Remembrance as the enemy of loneliness
Julia Namier, before marrying the British historian, was caught up in Stalinist repression in Russia. As Iulia de Beausobre she was sent in 1933 to a labour camp, where she nursed the sick.
She and a sick woman she was accompanying across the snow suddenly saw a fir tree lit up in relief, its pitch black trunk dark against shafts of light. It could not have been the sun (blocked by the thick forest). The woman exclaimed: “Father Seraphim!” What could she have meant?
It turned out that they were near the Sarov region where St Seraphim had lived (1754-1833). The relevance of the bright light came from a personal revelation recorded by Nikolai Motovilov (1809-79), whose account of Fr Seraphim was published posthumously in the year of the monk’s canonisation, 1903.
Fr Seraphim had explained that good works, penance, fasting and prayer were but means to an end, which was the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. Only a good deed performed in the name of Christ brings the fruits of the Holy Spirit, Seraphim told Motovilov.
But how, Motovilov asked, could we tell if we were in the grace of the Holy Spirit? It was then that Seraphim, who had placed his hands on his friend’s shoulders, was transformed. “Imagine the face of a man talking to you from within the centre of the sun,” Motovilov wrote. “You see neither his hands, nor his body, nor your own body; only a blinding light that spreads far around.”
This (of course) proves nothing, except as a reliable account of a holy man being physically affected by the peace, sweetness and joy that are the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The woman in the labour camp had heard the account and believed it. She saw the transformed fir tree as a sign and a comfort sent by the saint to the hardpressed women.
This story is more or less well known. It figures in a remarkable new book by Erik Varden. Shattering Loneliness is a series of six short chapters that explore aspects of Christian remembrance. The author is a talented and unusual man, born in Norway and later a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. In 2015 he became Abbot of Mount St Bernard, Leicestershire, a monastery of the Cistercians of strict observance, known as the Trappists. He is learned, skilled in music and writes in an engaging style.
Most notably he is happy as a monk, which entails embracing privations as well as experiencing joy. In fact I find his life story rather daunting, for he took an interest as a child in a neighbour in Norway who bore on his body scars of his sufferings in a Nazi concentration camp.
As a youngster, Varden studied books – by Elie Wiesel or Ilse Weber – that I dare not read for the horror they recount. Yet Varden’s encounter with the darkest anguish brought him, like the music of Mahler (the Resurrection Symphony) to the Catholic Church.
Bearing in one’s body the scars of suffering is one kind of remembrance that he considers. In his chapter on the great anamnesis, “remembering”, that Jesus commanded in the celebration of the Eucharist, Varden tells the story of Maiti Girtanner (1922-2014). so terribly injured by her treatment after arrest as a member of the French Resistance, that she had to give up a longed-for career as a musician. Instead she gave 70 years to forgiveness, beyond anything one could imagine, even to comforting the man who had mistreated her worst.
This deeply scriptural book could feed a life of prayer or lead a lone soul to reconsider her connection with the community of humankind held together by remembrance.