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| Our Swamp Wallaby |
Recently Peter Ridgeway, from the Department of Primary Industries, and I set up two infra-red cameras on the property. Peter is helping us remove the wild African olives from the property and work towards regenerating the native forest. The idea was that the cameras would photograph any animals. One of the cameras took many photos while the other took hardly any. As we guessed there were a good number of photos of butterflies, rabbits and a fox who visited the site morning and evening and sometimes at night. But there was one photo of a native animal- a swamp wallaby. There she is in the photo above. we are pretty sure there are also wallarooos and and eastern grey kangaroos. Getting photos is a matter of luck as much as anything. But it is a blessing to have such native animals on our property.
Paul, Shane and I were in Wollongong twice recently. The first time was for the funeral of Bishop William Murray, second bishop of Wollongong, who ordained both Paul and myself. The funeral was impressive, solemn but not pompous and in a number of places heartfelt. Bill's niece, Patricia Murray, gave a wonderful eulogy on behalf of the family.
Our second visit was to meet Francis Sullivan, the CEO of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which has been set up to represent the Catholic Church and the different religious communities in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia. Francis spoke well and summarised for many of us our feelings of shame and demoralisation at the child sexual abuse committed in the Church in this country. His perspective was to suggest that God is using this time as a time of dark grace in which he are called to pray "Creator God, reshape my heart" Psalm 51.12. In the Liturgy of the Hours we have this psalm every Friday morning (but using the number Psalm 50.12). This reshaping of the heart is not an easy process. Our task is to make things better for victims and the church a safer more trustworthy place. We were grateful for Francis's honesty.
What Francis Sullivan made clear is that the church is called to a spiritual revolution which will affect us all. What we are called to is a Church with values which were formed the best spirituality of the Thirteenth Century with St Francis, the Early Carmelites and the Beguines and Beghards of Northern Europe. I was sad to read recently of the death of the last Beguine. This wonderful obituary appeared in The Economist:
Marcella Pattyn, the world’s
last Beguine, died on April 14th, 2013, aged 92
AT
THE heart of several cities in Belgium lies an unexpected treasure. A
gate in a high brick wall creaks open, to reveal a cluster of small,
whitewashed, steep-roofed houses round a church. Cobbled alleyways
run between them and tiny lawns, thickly planted nbwith flowers, grow
in front of them. The cosiness, the neatness and the quiet suggest
a hortus
conclusus,
a medieval metaphor both for virginal women and the walled garden of
paradise.
Any
veiled women seen there now, however, processing to Mass or tying up
hollyhocks in their dark habits and white wimples, are ghosts.
Marcella Pattyn was the last of them, ending a way of life that had
endured for 800 years.
These
places were not convents, but beguinages, and the women in them were
not nuns, but Beguines. In these communities, which sprang up
spontaneously in and around the cities of the Low Countries from the
early 13th century, women led lives of prayer, chastity and service,
but were not bound by vows. They could leave; they made their own
rules, without male guidance; they were encouraged to study and read,
and they were expected to earn their keep by working, especially in
the booming cloth trade. They existed somewhere between the world and
the cloister, in a state of autonomy which was highly unusual for
medieval women and highly disturbing to medieval men.
Nor,
to be honest, was it the first thing Juffrouw (Miss)
Marcella thought of when, as a girl, she realised that her dearest
wish was to serve her Lord. But she was blind, or almost so, and no
other community would accept her. She wanted to work, too, and was
not sure she could in an ordinary convent. The beguinages had
originally been famous for taking the “spare” or “surplus”
women who crowded into 13th-century cities in search of jobs. Even
so, the first community she tried sent her back after a week, unable
to find a use for her. (In old age she still wept at the thought of
all the rejections, dabbing with a handkerchief at her blue unseeing
eyes.) A rich aunt intervened with a donation to keep her there, and
from the age of 21 she was a Beguine.
Contentedly,
in the beguinage at Ghent from 1941 and at Courtrai from 1960, she
spent her days in tasks unaltered from the Middle Ages. She knitted
baby clothes and wove at a hand loom, her basket of wool beside her
chair, chatting and laughing with the other women. At lunchtime, like
the others, she ate her own food from her own cupboard (identified by
the feel of the carvings under her hands), neatly stocked with
plates, jugs, coffee and jam. Cooking she was spared, ever since on
the first occasion she had failed to see the milk boiling over, but
she washed up with a will.
A
good part of the time she prayed, all the prayers she could remember,
but especially her rosary whose bright white beads she could almost
see. Most usefully, since she was musical, she played the organ in
chapel; and she cheered up the sick, as she nursed them, by
serenading them on banjo and accordion. Almost her only concession to
modernity was the motorised wheelchair in which she would career
around the alleyways at Courtrai in her later years, wrapped in a
thick knitted cape against the cold, her white stick dangerously
levelled like a lance.
Love’s
light
In
her energy and willpower she was typical of Beguines of the past.
Their writings—in their own vernacular, Flemish or French, rather
than men’s Latin—were free-spirited and breathed defiance. “Men
try to dissuade me from everything Love bids me do,” wrote
Hadewijch of Antwerp:
They don’t understand it, and I can’t explain it to them. I must live out what I am.
Prous Bonnet saw Christ, the mystical bridegroom of all Beguines, opening his heart to her like rays blazing from a lantern. But a Beguine who was blind could take comfort in knowing, with Marguerite Porète, that Love’s light also lay within her:
O deepest spring and fountain sealed, Where the sun is subtly hidden, You send your rays, says Truth, through divine knowledge; We know it through true Wisdom: Her splendour clothes us in light.
When
she was known to be the last, Juffrouw Marcella
became famous. The mayor and aldermen of Courtrai visited her, called
her a piece of world heritage, and gave her Beguine-shaped chocolates
and champagne, which she downed eagerly. A statue of her, looking
uncharacteristically uncertain, was cast in bronze for the beguinage.
The
story of the Beguines, she confessed, was very sad, one of swift
success and long decline. They had caught the medieval longing for
apostolic simplicity, lay involvement and mysticism that also fired
St Francis; but the male clergy, unable to control them, attacked
them as heretics and burned some alive. With the Protestant
Reformation the order almost vanished; with the French revolution
their property was lost, and they struggled to recover. In the high
Middle Ages a city like Ghent could count its Beguines in thousands.
At Courtrai in 1960 Sister Marcella was one of only nine scattered
among 40 neat white houses, sleeping in snowy linen in their narrow
serge-curtained beds. And then there were none.
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