THE BEAUTY AND CHARM OF TRADITION

(A tourist's-eye view of three religious communities of women in France) by Alison Hope

There are, in France, three religious houses for women that use the Old Rite of the Mass: two in the south of France and one in Brittany. Beyond the liturgy, all have a second characteristic in common: to reach them, like heaven, requires effort. To Jouques, in the south of France there is a bus trip to a petite village, followed by a taxi ride to the monastery. which is approached by a one-man road running through wide,flat fields of yellow straw and lined by short trees.

I came here in a dry summer flowered in shades of red and purple under a blue, blue sky, when the nuns were singing Vespers Two years after, the paint is peeling from my memory, , but I think there were wooden pews, -not the straw chairs so common in French churches,- and booklets laid out with the office in Latin and French. Behind the bars of their enclosure, I could see rows of nuns in wooden pews, - the senior sisters in the back rows, the juniors in the front. I had the impression of fullness and from seniors to juniors there stretched a range of ages.

Following Vespers I was walked to the guest house, down a dirt road through more fields, to a house shaded by large trees. Here were chairs set beneath the trees and an outdoor table beneath a vine-covered trellis. The keeper of the guest house, a talkative and rather curious French woman, ushered me into the house, up the stairs and into a small bedroom. Then down the stairs we went, to a tour round the house, drinks, and much chatter about the monastery and the other guests. A few teenagers from Poland were staying here and working in the fields for their keep, doing the jobs the nuns couldn't keep up with.

The nuns of Jouques are a Benedictine order founded in the 19th century in reparation for the French Revolution. The monastery in Jouques has a younger sister at Roseans, also in the south of France, founded not so long ago when Jouques found itself with more nuns than space. While they use the Old Rite of the liturgy by habit, should a younger priest familiar only with the New visit them, they accept Mass in the New Rite also, to encourage the encounter of younger clergy with their traditional life and Old Rite office.

In the monastery there was a small shop, arrayed with books and monastery products: cards, jams made using fruit from their orchards (each day I would see, through gates into the orchard, sisters in blue smocks, hatted and basketed, with their arms immersed in fruit trees), perfumed water made from the flowers and so on. Guests' meals - oh, those delicious madelaine biscuits! - were cooked at the monastery and then brought by a bright, fair young nun to the guest house, where they were laid out under the vines or in the cooler dining room, while the sister flitted about bringing dishes in or out and chatting to housekeeper and guests. Seven times a day (or eight if you were up for matins, which I wasn't) guests could gather for the sung Latin Office (and Mass) in the monastery chapel, and if you thought you might have a vocation yourself, you would be escorted by an earnest bespectacled young sister, -who reminded me of St. Scholastica,- to a small room and shown a film about the order and their life.

Before I left, several other guests arrived, and after evening meals, we sat beneath the cool trees and chatted out the long evenings. One guest had several friends in the convent. When she was at university, she said, (ten, maybe twenty years ago?), a great wave of enthusiasm for religious life seized the traditional young Catholics and one after another left to join monasteries. She had tried here herself, but - she shrugged her shoulders - it was not her vocation. Gradually the enthusiasm had subsided, and the remnants married. She herself had children now, and lived in the city, but she came here often with her husband to visit her friends and to retreat for a few days. I could see why. It is an attractive place - with its golden fields, walled orchards, bright flowers, stone buildings, wimpled sisters and its pervasive air of calm.

The Benedictine abbey of Our Lady of the Annunciation at Le Barroux is one of the newer shoots of religious life in France. Founded in the 1970s, this abbey, still in the process of being built, houses about forty nuns, largely of a younger age group. The abbey lies in a flat land of shrivelled trees and green vineyards, an hour's scorching walk from the stone village of Le Barroux where house is piled upon house in a golden-brown muddle, up the slopes of a hill topped by a castle. On the other side of the valley from the abbey lies its male counterpart, the Abbey of St. Madeleine, and on the horizon beyond each, sharp against the clear summer skies, rise jagged mountain peaks. In the mornings, the abbey bells cry to each other across the valley: the men's first, distant, wafting on gusts of wind, and then the women's, vibrant, calling hearers to put down their books on prayer and take up its practice.

We in the women's guest house, summoned from stillness, would walk swiftly past the vineyards (pale pink poppies flopping along the road edge) to the abbey crypt, passing on our way the house holding the nuns' little shop (a pantry of books, cassettes, honey, lavender water and cards). The crypt foyer is a square of sunshine with steps winding down into cool darkness. Here the sisters sing their office and have Mass, for their abbey church has yet to be built. But all the existing buildings were made of warm pink-gold blocks of stone with two storeys and rounded arches, - a promise of future beauty.

As with the men's abbey, the Office and Mass were in the Old Rite, and one or more monks would travel across daily to celebrate Mass for the nuns. Unlike Jouques, the bars of the enclosure here were to the left and at the front of the pews, so visitors saw little of the sisters unless they sat in the far left front rows, which I admit to doing a few times. Unseen the nuns may have been, but not hidden, for their voices soared in the domed acoustic of the crypt, a pure-toned, perfectly tied unison that the monks were unable to match, at least on the occasions I heard them sing.

The monks, founded earlier than the nuns, had a fully built abbey, replete with a modern shop automatic sliding glass doors and stylish toilets the equal of any boutique shopping mall), huge parking lots - to accommodate the buses that pulled up here every Sunday, full of visitors and families for Sunday Mass and the children's catechism classes - and beautiful rooms, which on Sundays would be sprinkled with monks and male visitors in earnest discussion, or resonant with children's voices in class.

The abbey church was spacious, though not enough for all the Sunday crowds, for two-thirds of the church was filled by long pews for the monks. Outside the pink-gold of the church there stretched a vast garden of lavender, swaying purple, warm with sun and bees, soaking the morning air with its strong sweet aroma - the most characteristic feature of the abbey in my memory. After Mass and classes, the visiting families would stretch out blankets beneath the shade of spindly trees for a picnic lunch, and the air was full of voices. But on the other side of the valley, the nuns' abbey lay motionless beneath a blanket of heat and humming cicadas. Everybody knew the monks, one sister told me, with a faint, patient wryness, but the sisters were hidden, to most visitors no more than an echo of bells across the valley.

The Dominicans of the Holy Spirit were situated even further from rail transport than the two Benedictine orders, but happily a sister offered to drive out and pick me up. Located at the tiny 'village' of Pontcalec, Brittany, - a village of approximately three houses as far as I could see in the course of my wanderings - the motherhouse of the order was a chateau acquired by the order's founder in the 19th century. Attached to it was a 15th century chapel that he had moved from its original site and grafted to the chateau. How to describe the beauty of that place? It was like a picture from one of my childhood books of fairytales. The grounds and surrounding countryside were green forests, soft with old red-brown leaves underfoot, sun-dappled or dripping with raindrops. The grey stone chateau sat in a smooth curve of the river Calec, upon which swans contemplated the world peacefully. A small stone bridge arched over the river, carrying the road past a stone cottage or two where guests of the sisters, usually family only, could stay. In the other direction , the road travelled beside the stone walls and iron gates encircling the property past another old white house owned by the order, during the school year populated by boarders but now housing only myself and the small group of sisters who looked after the house.

The wimpled sister who collected me at the station was a fair, lively young woman, who chattered vigorously all the way to the convent. "Am I talking too quickly for you?", she asked at one point, sympathetic to my struggles to follow her French. "A little", I admitted, correctly expecting no concession beyond the question. I had only ever met one French person who comprehended what speaking more slowly meant. This sister told me that the order was just finishing its annual retreat, so sisters from all over France were gathered at the motherhouse. How many houses did they have? Five, and they were currently founding their sixth somewhere in the south of France. Their apostolate was children, which encompassed both schools and orphanages. My driver had been a teacher before entering, so it had been an easy transition for her, she said, adding that many of the order's vocations came from girls taught at their schools, though she had not been taught there herself.

The sisters sang all the Hours of the Office - Matins and Lauds monotoned in the morning, Terce, Sext and None bundled together at lunchtime and Vespers chanted solemnly with organ in the evening, when the late afternoon gold of sun poured through the stained glass windows, flinging colours in reckless montage across the floor. Compline took place just before bed, if I remember rightly. As with the Benedictine monasteries, books were piled by the door with text in Latin and French. Before each set of Offices, the bell would ring out, and I would make my way from the white house, ducking beneath dripping branches, down a little dirt path through the trees that met up with an avenue sweeping down to the chapel. Sometimes a sister on a bicycle would hurtle past me, her veil flapping behind her, fly over the step at the bottom of the path and cycle furiously down the avenue before me. "Our bones are too fragile to do that any more", an older sister informed me regretfully.

By a strange decree of providence, I had, completely unplanned, arrived at Le Barroux on the feast of St Benedict, in time to kiss the relic of St Benedict offered for veneration at Mass. Now, again, I found myself unexpectedly at the Dominican convent on the Old Rite feast of St Dominic. Although the sisters held full celebration of this feast over until the New Rite date, so as to celebrate simultaneously with other Dominicans throughout the world, there was nonetheless some feasting on the Old Rite date. From my little dining room on the ground floor, I could hear the tramping of many feet into the two refectories above, a brief silence (grace?) and then a mighty outburst of chatter as lunch began.

Late in the week, one brown-faced, blue-eyed sister my own age sought me out. She was an English teacher, ready to seize this opportunity to practise her English, so we rambled about the grounds and talked in English for some hours. She had been schooled by the order, but, always a more rebellious student, had certainly not intended to become one of them. When she announced to her friends that she was going to join the Dominican sisters, they were incredulous. "You? A nun?" One or two or her male friends had said with chagrin, "But I was planning to marry you!". "Stupid!", she had responded, laughing, "You should have said!". Her decision to join the order had been influenced particularly by one old sister in her eighties who had said to her, when she was considering entering, "It's a good life!". Impressed, this sister had concluded that testimony from an eighty-year old who could look back at her life and assess it thus was worth following.

One current novice was a product of her own vocation. The girl had been at school with her, although her parents were Protestant. The day I left, this novice made her first profession. I was there for the ceremony - a beautiful ritual, the novice's arms outstretched in white as she sings the threefold 'Suscipe me' - and sat by the door, opposite her weeping mother. Afterwards, there was food and laughter and - marvel of marvels! - sunshine. But my train was not long away, so I left with a kindly Frenchwoman who was willing to drop me at the swarming station to jam into a train to Paris. From there, I was to take a train to Holland, leaving behind me the France of bells, chateaus, purple lavender and convents where an ancient religious tradition and liturgy has continued to draw young women from the world to God.