135.
[xiii]
Vox Benedictina 2/2 (1985): 82: “It’s an odd
sensation writing my editorial in a hotel room in Louvain … I’ve
located about sixty manuscripts which contain the lives of Christina, Marie,
Alice and the three Idas and I know there are many more. It’s just a question
of locating them. There are twenty-nine for Marie alone! … [D]espite the oblivion into which they fell for a few centuries, they
spoke as directly to people of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries as they do to us.”
[xiv]
Ibid., 10/2 (1993): 195.
[xv]
“When love leads to destruction it can only be strong in active humility”:
Mother Maria, Can Wisdom Be Taught? The Library of Orthodox Thinking (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Co., 1992),
p.15.
[xvi]
Gn 6:14–15: “Make for yourself an ark of gopher wood; you shall make the ark
with rooms and shall cover it inside and out with pitch. And this is how you
shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty
cubits and its height thirty cubits.” The conversions into feet, capacity,
tonnage and hypothetical cargo are footnoted in the Ryrie Study Bible (Chicago: Moody Press).
[xvii]
The Christ figure is usually identified as St. Laurence rushing eagerly towards
his martyrdom on a flaming grill. For the more convincing hypothesis of a Last
Judgement, see W. Seston, “Le jugement dernier du Mausolée de Galla Placidia à
Ravenne” Cahiers archéologiques 1
(1945): 37–50.
[xviii]
Paradiso, 28, 11. 41–42.
[xix]
Galla Placidia, youngest child of Theodosius the Great, is more often
remembered for her youthful adventures (carried off by Alaric as booty from the
410 sack of Rome and subsequent marriage to Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, with
whom she reigned in Spain as Queen of the Goths) than as Empress of the Western
Roman Empire, ruling in Ravenna from 424 for thirteen years as regent for her
son, Valentinian III, followed by twelve until her death as power behind the
throne. Her reputation for holiness began when she implored the intercession of
St. John the Evangelist to rescue her and her children from their foundering
ship off Ephesus. The storm subsided and Placidia’s ex voto, the Church of St.
John the Evangelist, still stands in Ravenna, in spite of taking a World War II
bomb meant for the nearby railway station.
[xx]
“I retained the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to
this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the sea, individual
chips of the mosaic … When I was back
home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to obtain the pictures … He discovered that the mosaics I had described
did not exist. Meanwhile, I had already spoken at a seminar about the original
conception of baptism, and had mentioned the mosaics that I had seen in the
Baptistery of the Orthodox … This
experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events in my life” (C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections [London:
Fontana, 1983], pp. 314-316).
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