In This House of Brede
By Rumer Godden

672 Pages • $13.95

INTRODUCTION
by Phyllis Tickle

In This House of Brede
By Rumer Godden

[Open a pdf version]

The motto was “Pax,” but the word was set in a circle of thorns.

In This House of Brede opens with that sentence, and any introduction to Godden’s work dare not do less. “Peace” above the door, but a crown of thorns surrounding it.

Eastern Orthodoxy has, almost from the beginning, had the clearest aesthetic of all of Christianity about religious art, whether the art be in
stone or paint or music or words. The Orthodox Church teaches its artist/believers that holy art must always be informed by and saturated
with a certain and “bright sadness.” Divine art must always be pervaded
by a sweet mixture—deep, compassionate sorrow for the sin and sorrows
of this present life commingled with a luminous joy over the promised salvation and relief, which are promised by the one who can never
promise in vain. That certain and bright sadness informs every Byzantine painting that has ever been hallowed and every iconostasis that has ever been venerated. Though Rumer Godden was a Roman Catholic rather
than Eastern in her profession, that certain and bright sadness that
pervades Orthodoxy informs her great novel, In This House of Brede.

Philippa Talbot is Godden’s protagonist, the icon who becomes saturated with the bright sadness over the course of the story of Brede. When we
first meet her, she is a well-tailored, striking widow of considerable accomplishment in government service who has gone as far as she can
go in the formation of her own soul. Further progress requires some
radical interruption in her ways of being in the world. She is a disciplined woman, but of a generous disposition. This is as it should be in a
Christian. She has managed to change a passionate affair with a married lover into one of companionship without infidelity, albeit at great personal cost and pain to both of them. This, too, is as it should be. She even has come to understand that her marriage, though it was ended by her husband’s death, was in essence a failed one; and she accepts with contrition that the failure was as much her fault as his.

Philippa carries with her as well the eternal agony of a personal tragedy buried deep in her past. The memory of her desperate, pleading words during those moments course like an antiphon through every day and
every night of Philippa’s life. They become a dark motif, a constant chant
of the grief that informs Philippa’s way of coming to the House of Brede.

Philippa seeks admission to Brede, a Benedictine monastery near the sea
in the south of England. A fictional place based on Stanbrook Convent
and St. Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde, Isle of Wight, Brede is a holy place inhabited by very human sinners called to a very particular form of service to God. The cloistered nuns have one single, overarching vocation. They
are called to the life of prayer. Everything else is subsumed under that
one duty: prayer. In choir and away from it, the nuns pray. They know
that it is in this way only that the world is changed. God flows through the nuns into human affairs, and human affairs flow back to God in the same way. Conduits of conversation between the divine and the human, they discipline themselves toward the purity of soul required to be a good and trustworthy portal between two realms. The aim and the result of such a
life is peace, as the motto above the entrance to the House of Brede says. But the peace to be gained and effected at Brede is, as Brede’s Lord said, “My peace, and not as the world gives.”

Philippa’s story can be read on several levels. In This House of Brede is probably the most accessible, accurate, and sympathetic presentation of monastic life in all of English literature. I have often sent copies of it to friends who want to better grasp what a monastery actually is, how it is organized, and why it exists. In fact, I first came to know Brede a quarter-century ago in precisely that way. I had been asking about monasteries; a colleague of mine, Judy Platt of the Association of American Publishers, sent me a copy of Brede as the definitive answer. She was right. Since
then, I have returned to Brede more than once. In fact, with the exception
of the Bible, it is the only book I have ever read more than three times.

One can certainly read In This House of Brede as the finely honed story
it is. Rumer Godden was a consummate artist long before she was a Christian, and she never betrays her craft, not even to make a doctrinal
point. The skills of rich characterization that she brings to her nuns are marvelous to behold. Godden’s women fairly dance across her pages,
each one as credible as a favorite aunt or—sometimes—a distressing
mother-in-law. (Caveat: One does not love all the sisters at Brede, but
one does believe them.)

From the beginning, it is also apparent that one can engage this tale as simply a fictional but very realistic biography of Philippa Talbot. The progress of her soul is translucent, open to our view, entirely plausible.
But any of these readings of Brede—an exploration of monastic life, a wonderful story, a biography of Philippa—is incomplete unless pursued
in combination with yet one other way of knowing the story.

As with the Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Progress, so with Philippa. She is every searcher after Christian truth; and Brede is the microcosm we each inhabit. Our stories are not hers but the stuff of our souls is identical to hers and, Godden lets us understand, identical as well to that of every other
follower of the Christ. We are all vowed, and we forget that to our own peril. We forget it as well to the peril of the community of which we are member-parts. We belong by virtue of communion and confession to that larger house of which Brede is not more than an exemplary image.

Rumer Godden was born in England in 1907, reared from infancy in
India, returned to England as an adult, and died in Scotland in 1998. She wrote more than sixty works during her life, works that included novels (Black Narcissus, The River), children’s books (The Kitchen Madonna,
St. Jerome and the Lion), poetry (The Creatures’ Choir) and nonfiction (Two under the Indian Sun).

Godden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1968 at the age of sixty.
Of it, she would later say, “I like the way everything is clear and concise. You’ll always be forgiven, but you must know the rules.” The poignancy and the unguarded candor of that profession take on an added persuasion when one understands that, in preparing to write In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden lived for three years at the gate of an English Benedictine abbey. The experience changed her life. It certainly has changed mine.
And I assume it is about to change yours as well. Traveling mercies.

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