Stone Yard Devotional Quotes

I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it's still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.

Nobody knows the subterranean lives of families.

But still, it has surprised me, over the years, to discover how many people find the idea of habitual kindness to be somehow suspect: a mask or a lie.

There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I've never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.

I’m used to it now, the waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.

We all make saints of the dead, I said. It's the only way we can bear it.

It's been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.

But then, I reflect, there’s probably something sick about the way most people live.

I wish, for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when she fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had.

And yet'. Those are my two favourite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak, 'The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass.' Elie Wiesel

Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It’s admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It’s not chitchat; it’s hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.

There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

In the hallway to the dining room hangs the famous Julian of Norwich quotation: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Nearby, in a little alcove, hangs something else – a boxed collection of pinned dead butterflies, orange and black, apparently a gift from some old priest of the area, long dead. I pass these two frames every day, but it happens sometimes here that one is suddenly struck anew by familiar things. During Vigils I am filled with mourning for those butterflies, for all the extinctions and threats, flooded once again with the knowledge that nothing outside these abbey walls is well, and no manner of things shall be well. And I know that inside these walls, Helen Parry is the only one who will face that truth. And I don’t know what my duty is to that knowledge, except to hold it.

The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.

Composting was one of the things my mother did that other mothers did not. in our town, when I was a child, deliberately leaving vegetables and bones to rot in your own backyard was not something that nice people did.

After so many years of living in cities, the endlessness of the night sky here pours a wild, brilliant vertigo into me.

I'm masked now (still a novelty for us, while the rest of the country is sick of them), and there is a relief in that anonymity.

I can see why that might have been a big... incident for you.' The pitying smile returned, then hardened. 'But for me, that day was nothing.

I know that what happened to her at home, at school, and what she learned from that time about fighting and survival, is still inside her. And the world does owe her, is what I think.

There is something terrible in a quiet place about the sound of a woman's screams. It is worse than the sound itself; it gathers force, becomes an omen or a reminder of something horrible from the past.

It only occurred to me in late adulthood, seeing young women in the street, on the beach or in restaurants, how strange it had been that I covered my young body so thoroughly and constantly back then.

In her remaining life there was only room for the truth, and sometimes that would be brutal. It was sad, but it was too late; she had to prepare herself for what was to come. Only what was essential could be allowed to reach her now.

I drove, thinking about her words and that decision I seem to have made, in the middle of my life. Choosing disappearance, while Helen has chosen the opposite. I thought about the costs of those decisions, for each of us.

Some years after my father died, after my mother had folded herself up in grief for a time and then slowly emerged, dignified and altered, going about her life with the calm authority I’ve seen sometimes in people who have endured some great loss,

Occasionally – not very often – I felt pity for her apparent inability to understand the basic rules of survival. She would walk up to a group of girls in the playground, for example, and ask a question or, worse, give an opinion: on a girl’s sneakers or schoolbag or jacket. Worst was when she gave compliments, for praise from this girl was an insult, and the recipient would be teased for months. I like your hair, Leanne, we’d mimic in our stupid, nasal voices, while Leanne cringed and begged us to stop.

I need you to know that I loved my mother, and she – tried, as much as she was able, to love me.

Throughout the hour of this emergency I had been absolutely calm. But the primitive body knows fear, and responds.

During Lauds I found I was thinking, But how do they get anything done? All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.

On my second visit, I remarked (embarrassed again by my tears) that it seemed my friends were deserting me, just when I needed them most. She was unsurprised. Your life has been stripped down to bedrock, she said. It’s not their fault; their lives are protected by many layers of cushioning, and they can’t understand or acknowledge this difference between you. It probably frightens them. They’re not trying to hurt you. She didn’t say, Understand this: you are alone, but that is what I heard. I found it strangely comforting. She said again, I think you should call the bereavement centre.

The last time I saw the doctor, she seemed weary of me and my problems. She asked from behind her desk, a little testily: What is it that you want right now? For this not to be happening, I said. I could hear the sullenness in my voice. The doctor looked at me and waited for a moment. She seemed to decide on the simple, brutal truth. Well, it’s happening, she said. I have always been grateful to her.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.’ Simone Weil.

trees, and I was grateful to lead this life here, now. There may be a word in another language for what brought me to this place; to describe my particular kind of despair at that time. But I’ve never heard a word to express what I felt and what my body knew, which was that I had a need, an animal need, to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home.

There are four steps to true forgiveness, the therapists say: uncovering the nature of the harm; the decision phase, in which to explore whether to grant forgiveness or withhold it; the necessary ‘work’; and the final step, deepening or discovery. Many people reach the decision phase and find that it is not possible to forgive after all. In the work phase, the injured person must labour to understand the individual who caused the harm in a new way, which may create more compassion towards the offender and oneself. In the final deepening stage, the forgiver is supposed to find the hurt and hatred associated with the injustice receding even further. The forgiver may discover meaning in their suffering, and understand that there is a freedom in forgiveness. This is serious work, beyond the reach of occasion or rhetoric. And it is not for any individual to urge such rigorous, such dangerous and painful moral work upon another.

When i think about the phases of my life, it’s as a series of rooms behind me, each with the door to a previous one left open, behind which is another room, and another, and another. The rooms are not quite empty, not exactly dark, but they are shadowy, with indistinct shapes and I don’t like to think about them much. When I hear the name Helen Parry, I think about those rooms furthest back in the deepest shadows.

It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.

The singing is mesmerising, until I find the right page in the right booklet and discover that the lyrics are all about denouncing evil this and God’s enemies that. The subtlety of the lilting chant belies the blunt instrument of the words themselves.

Action is the antidote to despair.’ Joan Baez.

She smiles at me with what feels like her whole self, and I can only think of it as…love.

The doctor was big and square and imperious. For some reason her authority and her deep, practical kindness made me assume she was gay. She did not gush or emote, which was a relief. If someone had been openly empathetic, if I’d been entreated to elaborate upon the emotional terrain of what was now being called my grief, I would have been ashamed. On my second visit, I remarked (embarrassed again by my tears) that it seemed my friends were deserting me, just when I needed them most. She was unsurprised. Your life has been stripped down to bedrock, she said. It’s not their fault; their lives are protected by many layers of cushioning, and they can’t understand or acknowledge this difference between you. It probably frightens them. They’re not trying to hurt you. She didn’t say, Understand this: you are alone, but that is what I heard. I found it strangely comforting. She said again, I think you should call the bereavement centre. The last time I saw the doctor, she seemed weary of me and my problems. She asked from behind her desk, a little testily: What is it that you want right now? For this not to be happening, I said. I could hear the sullenness in my voice. The doctor looked at me and waited for a moment. She seemed to decide on the simple, brutal truth. Well, it’s happening, she said. I have always been grateful to her.

desk. The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.

I never saw it either – not at the funeral, not before nor afterwards, but I knew this was natural for her, a deep need for privacy and stillness in her emotions, and I knew her grief was too great for mere tears.

I used to think there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life. But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after. Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it’s still there, like that dam water, insisting, seeping, across the past and the future.

I shovelled the compost and spread it, shovelled and spread, preparing the soil and waiting for things to make sense. Tried to attend, very softly and quietly, which is the closest I can get to prayer.

All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it a creation of lines, or colours: if it is not religious, it does not exist.

The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.

feathery angels floating above and beside a tea table. All these centuries of paintings, all those saintly visions and miracles, all that religious feeling. Just neuroelectric misfire.

I thought of the tiny church I once visited in Provence, where Marc Chagall created a mosaic depicting the story of St Roseline, whose six-hundred-year-old desiccated corpse lay in a glass coffin in the same church. St Roseline, a young nun, was once so overcome with the adoration of God – mid table-setting duty – that she fell into an ecstatic religious swoon. She emerged from her reverie just in time for dinner, to discover that a band of angels had done her work for her. This is the subject of Chagall’s sparkling work in the chapel, his childlike

sweet-smelling ash-dust falling on your closed eyelashes.

What I could not tolerate was the ‘falling in love with Jesus’ talk that I knew would come next, and it did. I find it nauseating; surely this life should be composed of something more sober than that. Something austere, and momentous, and powerful. Close attention, hard thinking. A wrestling, to subdue…what? Ego. The self. Hatred. Pride. But no, instead we have Sissy, and also Carmel, simpering that they are here because I fell in love with Jesus and want to live with him in heaven.

she had to prepare herself for what was to come. Only what was essential could be allowed to reach her now. I listened to her speak and did not know how to express my gratitude that she had let me come to see her that day.

As I swept it came to me that my inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me. I used to think that time, adulthood, would clean it away, but no. It recedes sometimes but then it returns and I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child. The fact of grief quietly making itself known, again and again.