A Taste of What Could Be

“This will give you an opportunity to testify… for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”  St. Luke 21:13-14

The senior warden and I were having lunch a few weeks ago over at the Hunter’s Inn, and I asked the waiter if the reuben was any good.  I am, you see, a one sandwich man, and that sandwich is the reuben.  If it’s Friday, I’ll have the fish and, on occasion, the special.  But if I’m out for lunch, it’s usually a reuben.  If I’m to live here for many years to come, I need to figure out who serves the best reuben in Potomac. 

So, I asked the waiter the important question: “is the reuben any good?”  And he was that rare bird, the waiter of probity.  He answered me, “Well, people like it.  But I’m from New York, and they toast it here instead of grilling it.  It’s just not the same.” 

And I thought to myself, I know just what he means.  Because I, too, have been to New York, even unto Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where they make reubens of Biblical proportion. 

The Anchoress in the Loft

 

“Happy are they who dwell in your house! * they will always be praising you.”

Psalm 84:3

“How did we get a recliner and a coffee table up in the Rood Loft?” I asked Father Philip.  “Oh,” he smiled, “I guess you haven’t heard the story about our anchoress.”

But let me back up a bit.  I was a seminarian at the time, and a member of the congregation and an altar server at Pusey House.  Pusey House is technically not a church, but a “house of piety and learning,” and it’s the chaplaincy for high-church Anglican students at Oxford University.  It is housed in a beautiful neo-Gothic chapel, designed by the great Temple Moore, and the chapel is dominated by a life-size rood, a statue of Jesus on the Cross with St. Mary and St. John.  The rood is placed on a large platform called the rood-loft, a kind of balcony that goes across the breadth of the church about ten feet up, dividing the Chancel of the Church from the Nave.   If you’ve spent much time poking around old churches, you will know the Rood Screen, which is a smaller version of this—we had one in my last congregation that was maybe a foot wide.  But the Rood Loft at Pusey House was really a room of its own, 6 or 8 feet wide, with a tall stone parapet on either side.  I had been sent up onto it to retrieve some obscure liturgical implement, and that’s where I discovered the dusty recliner.

The Rood Loft, Father Philip went on to tell me, had been the home of Pusey’s resident anchoress for a few months a decade or so before.  An anchoress is a person called by God to a life of solitary prayer.  It’s a bit like a hermit, but while hermits tend to live in caves in the wilderness, anchorites or anchoresses live inside churches.  Back in the Middle Ages they were quite common, and Julian of Norwich, the beloved mystic quoted by Rev. Mary Thorpe in her sermon last week, was an anchoress in the Church of Saint Julian in Norwich back in the fourteenth century.  These days, they are much rarer.  In fact, as far as I know, the one from Pusey’s Rood Loft may have been the only anchoress in the modern history of the Anglican Communion.