On this Sunday’s Lyric Feature on RTÉ lyric fm, listeners were invited to step inside artist and writer Sara Baume’s quest at St Mary’s Abbey, Glencairn in Out of the Marvellous.
For us, however, the marvellous is not a theme or a title. It is the place where we live—and it is Christ, He to whom we have vowed our lives.
Our life is hidden, simple, repetitive. We rise in the dark. We gather in choir. We chant the Psalms. We work with our hands. We walk the same paths through the garden and the woods. To an outside eye, it can seem small, contained, even uneventful.
And yet, we would say: this is where the marvellous is.
This can be difficult for people to grasp. How can this be enough? Is prayer efficacious? Does it matter?
In the Lyric Feature, produced by Regan Hutchins, it is clear that there are no easy or obvious answers for those who are not called to this life. And yet, for us, it is the “one thing necessary.”
The word marvellous suggests something extraordinary, dazzling or beyond the ordinary run of things. But in the monastic life, the marvellous is discovered precisely within the ordinary: in the encounter with God in each moment of the day, in fidelity to the bell, in perseverance in community, in returning again and again to silence.
The programme gently explores how art can be informed by prayer, and how a life of prayer, hidden though it may be, can quietly influence those who cross its threshold. Yet, there’s something about the essence of what it means to live here that’s different for us who are not guests: not just a life of prayer in the efficacious sense, or its ‘power’, or that it changes things (which is covered in the programme) but what it means to be united to Christ, to have a vocation, to have submitted oneself to God. That is really the purpose of life here, the immeasurable end and the dynamic of self-gift and holocaust and sacrifice.
Our vocation is not to produce something measurable. It is to be: to stand before God, to be an opening in the world for God, to be a witness to God. Whether or not the fruits are visible is not ours to determine.
To enter into the marvellous is not to escape reality, but to step more deeply into it.
