Reflections on Mepkin Abbey
Porter Taylor
Emily Dickinson wrote this about poetry:
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
That’s the way I feel in moments when I am at Mepkin Abbey Monastery in lower South Carolina. The Abbey is over 3,000 acres and is beside the Cooper River.
Of course, the monastery is not for everyone. The monks have practices and a shedule that go back to the 11th Century. Monasteries are primarily only for men as the convents are only for women. The monks and nuns take oaths of staying for life. There is no alcohol or television or newspapers. They are strictly celebrate and even are strict about what visitors can wear. They are also vegetarian. I have always struggled with the meals because breakfast is simply oatmeal or hard boiled eggs and dinner is left overs from lunch or peanut butter sandwiches. Lunch is the big meal—albeit that it too is vegetarian.
Then there’s the schedule:
4:00 AM Vigils and Morning Prayer
:7:00 AM Mass –The great Silence from the night before ends
Work in the morning—and at Noon Mid-Day Prayer
Then Work for the monks—but free time for the visitors until Supper at 5:00
6:00 Vesper—which means prayers in the chapel
Finally at 7:30 more prayer at Compline which ends with a monk shaking water drops on each person’s head as they leave the church
and—Beginning of Great Silence until the 4:00 am Vigils again.
Over and over six days a week. On Sunday—the sabbath—there is just the Eucjharist (Lord’s Summer) in the morning.
I usually stay for six days and get used to the schedule on day three.
I read and pray in the chapel and walk in the 100 acres.
But I feel awe when I go to the garden and connect to the statue of the Virgin Mary. It takes me out of my mind—with all my regrets or fears or hopes. The statue is by the river and is made of white cement. Mary is holding Jesus, her baby. Her check is touching his head, and her arms hold his face under her left ear.
Twice a day I go to the statue and stare. At some point I place my head on her right hand that is holding the Jesus child and close my eyes until I experience her holding me. I never know how long that will take.
When it does, I feel connected to something bigger than me. It’s as if I hear what St. Julian of Norwich heard: “All will e well and all manner of things will be well.” There is something about connecting to this statue that calms me down and tells my inner score keeper to be quiet. I sometimes think it’s making up for the distance I had most of my life between me and my mother and father, but I resist going there because it keeps me from being present in this moment instead of regretting the past, and God knows I have had enough regrets.
So, in some sense this Mary makes up for all that I missed in childhood. While I stand there, my brain clears and I just breathe in and out as I feel my fears go down my body into the ground only to be washed into the river when the rain comes.
There’s peace that comes as I lean into her and only hear the birds over the water. I have such regrets about my connection with my mother and some misgivings about how I raised our children, and then, there’s the fears of the present moment as I battle Alzheimer’s disease. But with my head in her hands, all that worry flows into the river and I am at peace. I don’t have to talk or verbally respond. The only mistake I can make here is to try to make something happen. I lean into her hands as she holds the baby Jesus and breathe. Slowly my fears and reservations and guilt for all that is done or left undone goes out of my body into the dark and maybe into the Cooper River ten feet down the hill.
I never know how long I stand there. But at one point, I lift my head, kiss her hands and back away.
Then I go and sit on the hill above the river and watch
the river flow and see the Herons dive into the water to be fed. I don’t envy them for I have just been feed on this day by Mary, and thank God I have six more days to be feed and hope that’s enough for me to look at her picture when I am at home and have a sense that all will be well.
I have read in various books and articles about “Liminal Spaces” especially in places like Iona. I don’t have to go across the ocen. Soince1996 I have been going at least once a year to Mepkin. Liminal space means “a threshold between two points, signaling the end of one time and space and the beginning of another.”
I go to Mepkin because it is a liminal space. It invites me out of just repeating the same old story of why I am not enough and instead invites me to be connected to the source so that I might actually become the person God has created me to be.
