Stanbrook Sisters

(Today I visit Stanbrook Sisters at Wass with my Coptic Monk friends)

Moved by the Spirit

A new, ‘green’ Stanbrook Abbeyhas been built among the hills of North York shire. Pat Ashworth was allowed a rare glimpse inside its walls (Church Times).

Eco-friendly: a view of the south elevation of the monastery PHOTOS PETER COOK

SHE WALKS with the spring of a young woman, and the deter mined pace of someone on a mission. Her black habit is hitched up to clear the wet grass; she wears stout walking boots; her hands are deep in her pockets; and her white novice-veil is visible above a bright red waterproof mac. She vaults the fence and disappears across the hill side, through pasture grazed by in curious sheep.

It is a glimpse of the contempla tive life that speaks volumes about Stanbrook Abbey in its new loca­tion. Cistercians traditionally built their monasteries in the valleys, but Benedictines built them on the heights. And while this hilltop in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park is no Subiaco or Monte Cas sino, its south-facing slopes are open to the vastness of the sky, and a view over the Vale of York that on a good day can stretch for 70 miles.

This is now the 21st-century home of the 24 Benedictine nuns who make up the Conventus of Our Lady of Consolation. Their journey from a Pugin building in Worcester shire began in 1997, when they em barked on a journey to discern the most important elements of their monastic and contemplative life. “If we had known then what we know now, we would have pulled the shutters down and told the Holy Spirit we weren’t in,” says the Abbess, the Rt Revd Dame Andrea Savage.

THE community’s former home, in the shadow of the Malvern Hills, is acknow ledged for its beauty. It was built for a community of 70 at the time of John Henry Newman’s “Second Spring”, when the vision of the monastic life included a large, imposing building. Did they enter the monastery to be caretakers of such a building, the nuns of 1997 reflected? The listed edifice was on four echoing floors served by an erratic lift. Feasibility studies showed that it would be impossible to adapt it, and a search for an exis ting building to convert proved fruit less.

The community faced the chal lenge, decided to sell, and, in 2003, appointed architects to design a new monastery. Five Sisters with appro priate experience that included architectural skills, scoured the country for sites, and returned each time with the strong conviction that none of them would be right.

The Abbot of Ampleforth invited them to consider North Yorkshire. And, after being gazumped on one property, they received — by way of compensation from an embarrassed estate agent — details of the farm house and buildings on the present 56-acre site.

The five Sisters reported back with enthusiasm, and a site viewing by the whole community produced unanimous support. That they were led here they have no doubt. It was a greenfield site in a National Park, where only an exceptional building for an exceptional client has any chance of being approved. Any new building must also conserve and enhance the beauty and heritage of the natural landscape.

“We took a great leap of faith, and bought this property without planning permission, which in the eyes of many seemed very unwise,” Mother Andrea, a spirited Glas wegian, said. “We had found a site very rich in Benedictine mona sti-cism. The land itself was probably farmed centuries ago by the monks of Byland Abbey and of Rievaulx. We were renewing a footprint of faith that was already around us.”

The appointed architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, acknowledge that being asked to express a sense of the transcendent in the design of the new abbey was “a fantastic challenge that doesn’t come with every commission”.

THE sight of a traditionally robed nun in England has been rare for the past 50 years, and the attempt to trade down to something more fitting for their way of life had met with “an understandable look of surprise and bafflement” from people, the prin cipal architect, Gill Smith, said.

The Sisters had come with what she described as “a remarkably thorough and impressive” brief for

a building designed to last at least 250 years: a living contemplative tradition to pass on to the future.

“It was very educative for us: we had to learn a lot about monastic living, and they had to learn about the world of money and building and relationships, the morass of pushing and pulling out of which comes the design,” she said.

There is a special quality of light in this part of the country, with its chequered fields and glimpses of water. White clouds mass in gigantic formations in bright blue skies and over golden hayfields in summer, and there’s a dramatic aura even to forbidding power stations on the horizon. The panorama from the Abbey is 180 degrees, and there is an enormous depth of vision.

“Every day that we get up and draw the curtains, the landscape is dif ferent,” Sister Petra says. “One day it’s absolutely awesome, and other days it’s very intimate. On a sunny day with bright shadows it’s very tender, and on another day it’s all dark sky and thundering rain. When it rains, it really does rain. And the wind! It’s very liberating.”

THE enclosure is the nuns’ entire world for a lifetime, fostering a life of prayer and witness to God. Prayer and spiritual reading are the two “bookends” of

a long day that begins at 4.30 a.m., and is punctuated by vigil, the Divine Office six times a day, manual labour, meals, and a short period of recreation.

The Benedictine way of prayer is lectio divina, a slow and meditative reading not for information but to deepen the relationship with God: what Sister Petra describes as the opposite of mastering a text.

“You might only read a para graph in three-quarters of an hour, but you meditate on it and use that as a kind of springboard for prayer,” she says. “We believe we hear God speaking to us through that reading. You wait for the word to speak to you — a phrase that will really arrest you and speak to your mind and your heart — and that’s when you stop and give yourself up to it.

“You are being asked to give up being in charge and mastering things and making progress, not to be hurried or distracted. It’s a tre mendous spiritual discipline.”

The architects had to understand this Benedictine way of life, where a great part of the day is spent in prayer in the nuns’ individual cells. All the cells nestle into the contours of the south-facing slopes, with only what Ms Smith describes as “the view, and nothing to interfere with you and God”.

Mother Andrea says: “Being able to walk out on to the balcony of your cell and experience God’s creation enveloping us was a prayer all by itself. This is the aspect the community rejoices in.”

LIGHT, tranquillity, silence, and the “rich monastic patrimony” of the site were uppermost in the architects’ mind. They opted for a classic orthogonal, symmetrical design rather than the fluid lines of what might have been something more “chaotic and organic”, although the church and library that will be added in the second phase of building will be more curva ceous, the flourishes to the core simplicity.

Inevitable cost-cutting came with the economic downturn; and they have not yet found a buyer for the £6-million property in Worcester. They have already spent £5 million on the new one.

What is here now allows the nuns to live their monastic life, but, until the old property is sold, there will not be enough money for the next phases, which include guest accommodation, another Benedic tine charism. The small chapter house inadequately serves as the church, and is open to worshippers from outside.

The Sisters earned the architects’ respect by not compromising on any of the sustainable elements, “hanging on to aspects which most clients just drop”, Ms Smith said. These include the use of recycled local sandstone, solar panels, a woodchip boiler, and water from a rainwater harvester to flush the lavatories, wash the laundry, and serve outside taps for the garden and orchard that will take shape.

A reed-bed system is associated with the septic tank; and a mat of sedum on the east and west roofs of the cloister reduces noise, keeps in the warmth, and provides a view of natural, living roofscape from the first-floor windows.

FOR two hours on an October afternoon, an opportunity never to be repeated, we are privileged as an invited group of journalists to see not only the shared spaces for guests and nuns, all accessed on the east side of the building, but the private enclosure itself, with the cloister courtyard at its hub. The tiny cells resemble simple student-rooms. The wind is whipping up outside, but the white corridors are calm and warm, and the courtyard, with its stunning glass cloister, is bright with sun­shine.

The workrooms are on the first floor, and include a large, bright sewing-room where the nuns make their own habits. There is a smell of clean laundry emanating from neat stacks of well-worn towels and bed-linen. The bulk of the 60,000 books, some of them rare, which comprise the vast library, will have to remain in cardboard boxes until the new library is built, while other books jostle on corridor shelves and in the novitiate common-room.

We descend even to the cellar, with its fragrant woodchip moun tain contained behind a high stable door. Back at ground level there are fresh scones, hunks of chocolate cake, and big pots of tea in the re fectory, where Robert “Mouseman” Thompson’s great oak tables and heavy chairs have survived the journey from Worcester to come home to Yorkshire. Flowers and gifts poured into the Abbey from local people when the nuns arrived, and an Open Day in September was so popular that they ran out of cake.

Always there is an awareness of the surroundings, the inward still ness, and the natural world outside. The 56 acres of the enclosure stretch right to the tree line. Sister Petra, who has been a journalist, a nurse, and a teacher in her former life, reflects on the 17 flat acres from which the nuns have come. “You never thought twice about it. But when you went out for a walk, you literally went for the same walk every time,” she remembers.

“This is a community of faith, but we are very real people and have the same problems as other people do in the world. In the world, if you’ve got problems you can go down the road to the pub or the cinema, or go on holiday. Here, you can’t. That’s when you walk the 56 acres. That’s a very real way of learning to live in community.”