Diary of a COVID-19 hermit #3
Blog by Claire Henderson Davis, MitE Chaplain
I would like to share with you some new developments in my exploration of the life of a hermit during this period of lockdown: I have been experimenting with letting go. Rather than clinging onto things, which give me comfort and security, I have been seeing whether I am able to surrender in trust, letting go of things I think I can’t do without.
This process began before the crisis when I decided to give up caffeine for Lent. I was addicted to coffee and definitely felt that I couldn’t function without it. The first week was hell but then my body adjusted and a new reality took over, so I was already primed for this letting go experiment. I next decided to give up watching TV (including Netflix or any other source). What I found is that I particularly missed it during mealtimes – there can be something quite lonely about eating alone, and watching TV during meals had somehow been giving me a sense of companionship. Nevertheless, I decided to make friends with my loneliness. What then occurred to me is that in monasteries, there is often someone reading to the monks at mealtimes. I wondered if I could find something read aloud on the internet that I could listen to during mealtimes, but that felt in keeping with my hermit’s life. I came across the actor David Suchet reading the whole Gospel of Mark in one go at St Paul’s Cathedral. I was riveted. It turned out that David Suchet has recorded the whole Bible and that it is available on YouTube for free. I had found my heart’s desire and a precious gift. By letting go of my fear of loneliness, I had opened up a space in myself which led me to this extraordinary find, giving me the opportunity to engage with the whole Bible in this new way.
I think the danger of giving things up is that one can become fanatical or rigid or self-righteous about it. This, it seems to me, is another form of self-protection – keeping at bay the longing for the thing removed by building impenetrable walls against it. One Sunday, I woke up feeling that I’d like to drink a cup of coffee and thought, ‘Why not? I had proved to myself that I am capable of living without it and this desire didn’t feel driven by addiction. I made myself a cup and enjoyed it. A friend told me about the three-part BBC series ‘Retreat: Meditations from a Monastery’, which offers the viewer a kind of vicarious retreat through its slow filming of life in three Benedictine monasteries in Britain. ‘I’d like to see that’, I thought. And again, I gave myself permission to break my own rule. ‘The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath’, said Jesus.
For me, there is something sad and wistful about watching the mainly older monks going about their business in huge buildings and estates built for much larger communities. Here is the remnant of a bygone age, I thought, of a tradition slowly dying.
At the same time, there is also something beautiful about the attention to the everyday expressed in the rhythm of their lives as portrayed in the documentary – baking bread, tending the bees, sewing a habit, painting an icon.