Sublime

For the Benedictines, gardening was an equaliser and nobody within the monastery was too grand or too learned to work in the garden for part of the day. This was a culture of care and reverence in which the gardener’s tools were to be treated with the same level of respect as the vessels of the altar. It was a way of life in which the body, mind

A private world of women, guarding their sanctuary. Nuns in sackcloth living in huts near a riverbank. That’s what it reminds him of.

Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Col. 3:12–16).

Ann Bedford Ulanov

ecclesiastical

You will see: women are weak, but mothers are strong.

This architectural mode of enclosure and enfolding suggests sanctuary, retreat, and escape. From the narthex entry one is invited to lose oneself in this space that channels the pilgrim into a labyrinth of octagons and circles, inviting a wandering that seems to escape from the driven, goal-oriented ways we inhabit the “outside” world. The pilgrim