Easter Greetings to all readers
Easter 1939 - a rich little Easter cake; the chapel floor is finished at long last; Mary Magdalene an apostle to the apostles... All in all, it's a busy time for Adela Curtis
A warm welcome to the latest post from In Search of Adela Curtis, A Modern Mystic. The weather has been appalling here over the last few days but yesterday (Easter Eve) there was beautiful sunshine and I took some photos in our grounds to include in this post.
Later today, Easter Day, I will be joining many of my lay and clergy colleagues in the Bride Valley and Chesil Benefice, at our first joint service since the new benefice was created last autumn. We are now a grouping of 10 churches: back in 1939, Burton Bradstock (the nearest village to Othona) was a single parish with its own full-time Rector, the Revd Arthur Dittmer, who had arrived in 1936 and would actually stay until 1964. In her diary for 1939, Adela Curtis records that Mr Dittmer would come up to Community House once a week, generally on a Wednesday, to preside at Holy Communion for the Sisters and any of their visitors who wished to attend. It was on Easter Monday at noon that he came to take the service over the Easter weekend that year. Unfortunately by then Adela was not well enough to attend and she needed to stay in bed all that day.
At least the chapel was now fully finished and in use. Earlier in the year, all teaching and services were still taking place in the Common Room (known today as the Sitting Room), as the chapel floor was causing grief, with umpteen letters and phone calls to the architect and the builders, until finally the work that was needed to make it good was done towards the end of February. This Easter, 9 April 1939, would therefore make good use of the chapel and almost certainly the same would have applied for Easter 1940, just before the house was requisitioned by the army and men from the 9th Durham Light Infantry were billeted in it.
‘It is finished’
For Adela, Easter 1939 was a busy time of teaching: she had been giving lectures on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Eve and Easter Day. These were later published as Part 12 of a series called Studies in the Collect, Epistle & Gospel for each Sunday in the Year, with Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Eve and Ascension. The full series ran to 14 booklets. For most of the Sundays in the year she would focus on the Collect (the special prayer for the Sunday), the Epistle (a reading from one of the letters in the New Testament) and the Gospel passage, all of which were set out in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer. For Easter, however, not only were there the extra holy days but also she chose to cover more biblical material than the prayer book offered.
For Good Friday, for example, her teaching included reflections on the ‘Seven Words’, or sayings, said by Jesus when he was on the cross. The thoughts she shares on the sixth of these, ‘It is finished’, reveal some of her key spiritual concerns and inner experience. I’ve chosen a couple of short extracts and after each, in the bullet points, I have attempted to highlight the main points of interest as I understand them:
Redemption is a finished work! … all who profess to believe in Eternal Life as the Gift of God in Christ Jesus, - a gift to be possessed here and now, since in Eternity there are no temporal divisions of past and future - must … renounce the carnal illusions of Time, Space, Becoming, and receive the transformation and renewal of the mind, enabling them to rise into the Spiritual Dimension of Freedom from the earth limitations. [p13] [Italicisation and Capitalisation are her own.]
Eternal Life as a gift to be possessed here and now. Although Adela had distanced herself from some of the New Thought (NT) teaching, which she had embraced in earlier years, yet she kept hold of the NT understanding that Eternal Life was something that could be experienced now. As there is no ‘time’ in God, no past or future, so she would argue that it makes no sense to ‘wait’ for some later time after death to experience eternal life.
Time, Space and Becoming. For her, these are limitations of our bodily (carnal) lives on earth. We are so used to them that we assume they are ‘real’ and that through our senses we experience the ‘real’ world. She would argue that God is the only reality, therefore we need to let go of these limitations in order to experience the Spiritual.
Spiritual dimension. Adela uses language carefully. For her, spiritual is a development on from both the material dimension, of which our bodily senses are aware and from what she calls the psychical dimension, which is related to ideas and culture. To find God, we must turn our attention away from both of these in order to enter the spiritual dimension.
The next paragraph follows immediately on from the earlier one:
To hear [the words of Jesus, ‘It is finished’] spoken by the Voice of the Ever-Living One in Contemplative Silence is to be set free from past and future; to realise as a present experience the “finished” Work of Redemption; and to be able to practise the Lord’s Rule for Prayer in claiming as already fulfilled all that is asked in His Name. Herein is healing for all discouragement at apparent failure, all impatience at delay in the carnal time-sequence of work for the Kingdom. If the Master says of His Work “It is Finished”, there is no need for His servants to fret and fume in desperation over the many ragged edges of their efforts to do on earth as He has done in Heaven.
This is a revealing paragraph, as I think Adela is describing some of her own experience here.
The importance for her of times of contemplative silence. It is in this mode that she may experience hearing the words, ‘It is finished’, as said by Christ. This is when she seems to experience eternal life, which is a release from the constraints of time.
This becomes a healing experience for her. The discouragement about failure that she mentions, and the impatience are part of her lived experience. This meditative silent encounter with Christ that she describes seems to be the one way that she experiences ‘healing for all discouragement for apparent failure’. As a result, she can let herself off the hook of fretting about work that feels unfinished.
Celandine growing in the grounds to the west of the chapel.
‘A little rich Easter cake’
Easter also had a lighter side for Adela, a bit of a holiday feel to the season, as her nieces, Phil and Eve came down from London on the Wednesday before Easter and stayed for just over a week. They brought Adela ‘a little rich Easter cake’ and told her about an artwork which presumably Phil had painted:
‘The tempera picture of the Sisters in the garden sold at the Exhibition for 12 guineas [£12 12 shillings]: about a guinea an 1/2 inch for it was very small. Some stranger bought it at once. It looked Italian: mediaeval & “religious”.’
I would love to see this picture - I wonder where it is now!
Unfortunately, Eve brought a cold with her from London and she gave it to her aunt, who was already being treated by Dr Oliphant from Bridport for heart trouble. On Easter Day Adela wrote:
6.am. Lovely weather. Flowers from several. Easter Gift of £14 for publishing Easter lectures.
Gave lecture 3pm - 4.15pm. Could hardly get home. Went to bed. Have taken on Eve’s heavy “cold”. Face and head a raw ache. Nothing like it for 30 years!
Mussolini has brutally invaded Albania. King exiled to Greece. His wife, alas, with first child only 4 days old!
Adela became really poorly, going down with what was probably some kind of infection, which lasted for a good few weeks and brought depression with it. When she finally found the energy to return to the main house, she had a major falling out with most of the resident sisters, as they had eaten food and drunk tea that should have been kept in reserve as emergency war stores. It was a difficult time for them all.
‘Apostle to the Apostles’
For the final part of today’s post, we pick up on a brief extract from Adela Curtis’ Easter Day address, in which she attends to all the resurrection appearances that take place on that first day. She draws her hearers’ attention to the fact that women were the first people who saw the Risen Christ:
Of the five revelations of the Risen Lord on the First Day it is significant, deeply significant, that the first and the second were both made to women; the third to two travellers; the fourth to Peter; the last to the eleven and “those that were with them”.
Natural expectation would have reversed the order, putting the eleven first, and the women last.
But it was a woman who was chosen as the Messenger of the Resurrection, the Apostle appointed by the Risen Lord to carry the Good Tidings to the eleven; and their refusal to believe It is at once a witness to Its reality, and an indication of the danger of relying upon the “male” or rational mind for “right judgement” and “spiritual discernment” in “the things which are Eternal.” …
The fact that she was a woman would hinder their reception of the Message sent through her.
The same sad blindness afflicts the church today…[p51] [Adela Curtis’ capitalisation of certain words.]
The prominence of the women in the resurrection appearances is noted routinely by commentators these days, but I imagine it would have been far less to the fore in biblical scholarship in the 1930s. In the UK, universal suffrage for all women over the age of 21 had only been made law in 1928, just 11 years previously and the ordination of women to the Anglican priesthood in the UK would not happen for another 55 years.
From her own experience, it isn’t difficult to imagine that Adela identified herself with Mary Magdalene, in the way that her own gender hindered the reception of the ‘Message sent through her’. Just a few years previously, Adela had approached the then Bishop of Salisbury to enquire whether the Community could be accepted into the Church of England. According to her niece Phil, he was very interested, but died before any action could be taken and his successor refused to accept any community with a woman at its head.
Thank you for journeying with me into the world of Adela Curtis and her communities over the last six months. I have some holiday coming up and will be taking a break from writing posts during April.
The poem that comes to my mind at Easter is the one written by e.e. cummings that begins ‘i thank You God for most this amazing day’. If you would like to read it, click on this link