abound in

ch-year-old.

A bouquet of gestures:
memories of Le Barroux, 2004

Visiting a French Benedictine monastery, which remains faithful to the traditional Mass and monastic Rule, proved an extraordinarily moving experience for Stephen McInerney, who lectures in English Literature at Sydney’s Campion College.

On 13 May this year, Père Dom Gérard, the founder and first abbot of Le Barroux, celebrated his golden jubilee as a priest. Dom Gérard’s story is fascinating and well-known to many traditionalists. During the upheavals in the Church in the 1970s, Dom Gérard left his monastery (Notre Dame de Tournay) in order to remain faithful to tradition, the Mass of his ordination and the rule of St Benedict. Dom Gérard’s “experiment in tradition” brought him, inevitably, into the orbit of Archbishop Lefebvre, to whom he remained united until 1988. They are the bare facts of an extraordinary life devoted to God and in the service of the Church.

My own experience of Dom Gérard came while staying as a guest at Le Barroux in Lent 2004. By that time he had stepped down as abbot, succeeded by a younger man, Père Louis-Marie. On my first day I watched Dom Gérard in the refectory and choir. The way he carried himself, the discretion with which he carried out each task in the day’s ordering, made him seem very much like any other monk, albeit much older than his spiritual sons. But there he was, observing the rule just as he had done for over fifty years. A day earlier, or a day later, I would have seen the same simple observance, the same fidelity. On one occasion I saw him on his knees before the new abbot: humility personified.

I doubt he noticed me, and yet, upon reflection, I realise that his small acts of fidelity to Tradition, each day, having flowed into the lives of his monks, have touched me, too, in a number of indirect ways. Impressionistic fragments, inspired by entries I made in my diary at the time of my visit, can perhaps suggest some of these.

Transcending the centuries

I stand at a long wooden table where, at this hour, the sun strikes handmade cups, basins, and pitchers of water and wine. It could just as easily be Lent 1004; the same hot sun; the same green hills and orange soil dusted with lavender bushes. A moment ago, a young monk (the prior, officiating in the abbot’s absence) poured water over my hands while an even younger monk offered me a towel. “Je vous en prie”, he said, in response to my “merci”.

The prayer before meals is chanted and the monks, at the Gloria Patri, bend like stalks of wheat beneath a scythe. And now a hush settles over the refectory, the kind you experience after a fresh shower of rain, where you can almost feel soft grasses thicken and fruit swelling on a bough. The Word of God enters that silence and throws it into relief, as the lector reads from the Gospel. And now the silence, fructified by that Word, settles around us again, as a server sets before us trays of meat and vegetables.

I am reminded, as I participate in this ritual, of a scene in Book Four of the Odyssey, where Telemachus, in search of news of his long-lost father, is wined and dined by Menelaus and the penitent Helen (“whore that I was”), the King and Queen of Sparta. Telemachus and his friend Pisistratus have just arrived and, having bathed, are escorted to the dining hall.

“A maid brought water soon in a graceful golden pitcher

and over a silver basin tipped it out

so they might rinse their hands,

then pulled a gleaming table to their side.

A staid housekeeper brought on bread to serve them,

appertisers aplenty, lavish with their bounty.

As a carver lifted platters of meat toward them,

meat of every sort, and set before them golden cups,

the red-haired king Menelaus greeted both guests warmly ...”

(Homer, The Odyssey)

Those lines were written in the eighth century BC about a story set another four hundred years earlier. As before this meal, so before that meal, there had been a ritual sacrifice in which the victim was shared by the community. There had been prayer in thanksgiving for “the rich smoky savour”. How little has changed in all those years ... And yet how enormous is that shift from pagan antiquity to Christian Europe, how different the two victims of those sacrifices, how different those two kings.

“Generations of leaves”

My mood, only a few hours ago, had been melancholy – a mood all travellers experience at different times, except that mine had turned acute after passing through the neighbouring village of Carpentras, which has become, unthinkably, a Muslim stronghold. ... But now I am safe in this abbey, and the welcome of a young monk at once lightens and intensifies my mood. In “parlour” (a time and place when a guest can seek spiritual direction from a monk), I ask him questions and advice in my broken French. Another guest is here confronting a major crisis (whether or not to marry a girl who has fallen pregnant), and my own – what to do with my life – must seem vague and self-indulgent by comparison. Which indeed it is - especially when seen against the further background of all these hidden lives, and, more especially, against the background of eternity: “Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men”...

The monk’s smile and, in parting, his warm pax (where his ear meets mine like the gentlest rugby scrum), relieves me of my own sense of selfimportance and, paradoxically, also tells me how important I am – to him, since each guest represents Christ to the monks – and to God. And I am amazed to realise, now, how a single gesture of one of these monks – the nod of a head, the setting down of a plate, the pouring of water – made with an imperceptible lightness of touch, can yet carry the weight, and the fragility, of Western civilisation, such that each gesture at once conveys the sweetness and lightness of Christ’s yoke and burden, as well as the weight of the Cross. Minus the traditional Mass, that repository of our civilisation, here these various gestures find their most meaningful and fullest expression - and from where they flow out into the monk’s daily routine - this balance is disrupted. And to think: men of the Church wanted to destroy this dimension of the Benedictine tradition. Dom Gérard, encouraged and supported by Archbishop Lefebvre (and, eventually, by a few cardinals and bishops), ensured that they could not.

Tradition’s roots

These monks will, in all probability, never know how their presence has affected me, nor realise how those brief moments will stay with me, appearing before my mind during every subsequent hardship – the final year of my doctorate, the search for a vocation, broken friendships ... Yet what enormous preparation went into each such gesture. How many Masses? How many hours in choir? How many cold, dark mornings meditating on the word of God? What roots had been put down over generations, to produce the tree that branched out to me, that day, with those frail and delicate flowers?

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