The opening psalm at Vigils on Tuesdays often passes in, not a blur exactly, but, shall we say, in less than sharp focus. How wise Benedict was to insist that Vigils should begin slowly! Yet there are a couple of lines which sometimes emerge from the mist with peculiar force, partly because they are lovely in themselves, partly because they express a very poignant emotion:
". . . your servants love her very stones,
are moved with pity even for her dust." (Ps 101.15)
The psalmist was singing of Sion, remembered in exile as a place of holiness and beauty, but the sentiments are familiar to every adult. Nostalgia for what we have lost, for the land of childhood or the scenes of youth perhaps, afflicts everyone at some time or other (even cloistered nuns). This most adult of emotions need not be negative. It can inspire heroic effort or great art, lead to the achievement of something really worthwhile, be truly creative. My own thoughts often turn to the church at Stanbrook on a summer's evening, when the western sun shimmers and shines through the choir, illuminating the tabernacle with a shaft of bright light: a reminder that the Lord alone is unchanging. For as the psalmist also says, speaking of the heavens and the earth,
"They will perish but you will remain . . .
. . . you neither change nor have an end." (Ps 101. 27, 28)