persuade Father Peter to counsel Simon, her once-betrothed, and Christine, both together. The priest, although he felt it to be a thankless task, summoned them to his humble cottage.
Simon arrived very early and, since there was only one chair in the room, he sat on his haunches, fidgeting, and blinking in the thick smoke of the wood fire. The priest tried to comfort him, but the conversation faltered in the face of Simon’s truculent silence. An hour later, Christine walked very slowly into the priest’s home. At once the lover jumped up and pleaded with all his heart: “A nun, perhaps, I can believe, but a recluse entombed, all that beauty, that energy, encased in cold grey stone!” Normally Simon was a man of few and simple words, but passion empowered his speech. “Delay your plans for a year or so…please think of me-us, then, the little ones we oft talked about.”
Christine’s face grew red and tears welled up in her eyes, but she took command of her emotions from the past. Her voice was firm: “Simon, I do still love you…but I must beseech you to find another woman. Many others there be far more suited for the unborn children I see in your eyes. I beg you to avoid my sight; please spare me the hurt. You shall be for ever my only earthly love.” Her voice started to break. “I ask Father Peter to request you to go in God’s peace. Please, please…I cannot bear the pain…” And she banished him from her presence, though never from her thoughts.
In contrast, Christine’s mother and her sister Margaret soon perceived the power of her vision. Although Margaret affected to be the most worldly of the family, she loved her sister and accepted with her whole heart that Christine had a different calling. Finally, so did her father, but her decision cut deep into his belief of what his family should be. He cared not what the village said of the strange honour bestowed upon the home, and he despaired of the lonely years his first-born would endure.
Christine spent more and more time with her priest, who himself struggled to read, comprehend, learn and then explain the Ancrene Riwle, the guidance for a solitary life of contemplation. Initially, he described her future life as climbing four rungs of a ladder. The first involved lessons on the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the holy fathers, beginning with the lives of the saints. Then she would be taught to meditate on these lessons. Prayer would be enhanced by this lengthy meditation. And the final rung was contemplation, a state to which the priest had never himself aspired. He felt acutely that he lacked what St. Gregory called the “art of arts”-that of guiding souls. He knew he could barely guide himself; Christine would eventually need to be instructed by a much higher authority than his own.
They discussed the means by which one enters a state of true contemplation, the highest form of union with God that the soul on earth can attain, the wondrous and mysterious act that involved the total occupation of the mind and the will with the thought of God. Christine had to substitute the love of self with the love of God, only then was union between God and her soul possible in this mortal life. Father Peter explained all this as he tried earnestly to grapple with the most powerful but enigmatic tenet of Catholic theology.
An anchoress, he insisted, must return Godwards truly to fulfil the purpose of her creation. She might achieve mystical ecstasy only by contemplating the three levels of the knowledge of God, via His creation of nature, by reading His scriptures, and by understanding God as Himself, in His manhood and Godhead.
The priest warned Christine that the path would be very hard and that Christ was a jealous master. And there would be many difficulties and temptations beyond her studies and the conflicts of her inner life. A woman searching for the truth on her own was anathema to the Church hierarchy, because men ruled the Church, men decided on the paths to salvation. Individual pursuit of God undermined the very foundations of Christendom, the centralised control of Rome. Female saints there were, he said, but usually they had been canonised long after their martyrdom. Respected nuns, usually of noble birth, there were also, but Christine refused to consider a communal route to God.
In the beginning the priest tried to overcome the girl’s self-abasement about her lack of schooling, but soon her quick mind outpaced her tutor’s. A little defensively, he parried her more penetrating questions by asserting the authority of more learned men over her intuitive insights.
Christine asked, “Is it not possible to learn from the Holy Ghost, and to confirm, in dedication, prayer and good works, a knowledge which the layman might know and yet the priest does not-what the fishermen of Galilee did know and the doctor of theology in Oxford today might not? Is it not possible that lovers of eternity can be taught by the doctor within? I have been taught that St. Francis mistrusted learning as a source of pride; is that not so, Father?”
“Is that not your own pride speaking, Christine?” he replied rather hastily.
Christine pressed her tutor on the central Christian principle of free will. She understood that man could choose between good and evil. God allowed evil, so that mankind could be tested, the priest explained. But was there really free will, if so much was predetermined, so many prophecies to fulfil, she asked. “What if Joshua had chosen to ignore the trumpets at the walls of Jericho?” she asked again. “Or if Abraham and Isaac had raised holy arguments against human sacrifice? Could the Holy Mother have refused to go to Bethlehem?”
Father Peter struggled to refute her logic. Sometimes, though, he laughed at her innocent humour. Once he explained that man was a little lower than the angels. Immediately she said, “Then the angels should reform themselves, and quickly too.”
At other times he realised that Christine was deliberately teasing him. When they were discussing abstinence, she asked, “Why did God believe the only humans worthy of salvation in the Flood were a family of winemakers?”
Yet the priest was shaken, nonetheless, by her rapid advances in both vocabulary and perception. They confirmed the power of her vision, perhaps, but he knew that if such changes were discussed in the parish she could be accused of witchcraft, and so might he. Occasionally she claimed to hear voices, and once or twice he reprimanded her, gently to be sure, for referring to herself in the third person. Sometimes he was not sure whether her fervour bordered on madness, but her calmness of spirit sometimes calmed his, too. Frequently he fretted about her, realising that much of what she said to him was arguably heretical. He thus encouraged her enclosure in a place where he could protect her from herself and, more importantly, from her Church.
“Remember how often do shrews find themselves on the ungodly end of the ducking stools,” he warned. “Remember how Mistress Le Walshe from Gomshall was taken by the bailiff and her tongue cut from her mouth for speaking out against the Church. She was fortunate. Think on them who have burned in the pit for saying that the Holy Scriptures should be put into our vulgar speech, not Latin.”
Christine always listened attentively to the priest’s strictures, but knew without doubt that she was embarked on a righteous path.
For nearly two years Christine prepared for her seclusion, assisted by the advice and prayers of Father Peter. As before, she continued to help in the fields and around her father’s house, but she laughed no more with other maidens, nor did she dance with the young men on feast days. Every day she attended church to learn scripture, at first by rote. Slowly she learned her letters in English, and even more slowly began to read a little Latin. Father Peter was not himself a scholar and had to work diligently to school himself for his lessons with Christine.
Her education was augmented by occasional retreats at a Dominican friary at Guldenford. It had been founded by Eleanor of Provence, widow of Henry III, in memory of her young grandson, who had died in the royal castle by the bridge across the golden sands which gave the town its name. Because there were no self-governing nunneries in any of the Hundreds of Surrey, Queen Eleanor had requested that the friary offer guidance to pious women, and so a small convent was established nearby. Father Peter was acquainted with the Abbess Euphemia and introduced Christine to her. It did not take long for the abbess to recognise the piety and intelligence of the humble village girl and Christine was offered a place in the convent, where the sisters soon came to accept that her vocation was that of a solitary.
Christine learned dutifully the offices and devotions of the Church and Father Peter explained in detail the long and careful sequence of prayers. He rehearsed her nearly every day in the timetable of the devotions she would have to perform when she entered her cell: “When you rise at dawn, make the sign of the Cross, saying the Paternoster, then begin at once the Veni Creator Spiritus, kneeling at your bench and bowing forward. Stay thus throughout this hymn and for the versicle ‘Send Forth Thy Spirit.’ Next, repeat the Paternoster and a Credo while you are dressing…”
And so her daily programme of devotions was planned, interspersed by observation of the Mass and occasionally the sacrament of communion.
Father Peter explained to Christine how lenient and at the same time how strict an anchoress’s observations could be. Certain high-born women had built elaborate shelters, almost tiny houses, adjoining their churches. They
