By Paul Mitchell
I’m writing from the midst of another lockdown in Melbourne Australia, in response to COVID19. What we’re going through has been compared to prisoners and asylum-seekers’ experiences, and often we and those in Sydney and New South Wales have been encouraged to empathise with their plight. Our time shut away, especially for those of us who live with others, has also been compared to life as a monk or nun.
In 2013, I stayed for a few days as a guest at a traditional monastery in the country. I had the deep spiritual experience I’d hoped for, but I left feeling sorry for the monks and nuns. They lived in a beautiful environment, with views of a lake and cows on rolling hillsides, but they were confined to the property. Even their bluestone-housed single rooms faced each other inside a locked courtyard.
There was some time each day when they could use the internet. They could also leave the monastery for a half-day each week, but that was the extent of their experience of the outside world. They couldn’t go where they wanted, when they wanted. They were in permanent lockdown and I was sad for them, even though the spirituality one monk had developed at the monastery was instrumental in me having the deep experience I’d craved.
Like many, I’ve read the spiritual wisdom and ecstatic experiences of monks and nuns like St John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, St Teresa of Avila, and the more contemporary Thomas Merton. But I realise I’ve sometimes ignored their words about how tough the journey to Christlikeness can be.
Now, in my little COVID19 monastery, I’m exhausted all the time from work commitments and home schooling. I’m finding it challenging to deal every day with the same loved ones in close proximity. It’s becoming obvious to me why so many monks and nuns made beer, wine and other than holy spirits. But I know lockdown’s better than being in ICU or spreading the virus around and contributing to the mortality rate. And I also know that lockdown’s suffering is creating in me a unique opportunity to allow the spirit to work.
The fruits of the Holy Spirit quoted in Galatians 5:22-23 (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) have always appeared to me more like holy grails. I’d look at them and think, yes, I’d love a little more love, and some extra joy would be joyous. But I read the list again recently and realised that, only due to lockdown, I’m building just a bit more patience.
That’s miraculous because I’m normally the bloke tapping his foot in the supermarket queue or drumming his fingers on the steering wheel at the red light. But lockdown has given me no room, almost literally in our smallish house, for impatience with my partner and son.
Like monks and nuns, we’re constantly confronted with each other’s foibles. Every niggling habit – from my 12-year-old son’s love affair with noise, singing to himself and humming, to my wife’s joyous daily abandonment of tidiness – can have cartoon steam forming in my ears. I’ve seen, too, that my habits are regularly making their temperatures rise. And that’s without considering the extra demands constant work from home and home-schooling have placed on our household.
But, somehow, I’m taking more deep breaths than ever. Realising that, if I lose my patience now, dropping a dish I’m putting in the machine because my son has thumped past me with his headphones on while my partner deals with a stressful work call loudly in a nearby room, what’s going to stop me from losing it again and again?
What ever stops me from losing my patience again and again? In a way, before lockdown, before losing my patience in front of my family didn’t mean having to then spend almost every minute of the day with them, nothing really stopped me. Patience was almost optional. Now, it’s a necessity. Because, in our little monastery, if one of us is letting a fruit of the spirit rot, the rest of us have to smell it all day, every day.
Trappist monk Thomas Keating wrote that people who decide to live in a monastery to escape the world are in for a shock because the world’s magnified within the cloister. And so also is our lockdown opportunity magnified to allow temporary suffering to prune our spirit trees and get some fresh spring fruit growing.
Still, I hope it won’t be long before I can write about patience being tested in, to paraphrase ecclesiological terminology, ordinary times.
Paul Mitchell is a Melbourne essayist, fiction writer and poet. Versions of this article have been published in The Melbourne Anglican and Paul’s latest book, Matters of Life and Faith (Coventry Press, 2021).