Lowering the portcullises
In a re-enchanted world
One reason for the existence of this blog is to serve as my ‘Commonplace book’, which is what folks once called the book in which they copied appealing quotes or stored sentimental paraphernalia they gathered along the way. To that end I post snippets of writing that moves me, or which is simply great writing. So I was listening to the Fully Alive podcast again in the car the other day and Elizabeth Oldfield was interviewing Rod Dreher (of The Benedictine Option fame) about his new book on re-enchanting the word, called Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.  Towards the end of the podcast Oldfield quotes from a book by Patrick Leigh Fermor called A Time to Keep Silence, written in 1953.
The quote connects nicely to my previous post on spiritual formation. It’s only about a decade or so ago that I was exposed to the Anglican Prayer Book, which had been somewhat disdained by my earlier evangelical upbringing, but which I have since found to be a source of great riches, and which has certainly been a part of the spiritual formation of those who read it for centuries. The quote is about compline, the lullaby of the liturgy as Oldfield called it, or short night prayer before bed, and I just loved it. We can get so benumbed and materialist here in the West, that we forget what we are genuinely up against and how precarious our daily safety can be:
Compline, the office that finishes the monastic day, belongs more than any of them to the world of the mediæval church. Only one lamp is lighted, enough for the monk who reads aloud from the Rule of St. Benedict … The faces of the seated monks are hidden in their hoods, their heads are bowed; and they themselves are only just discernible under the accumulation of shadows ... The whole service is a kind of precautionary exorcism of the terrors of the night, a warding-off of the powers of darkness, each word throwing up a barrier or shooting home a bolt against the prowling regions of the Evil One …
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One by one the keys turn in the wards, the portcullises fall, the invisible drawbridges touch the battlements …
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The windows are barred against the lurking incubus, the pre-eighth-century iambic dimeters seal up any remaining loophole against the invasion of the hovering succubi …
Turn the lights down and read it dramatically. Doesn’t it just make you shiver, and also strangely rejoice in the power of goodness fighting against the darkness?!