The Wounds of God Read online

  “Even in the darkest moments of the story, hope tarries in the wings. A wonderful writer, a wonderful read.”

  Liz Curtis Higgs, New York Times bestselling author

  “These tender and charming tales of medieval monastic life have an unexpectedly modern dimension. They highlight the struggles of the human condition both in the present and in the past. They illuminate that all humankind, whether aware of it or not, is on a pilgrimage. Through these stories we accompany Father Peregrine and his monks on their journey as they struggle to overcome their personal defects and to live harmoniously in community for the glory of God.”

  Eleanor Stewart, author, Kicking the Habit

  “Poignant, moving, rich with imagery and emotion… Modern readers will easily identify with each character in Wilcock’s timeless human dramas of people learning to love and serve one another while growing in their understanding of a tender and compassionate God. Highly recommended.”

  Midwest Book Review

  “Wonderfully insightful, with a rich historical storyline. There’s more substantial content here than in much Christian fiction – about grace, about leadership and loyalty, about humility, about disability and suffering.”

  FaithfulReader.com

  “I fell in love with Penelope Wilcock’s Hawk and the Dove series when it first came out. These books are still among my favourites and, incredibly, the series keeps getting better and better. What a delight a first time reader of the series has ahead of them!”

  Donna Fletcher Crow, author, Glastonbury: The Novel of Christian England

  “This masterful look into a bygone era reminds us that Christians of every age have faced the same basic struggles: how to worship God in spirit and truth, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Many thanks to Penelope Wilcock for showing us, through the power of literature, an old way to new life.”

  Bryan M. Litfin, Professor of Theology, Moody Bible Institute

  “Penelope Wilcock has created a wonderful cast of characters to fill the marvellously accurate fourteenth-century monastery in her medieval series. For the lover of medieval mysteries this is a series not to be missed.”

  Mel Starr, author, The Unquiet Bones

  The Wounds of God

  PENELOPE WILCOCK

  Text copyright © 1991 Penelope Wilcock

  This edition copyright © 2015 Lion Hudson

  The right of Penelope Wilcock to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Lion Fiction

  an imprint of

  Lion Hudson plc

  Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road

  Oxford OX2 8DR, England

  www.lionhudson.com/fiction

  ISBN 978 1 78264 141 4

  e-ISBN 978 1 78264 142 1

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Cover illustration © Brian Gallagher

  Contents

  The Community of St Alcuin’s Abbey

  Chapter One: About These Stories

  Chapter Two: Who’s the Fool Now?

  Chapter Three: Keeping Faith

  Chapter Four: The Poor in Spirit

  Chapter Five: Beholding the Heart

  Chapter Six: God’s Wounds

  Chapter Seven: Holy Poverty

  Chapter Eight: The Road Climbs Upwards

  Glossary of Terms

  Monastic Day

  Liturgical Calendar

  For my friend

  Margery May

  The Community of St Alcuin’s Abbey

  Monks

  Brother Edward

  infirmarian

  Father Chad

  prior

  Father Columba

  abbot – known as Father Peregrine

  Brother John

  works in the infirmary

  Brother Gilbert

  precentor

  Brother Cyprian

  porter/infirmary patient

  Father Matthew

  novice master

  Brother Walafrid

  herbalist/winemaker

  Brother Giles

  assistant herbalist

  Brother Michael

  works in the infirmary

  Brother Andrew

  cook

  Brother Ambrose

  cellarer

  Brother Clement

  works in the scriptorium and library

  Brother Fidelis

  gardener, with special care of the roses

  Brother Peter

  cared for horses

  Brother Mark

  beekeeper

  Brother Stephen

  responsible for the farm

  Brother Martin

  porter

  Brother Paulinus

  gardener

  Brother Dominic

  guestmaster

  Brother Prudentius

  works on the farm

  Brother Basil

  elderly brother, assists in guest house

  Father Bernard

  cellarer in training

  Brother Germanus

  works on the farm

  Father Gerard

  almoner

  Novices and postulants

  Brother Thomas

  abbot’s esquire; also works on the farm

  Brother Francis

  works in a variety of locations

  Brother Theodore

  works mainly as a scribe and illuminator

  Brother Cormac

  works in the kitchen

  Brother Thaddeus

  works in a variety of locations

  Brother Richard

  Brother Damian

  Brother Josephus

  Allen Howick

  becomes Brother James

  Sick or aged brothers living in the infirmary

  Brother Denis

  once the beekeeper

  Father Aelred

  Father Anselm

  Father Paul

  Father Gerald

  Father Lucanus

  Deceased community brethren mentioned in The Hawk and the Dove

  Father Gregory

  previous abbot of the community

  Assistants to the community

  Martin Jonson

  lay worker in the infirmary

  Luke

  kitchen assistant

  Simon

  kitchen assistant

  CHAPTER ONE

  About These Stories

  I will never forget my friend Maggie dying. Word came to me on the Saturday afternoon that there had been a fire at her house and she was in hospital. I cancelled my plans for the evening and went straight there. I was not allowed to go in to her, the doctor was with her, so I sat down to wait in a room where chairs and bits of furniture were stored. Presently a plump, fair-haired, rather anxious-looking priest appeared in the corridor, looking for a nurse. He turned out to be Father Michael, one of the priests from the church Maggie attended. We sat in the small, cluttered room together, waiting, ex changing what news we had, what little we had heard, giving details to a nurse to fill in a form about Maggie; the sparse pitiful details of her lonely life.

  Then we saw a nun walking briskly along the corridor, her veil flowing behind her. She marched straight up to the door of the intensive care unit. Maggie w
as there, and she intended to be with her. It was Sister Kathleen, the Irish nun, one of Maggie’s friends from the convent. They wouldn’t let her in, so all three of us sat together and waited, bound into a strange intimacy by the tension of the situation.

  The doctor came to see us. She was very poorly, he said. She had seventy, maybe eighty, per cent burns. The right leg—most of the right side—was gone. He suggested we should not go and see her. The nurse agreed with him. It was not a pleasant sight, she said, even for a nurse. I felt glad enough to go along with the advice. What could we do, after all? She was unconscious. The priest, also with some relief, agreed with me. Sister Kathleen said nothing. The doctor went away, saying he would bring us more news later. Not until he had gone did Sister Kathleen speak: ‘Should you not anoint her, Father?’

  Of course. Of course he had to. We found the nurse again and explained. There were prayers that must be said: she must be anointed, blessed, absolved, before she died. Sister Kathleen said firmly that she would like to be there at Maggie’s bedside to join in with the prayers. Me too. I knew it then. Just to creep away would not do. The nurse said she would go and ask. Where did Father want to anoint her? The forehead, he explained, was the usual place. The nurse looked doubtful. There’s not much of her forehead left,’ she said.

  She went away and returned a moment later. Yes, there was a little place. It would be possible. The priest and I looked at each other. He did not speak, but there was a sort of barely perceptible wobbling about his face. I think he felt the same cold nausea of horror that I did. I don’t know what Sister Kathleen was feeling. We trailed in the wake of her intrepid resolution, through the ward into the sideward where Maggie lay on her back under a sheet. Only her face was showing, and she was attached to all the tubes and drips of intensive care.

  I don’t know what I expected to see. I thought she would look like a piece of toast from what they said. It was Maggie, that’s all. Maggie, with her face swollen and her hair singed, some of her skin burned away, the rest of it discoloured. But it was Maggie. I could see her soul. I don’t mean my eyes saw a shining thing or anything like that. I mean that my spirit perceived, knew, beheld, the childlike, sweet reality of Maggie’s real self, radiating from the still, burned body on the bed. Father Michael anointed her, and we said the prayers, and went home.

  She was still alive in the morning. I was angry with myself for not having stayed with her. Maggie, who was so afraid of dying alone. I went back to the hospital and asked to sit with her.

  ‘You can hold her hand,’ said the nurse. ‘Sit on this side. There’s a bit more of this hand left.’

  Again the cold, sick clutch of horror. What would it look like, the remains of that hand? The nurse lifted the sheet, and there it was, Maggie’s hand. That’s all it was; it was her hand. Burned, yes, and a lot of the skin gone, but it was Maggie’s hand, and I held her hand till she died.

  I have always been grateful for the clear-headed courage of that Irish nun, not discouraged by medical professionals or intimidated by unfamiliar territory and the instincts of fear and dread, remembering the human essentials. Maggie needed us; she needed us and she needed God, and in some strange way those needs were not separate but the same.

  I walked away from the hospital down to the sea, wanting to be by myself, not ready to go home yet. I watched the waves crashing onto the pebbles as the tide came in, seeing and yet not seeing the foam and surge of the sea; half there and half still standing in the presence of death’s mystery; fear, reverence, awe… My lips still remembered the cold, dead brow I had kissed in farewell. My eyes still saw the sharp outline of her face, no longer softened by colour or blurred by the constant undercurrent motion of breath, pulse, life. Once, just once, the fingers of her hand had moved while I held it, while the respirator still held together the last shreds of her life’s breaking thread. Had she heard my voice? Talking so quietly, not wanting the nurse to hear: ‘Forgive us, Maggie. Oh forgive us.’ Maybe things would have turned out differently if I had stayed with her, been there to avert the last fatal stupidity: the spilt brandy, the dropped cigarette. I didn’t know. I wished I still had my mother to talk it over with. Mother always understood my questions, spoken or unspoken, and my grieving—even this grief all numbed by regret. I remember how I used to come home to her with my troubles when I was a girl, and she always understood. I picture her now in the kitchen, washing up maybe, or slicing potatoes, or stirring custard. She would listen quietly, and as often as not she would ponder my words for a few moments, then say, ‘I know a story about that.’ She would tell me stories, wonderful stories, that teased out the tangled threads of my heartaches and made sense of things again.

  It was a monk Mother used to tell me stories about; a monk of the fourteenth century called Peregrine du Fayel. He was a badly disabled man with a scarred face and a lame leg and twisted, misshapen hands. He was the abbot of St Alcuin’s Abbey in North Yorkshire, on the edge of the moors. He was a man whose body was shaped by the cruelties of life, but his spirit was shaped by the mercy and goodness of God. He couldn’t do much with his broken hands, but he discovered that there were some precious and powerful things that could be done only by a man whom life had wounded badly. He was loved and honoured by the brothers who served God under him, and there were many stories told of his dealings with them, the things he said and did. These stories were never written in a book, but they have been passed down by the women in my family, from one generation to another.

  The one who first collected the stories was a woman like him. In actual fact, although he kept this to himself, she was his daughter. Before he entered monastic life, he had a love affair, and unwittingly left his sweetheart expecting a baby. The baby, Melissa, was brought up by her mother and stepfather, and not until she was a young woman did she accidentally come across Abbot Peregrine, her real father. Finding him brought her a sense of completion and belonging, and she used to visit him in his monastery, and grew to love him very much, treasuring the stories about him that she gathered from the monks.

  One of the stories they liked to tell her was the story of his name. His name in religion, the name his abbot had bestowed on him when he took his first vows and severed himself from all that he had been up until then, was ‘Columba’. It is the Latin word for a dove. The abbot had been named ‘Peregrine’ by his mother, because even as a baby it had been evident that he was going to inherit his father’s proud, fierce, hawkish face—and he did. The brothers of Abbot Peregrine’s monastery found the incongruity of the name ‘Columba’ very amusing. They called him ‘Peregrine’, his baptismal name. They thought it fitted better. Melissa liked that story too, but she liked it because she saw both in him, the hawk and the dove. He was fierce and intimidating at times, it was true, but there was also a tenderness and a quality of mercy about him that he had learned in the bitter school of suffering. ‘Columba’ had been a good choice, after all.

  My name is Melissa. It is a family name. There has been a Melissa every now and then in our family for hundreds of years, since Abbot Peregrine’s daughter. The last one before me was my mother’s great-grandmother. She died the year I was born, and Mother didn’t want the name to die out in our family, so I was christened Melissa too. I don’t know what she’d have done if I’d been a boy.

  The stories and the name were passed down through our family, grandmother to granddaughter, all the way to my mother’s great-grandmother: hundreds of years. My mother’s great-grandmother told them to my mother, and Mother loved the stories. She told them to me in my turn, when I was fifteen.

  She waited until I was fifteen, because they were not children’s stories. They were stories of men who had faced disillusionment and tasted grief and struggled with despair. Mother waited until I came to that time when I was no longer satisfied with the convenient and the pleasant and the comfortable; when I had seen enough of the shifting sands of appearances and wanted to stand firm on the truth, and then she began to tell me the stories that l
ong ago Melissa had remembered and treasured about Abbot Peregrine, her father. He was an aristocrat, the son of a rich nobleman, and I must confess I liked that too: it’s been a long time since we had one of those in our family. My own mother and father never had two ha’pennies to rub together, but that might have been because, with more faith than wisdom, they had five children.

  When I was fifteen, my sister Therese was sixteen and my little sisters Beth and Mary were eight and six. My youngest sister Cecily was only three then, but she certainly made her presence felt. Daddy said she was like an infant Valkyrie, and words failed Mother to describe her adequately. She would just shake her head in silence. All three-year-olds are a force to be reckoned with when they get going, but I’ve never met anyone like my sister Cecily. She’s not all that much different now, actually.

  We lived in a small terraced house near the sea, which is the place my mind goes back to when I tell these stories, the stories Mother first told me there, the year I was fifteen. My sisters liked stories too, but not as much as Mother and I did. We lived with one foot in reality and one in fantasy, and sometimes we forgot which foot was which. I still do.

  I went to school at a girls’ High School. I have heard it said that ‘schooldays are the best days of your life’, but the best of my schooldays was the day I walked out of the gate for the last time and turned my back on it for ever. I used to feel as though my life was made up of weekends separated by deserts of weekdays, a bit like the beads on a rosary that come in clumps separated by bald stretches of chain. Perhaps I was a difficult person to teach—well, I know I was, they left me in no doubt about that—but if I gave my teachers trouble, it was nothing to the misery they caused me.