The Joy of God: Collected Writings

By Mary David, St Cecilia's Abbey and Erik Varden

A journey from where we are to achieving true happiness.

Sister Mary David Totah was a nun of the Benedictine contemplative community of St Cecilia's Abbey on the Isle of Wight. American by birth, she was educated at Loyola University, the University of Virginia and Christ Church, Oxford. After a distinguished teaching career, she entered religious life in 1985. For 22 years until her early death from cancer she guided the young nuns of her abbey with enthusiasm, wisdom and wit.

The spirituality to be found in the pages of this book demonstrates to the reader why her influence should have been so great and so deep. Her notes to the novices deal with issues of relevance to a world beyond the cloister: What is the meaning of suffering? How do we cope with living with people who annoy us? How do we relate to a God we cannot see? How do we make the big decisions of life?

Sister Mary David's teaching was both profound and intensely practical, suffused with faith in God's joy in our work, leisure, community and family life but above all in our view and understanding of ourselves. This book, with an introduction by Abbot Erik Varden OCSO (author of The Shattering of Loneliness) shows us how to realize the Joy that is God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781472971333

Mary David

Sister Mary David Totah OSB (1957-2017) was a Benedictine nun. American by birth, after a stellar Oxford degree and PhD, she joined the Benedictine Community at Ryde in the Isle of Wight. Her books include The Spirit of Solemnes, A Divine Gift, The Consecrated Life and In the House of Christ.

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To Sister Mary David’s parents, Michael and Mary Totah, and her sister, Monelle Totah

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Contents

Foreword: Sister Mary David Totah –

Father Erik Varden OCSO

PART ONE    CALLED TO JOY

PART TWO    JOURNEY TO JOY

Search

Decision

Growth

Freedom

Endurance

Mercy

Darkness

Light

PART THREE    SURRENDER TO JOY

Acceptance-with-Joy: Her Last Lesson

Interview recorded a few weeks before she died

Acknowledgements

Foreword: Sister Mary David Totah

In Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger, close to five hours of irrepressible singing flow from an encounter that takes place outside Nuremberg’s Katharinenkirche, where the young Eva Pogner sets eyes on a visiting knight, Walther von Stolzing. She knows at once, with certainty, that he is the man she will marry, he and none other. Magdalena, her chaperone, protests that the knight is quite unknown to her. Eva assures her that, no, he is not: she knew von Stolzing before she ever met him. Their first encounter was marked by recognition, for he came to her, she says, just like David, whose image had long held her in thrall. ‘Ah!’, warbles Magdalena, ‘the king with the harp and long beard in the Masters’ guild sign?’ To which Eva replies,

No! The one whose pebbles brought Goliath down —

sword in belt, sling in hand,

head haloed by blond locks,

the way Master Dürer has painted him for us!

The scene provides an apt vignette with which to introduce the author of this book. After the manner of her Biblical patron, she embodied at once a venerable wisdom and a dash of charismatic pluckiness. No one who knew Sister Mary David Totah (who, like Israel’s king, was short of stature) will have any trouble imagining her stepping forth to confront some braggart Goliath in the name of goodness and truth, her heart firm in faith, her arsenal simply a handful of stones polished smooth by the waters of the brook from which God himself drank on taking our nature, thereby to lift up both his head and ours – for thus the Fathers of the Church would illumine one Biblical passage with another, conflating David’s campaign against the Philistine (1 Samuel 17) with the pathos of the Davidic Psalter’s most poignantly Messianic Psalm (Psalm 110). It was a kind of reading in which Sister Mary David delighted. Possessed of a sharp, analytical mind, she also had a keen sense of poetry: her doctorate focused on the English symbolists. She was always one to go deeper, to probe further, to extend the horizon, dissatisfied with anything that was less than whole – and mindful that the wholeness she sought will tend to exceed what words on their own can express; that it yields its secret most readily through images and signs; that it calls for a response that lets circumscribing reason soar ever higher towards the infinite expanse of love.

*

When at a crucial juncture in sacred history Israel’s elders decided to abandon the Mosaic institution of Judges and get a king for themselves, they ‘gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah’ (1 Samuel 7.4). David, Israel’s true founding king, later sought asylum in that town when the rages of his star-crossed predecessor Saul contrived his destruction (1 Samuel 19.18). Pundits disagree, as pundits do, on the finer points of Biblical geography, but there is much to indicate that Biblical Ramah overlaps with modern Ramallah, the birthplace of Sister Mary David’s mother and father. Her love of Scripture, its history and sensibility, was not just devoutly acquired; it ran in her blood.

She herself was born in Philadelphia, brought up in Louisiana. Still, her Palestinian origin defined her. It gave a peculiar warmth to her family life. It surrounded her, right into the cloister, with the fragrances and flavours of her father’s exquisite cookery. It gave her a visceral, enlightened understanding of people who found themselves, in one way or another, homeless. It bestowed on her, too, a sense of companionship and fun. Of her relations she wrote:

Naturally talkative and hard-working, they radiate hospitality and warmth; they are a people at home in the world, and one of my family’s enduring gifts to me was the appreciation of created values, an awareness that God is glorified in our use and enjoyment of all he has given. There was nothing pinched, arid or abstract about home. I still remember the large family gatherings – the platters of stuffed zucchini and vine-leaves, the dancing of the dubka at weddings, the rattle of dice on backgammon boards, and the good-natured shouting and roar of laughter between adults. A cousin once asked his father why he always fought with his relatives. ‘Fight?’, he laughed. ‘That’s our way of talking.’

Sister Mary David read English Literature at Loyola University, New Orleans, then completed an MA at Virginia. She came to Oxford to do graduate work, among the first intake of women at Christ Church. While covering herself apparently effortlessly with academic glory, she was gregarious, hospitable, and dependable. A contemporary tells of arriving at the college in 1981, feeling overwhelmed, and asking the Head Porter how on earth she was supposed to get started. He simply told her: ‘You’d better go along and meet Miss Totah; that’ll be best.’ A lifelong friendship ensued.

All the while, in Miss Totah’s heart of hearts, a deep longing was configuring. Rooted in the Christian faith and practice of her childhood, it revealed itself early as a personal call, a ‘jealous love’ in the language of Scripture, a love demanding all. Sister Mary David later described to her sisters in the monastery how, as a young woman, she had one day stood in the kitchen back home in Louisiana, among pines and sugar cane, ‘emptying the dishwasher and having this overwhelming and intense experience of the love of God, and a piercing joy. I felt I could have died at that moment and my life would have been complete. From then on God was like a prism through which everything passed, enriching and intensifying life and filling it with wonder.’

She first visited St Cecilia’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight, in 1984, by then securely launched in an academic career as associate professor of English Literature at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. What the monastery embodied perfectly matched her long-entertained, inward desire. Rather like Fräulein Pogner before von Stolzing, she took one look at the hitherto unknown and knew: here is my future. The impact of the encounter marked her visibly, to the extent that friends thought she had fallen in love. In May 1985 she entered the monastic enclosure, cheerily proclaiming her intention to remain within it ‘for ever’.

That a woman so talented and lively, a woman so secure in herself that she could be, as a friend put it, ‘wonderfully at ease with the preposterous’, should choose a life of such regularity and confinement appeared to many not only bewildering, but scandalous. For is the enclosure of nuns not a living tomb? Does it not represent the oppressive containment of women by male hierarchs? Sister Mary David came to embody the antithesis of such facile stereotypes. She took issue with them as a scholar, too, notably in her fine history of monastic enclosure in the book Walled about with God. In it, she demonstrates that enclosure, far from being an imposition, has an intrinsic spiritual value that nuns, at times when their life has prospered best, have been proud to uphold, often in the face of opposition. She concludes that enclosure ‘is a condition of efficacy, not only for the prayer life of each individual, but also to safeguard and deepen the contribution of the contemplative life to the life of the whole Church’.

In her case, the enclosure of St Cecilia’s enabled wonderful flourishing. Even as a skilled composer might take disparate musical themes and, by rules of near-mathematical precision, knit them together into a complex fugue that makes of each component part a necessity for the integrity of the whole, so Benedictine regularity equilibrated and harmonised Sister Mary David’s gifts of nature and grace in a new song of strikingly original polyphony. She brought much with her when she entered the monastery. At the same time she found, within it, magnificent treasures. She was struck at once by the beauty of it all: ‘not only the transcendent beauty of the chant, but also the beauty of community life, a living together with profound respect, courtesy, affection and joy; the beauty of a community dedicated to a way of life based on faith in all its details – but in a matter-of-fact and simple way’. She drank deeply from the sources of monastic life, and found happiness in sharing her discoveries with others. The main beneficiaries were the novices of St Cecilia’s, with whose care and instruction she was entrusted from 1996 until her death. Much of the material contained in this book was composed for them, as formal lectures and as personal notes of encouragement or, when required, correction. For Sister Mary David expected of those who embraced the pursuit of absolute Truth absolute commitment. Half-measures, she insisted, were unworthy of love.

From 2008 she served as the monastery’s prioress, the abbess’s right-hand woman. What the community of St Cecilia’s meant to her is expressed in an instruction she gave on her deathbed: ‘I want each one in the community to be given this text when I am gone’, she said, holding up an extract from a poem by Isla Richardson:

Grieve not,

Nor speak of me with tears,

But laugh and talk of me as if I were beside you there.

. . .

I loved you so.

’Twas heaven here with you.

She pointed to the last line: ‘That’s just what it’s been for me here, a little bit of heaven.’

When inoperable cancer was diagnosed in 2012, she embraced the diagnosis as a task, quite in the spirit of Benedictine obedience. She patiently submitted to appropriate care both medical and spiritual, but it was self-evident to her that her death, no less than her life, was part of the gift she had made of herself on her profession: she was not one to claim anything back. On the contrary, she steadily advanced into the insight that defined, and transfigured, her last years: ‘Acceptance, with joy’. That joy did not simply drop from heaven. It was the conquest of a lifetime’s fidelity. The battle could be costly. Shortly before the end, she admitted: ‘It’s a very difficult passage, in a way, to make, one that’s full of joy at going towards something you’ve longed for your whole life, but at the same time pain at leaving so many precious people, precious things.’ But she remained unflinching in her gift, her heart growing wider and wider, overflowing with comfort for others, even in the midst of gruelling pain – a Paschal paradox aglow with glory. On 28 August 2017 she entrusted herself definitively into the Father’s hands, sixty years old.

*

Longish periods could pass during which I had no direct contact with Sister Mary David. But it was always such a reassurance to know that she was there! Like many others, I loved her, loved her dearly. And how wonderful to have known a person so free, so utterly given, that she could let herself be loved without any risk of even a shadow of ambiguous attachment. The one great, consecrated love of her life was always at the heart of every encounter, irradiating human affection with a gladdening light that, in the bustle of the convent parlour, amid tea cups and cosies and Breton cake, shed palpable rays of eternity. Those rays still proceed undimmed. By means of this book they will come to shed light, I expect, in unexpected places. In her obituary of Sister Mary David, the abbess of St Cecilia’s, Mother Ninian Eaglesham, wrote the following:

A great soul has passed on, but we trust that her spirit will remain among us, and not in any banal sense. Sister Mary David . . . leaves a legacy, not only of novices who made it to Profession or writings of notable calibre or anything else of that nature but of a spirit transformed by the love of God. This legacy will endure.

Fr Erik Varden

Second Sunday of Lent 2019

Why joy? . . . Loving God is finding one’s happiness in the happiness, the joy of God; it is, therefore, possessing complete and total joy, for God is immutably happy. The normal, persevering attitude of a baptized person is the high noon of joy; those who belong to God, who live by God, are given over to joy. Since we are with the Lord, and he with us, how do you expect our life not to be a life of joy, of exultation? . . . Peace for the present, hope for the future, and as the fruit, joyfulness, happiness, perfect joy.

Dom Delatte¹

Notes

1 Dom Paul Delatte, Commentary on Psalm 1, cited in The Spirit of Solesmes: the Christian Life in the Works of Dom Prosper Guéranger, Abbess Cécile Bruyère, Dom Paul Delatte, ed. Sister Mary David Totah (Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2016), p. 144.

PART ONE

CALLED TO JOY

It is a duty for each one of us to be joyful. It is a remarkable religion in which joy is a precept, in which the command is to be happy, in which cheerfulness is a duty.

Dom Delatte¹

Joy, said G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy, ‘is the gigantic secret of the Christian’,² the distinguishing atmosphere of the Christian life. It lies at the very heart of the Christian’s vocation as a child of God. Joy is something established in our relationship with God, the expression of one who is loved by God and lives in God. ‘When the Holy Spirit descends and fills the soul with the plenitude of his presence, then we experience that joy which Christ described, the joy which the world cannot take away’.³

Christian joy springs from the fact that ‘we are so rich, so saturated with God’.⁴ In creating and reconciling the world through his Son, God has given us everything. The Christian has been given joy, as he has been given everything else. This joy, then, is both a gift and a responsibility. It is also an act of adoration, says Dom Delatte, ‘because it bears witness to the fact that God, who belongs to us, is everything to us’.⁵ Christians are called to live in joy and to communicate joy, the joy of communion in the one body of Christ, the joy of believing, joy in the midst of suffering, joy in spite of suffering. There is no virtue, no circumstance, that is not to be illuminated by joy.

It is noteworthy how often in the New Testament joy and affliction go together. Christian joy seems to flourish and grow upon what might seem the least favourable soil. St James tells his reader to count it all joy when testing comes;⁶ Jesus speaks of true joy as being like the joy of a woman whose travail has passed and whose child has come;⁷ in spite of persecution, the Christians in Antioch are filled with the Holy Spirit and with joy;⁸ the apostle Paul may be sorrowful but he is also rejoicing.⁹

There is no doubt that in the history of the Church this joy in tribulation has been one of the most striking things about our faith, and its beauty and wonder lie in the fact that it is embraced for love of Christ. As Newman writes, this is one of the chief graces of primitive Christianity:

Joy in all its forms; not only a pure heart, not only a clean hand, but [also] a cheerful countenance . . . They had desired to sacrifice the kingdom of the world and all its pomps for the love of Christ . . . and when their wish was granted, they could but rejoice . . . Such was the joy of the first disciples of Christ, to whom it was granted to suffer shame and undergo