When the New Year comes, some people go out late and drink too much. Others go to bed early. And then some put in some extra time for prayer. Thanksgiving for the year past and blessings for the year to come are always in order.
At a church nearby, they are doing all four decades of the Rosary, followed by Mass on New Year’s Eve — kind of the New York Marathon of the spiritual life.
But some devote their entire lives to living in monasteries, totally dedicated to praying for the world day in and day out whether they feel like it or not. And yes, often, they don’t feel like praying any more than the rest of us!
In the roundup of those who died in the past year, these hidden souls will get no mention except perhaps for Brother Harold Palmer, a 91-year-old English hermit. He was a throwback to the more eccentric days of those who fled to the desert to pray. In 1971, he moved his mobile home to a hill in Northumberland, turning a ruined old farmhouse into a monastic retreat with solitary cells as a Carthusian-style monastery building.
The late actor Sir Alec Guinness, the original Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi (for those who haven’t seen his earlier works, please do!), used to make his retreats in monasteries. He liked to compare them to great power-generating dynamos, like those that light up a city. Only in this case, it is men and women monastics who are calling down grace through prayer and penance. They are like the just men of old who called on God to spare the city, even if only for the sake of a few who believe.
Some monastics, Guinness noted, were hard-headed and practical men; others could be, well, a bit eccentric. All abandoned the world and its comforts to become lighthouses pointing to another world.
The "Tory" Telegraph in London reported the death of Brother Harold, one of the more eccentric of these monks, who based his solitary life of prayer on the tradition of the Desert Fathers of Egypt. These were men and women in the years from 100 to 300 AD living lives of solitude and prayer in the desert beyond the banks of the Nile.
Eventually, these were followed by more organized and less eccentric expressions of monasticism, such as those of St. Basil in the Orthodox world and St. Benedict in the West. The Rule of St. Benedict, written around 530 AD, was in many ways a founding document for the settlement of modern Europe. His watchword was that work and prayer must fill up our days. It is a thirty-page or so document that is still used today and is worth a read in modern English or old-style English.
On his hillside, Brother Harold recited and chanted the prayers of the church day in and day out. "I'm a witness to the fact that there is a God," he said. He saw this life of prayer as one small way of being a witness in a world that had turned its back on God.
He translated medieval Latin plainchant into English. And began by drawing from Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions as a way of healing the scandalous division among Christians. He visited both Orthodox and Catholic monasteries to learn.
He started as a friar in the Anglican tradition and converted to Catholicism in 1996. One wag added some graffiti to his front gate. "Warning: bull in field" became "Warning: papal bull in field."
Brother Harold took it with good humor saying, well, "I'm the papal bull."
Not one for appearances, he rode a quad bike in his friar's robes. When his front tooth fell out, he never bothered to replace it, and for a winter hat, he would wear lost hats he found around the nearby town. The results could be odd.
Whatever people thought of his style, he was a complete contradiction to the gray secular monolith that is trying to take the merry out of today’s old England. Some of his friends compared him to a character out of an Ealing comedy of the 1950s and '60s with its blundering kindly figures. (If you have never seen these, they can be good fun.)
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Brother Harold found it funny that the RAF sometimes did test bombing runs on fake tanks near his hillside home. The government even threatened him for not having a TV license (a TV tax) for the TV he didn’t own.
A judge recently quipped to me that when Jesus was lost in the temple, he became the first free-range child. Well, if we are God’s children, Brother Harold leaned more to the free-range side of that ledger. May Brother Harold Palmer rest in peace.
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