CISTERCIAN WOODS - December 8, 2002

December 8, 2002

I will lie down in peace

And sleep comes at once.

(Psalm 4)

These lines, which are sung here every night at Compline, remind me of Maura and the ease with which she slept always but even more now they speak of her last laying down, the sleep in which she died.

The experience of singing the office with the monks is silencing and I’m finding little to say. The psalms wash over and seep into the very core of one’s being.

If you have lost the person you loved,

Someone with whom you shared many Christmases

But is now dead,

All the grief and loneliness can come back to haunt you.

And yet…

We are called on to be happy,

To be  people of joy.

(Tony Flannery, Waiting in Hope, pp.29-30)