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Obituary | The work of prayer
讣告 | 祷告工作
英文部分选自经济学人20241221期讣告板块
Obituary | The work of prayer
讣告|祷告工作
Brother Harold Palmer lived alone in the wilds by choice
哈罗德·帕尔默修士选择独自生活在野外
The Northumbrian hermit died on October 4th, aged 93
这位诺森伯兰郡的隐士于10月4日去世，享年93岁
Sometime in 1970 Brother Harold Palmer, then living in a house of the Society of St Francis, received a strange parcel in the post. He never knew who had sent it. It contained a mason’s trowel, a set square, a plumb-line and a surveyor’s measuring tape. Plainly, he had building to do.
1970年，当时住在圣方济会下的一所修道院的哈罗德·帕尔默修士收到了一个奇怪的包裹。他不知道是谁寄来的，里面有一把泥瓦匠用的泥铲、一把直角尺、一根铅垂线和一根测量员用的卷尺。很显然，他有建筑工作要做了。
Up until then he had been undecided. He had seen a possible site, called Shepherds Law, on top of a gorse-thick hill in Northumberland with views as far as Scotland. But it was still not ideal. In fact, it was ruins: bits of an 18th-century cottage, two triple-arched arcades and an almost-gone pavilion. Not worth a visit, his guide had said. The arcades had probably been part of a folly long ago. There was no point in starting a new one.
在那之前，他一直犹豫不决。他曾在诺森伯兰郡一座长满金雀花的山顶上发现了一个可行的地点，叫做谢佩尔兹罗（Shepherds Law），从那里可以远眺苏格兰。但这个地方仍不理想。事实上，那里是一片废墟：一座18世纪小屋的残骸, 两个三拱式回廊和一个几乎倒塌的小亭子。他的向导说，那里不值得去。那些回廊大概是很久以前庭院装饰的部分遗留。在那里建一所新房子毫无意义。
Probably not. But Brother Harold had been looking for a long time, and all over the place, for somewhere he could found a skete: a tiny monastic community where he would live alone and a few chosen brothers would live close, in separate cells. They would tend a communal garden, eat and do chores together, and most vitally build a little chapel where they would sing the Divine Office seven times a day. That too was work: Opus Dei, the work of God. And after a while it would become an exercise in joy.
也许此言非虚。但哈罗德修士已经四处找寻了很久，他想找一个地方来建一座隐修院：一个小型修道院社区，在那里他可以独自居住，还会挑选少量几位修士住在附近的单间里。他们会照料公共花园，一起用餐、做家务，最重要的是建一座小教堂，在那里他们每天会唱七次日课经（the Divine Office）。这也是工作：主业会（Opus Dei），即上帝的工作。而且过一段时间之后，它将成为一种快乐修行。
An Anglican priest, Father William Sirr, had tried to set up a skete at Glasshampton in 1918; sadly, no one had joined him. Perhaps Brother Harold’s counter-culturaldream could catch on in the modern age. People often said how much they longed for silence and stillness, and a life of prayer, solitary or almost so, was all about that. This was what had struck him most strongly when he visited Mount Athos and wandered among the sketes there: a stillness that if suddenly broken by a swallow, or a boat engine, immediately redescended like a presence. It had been a feature, too, of the lives of the earliest saints of Northumbria. St Cuthbert was said to have stood so still in the sea, praying by night, that his feet froze, and two otters came to him to lick them warm. In those days the Christian church had been undivided. He longed fiercely for it to be one body again.
1918年圣公会的神父威廉·希尔（William Sirr）曾尝试在格拉斯汉普顿设立一个隐修院，但可惜无人加入。哈罗德（Harold）神父的反主流文化理想，或许可以成为神父威廉-希尔（Sirr William）在当代的继承人。人们常说自己多么渴望静谧和安宁，修行者的孤独生活正是如此。哈罗德(Harold)去游历阿索斯山,在那里的修道院之间游荡, 此行给他最深刻的感受是一种静谧：即便突然被燕子或者船引擎声打破, 静谧也会即刻再次回归。早期诺森布里亚的圣徒过的就是这样的生活。据说, 圣卡斯伯特(St Cuthbert)夜晚在海里纹丝不动地驻立祈祷, 以至于双脚都冻住了, 两只水獺把他的脚舔暖. 那时候的基督教会还没有分开派系。如今他强烈希望教会能再次合为一体。
skete ：斯基特是东方基督教中的一个修道院社区,允许僧侣相对隔离,通常由许多小间或穴组成,作为居住区,并有一个集中的教堂或礼拜堂。
Since 1960, when he became a member of the SSF (the Anglican version of the Franciscans), he had lived in several SSF houses. But he couldn’t settle. He did not enjoy community on that scale, disliked being regimented, and hated the principle of enclosure. All in all, a difficult brother. He was happiest at the Alnmouth house on the Northumbrian coast, where the friars had to go down to the beach to gather sea-coal for the freezing rooms, and where railway trains, his passion, steamed past on the east-coast main line. In order not to miss them he would hitch his robe into his girdle, seize his situp-and-beg bike and race madly towards the smoke. He loved to be out and doing. He also loved to constantly acknowledge God around and within him, in song or silence, and alone.
1960年，他成为SSF(英国国教版的方济各会)的一员。自那时起，他曾在多个SSF修道院居住过。但是他一直没能安定下来。他在那种规模的社区住不惯，不喜欢受管束，讨厌封闭式的条条框框。总之，他不算一个好相处的修士。他在诺森伯兰沿岸的阿尔茅斯镇修行所过得最快乐，在那里修道士们需要到海滩上去采集海煤来给屋子取暖，还有铁轨火车会在东海岸的主线旁疾驰而过。铁轨火车是他的激情所在，为了不错过列车，他会把长袍塞进束带里，抓起他那辆坐立式自行车，疯狂地朝着烟雾冲去。他闲不住喜欢往外跑，也享受他独身一人时感受到的上帝与自己同在的那些美好瞬间，或在吟诵时或在寂静中。
situp-and-beg：The original sit-up-and-beg was a style of bicycle. It had a handlebar rather higher than the saddle, and when you put your hands up to steer, you looked rather like a begging dog.
St Francis had faced that dilemma. He ordered his followers to preach in towns, and did so himself. But he also made a habit of retiring to pray in remote and rocky places. Each Franciscan had to ask, as Francis did, whether he belonged in the world or not. The Northumbrian saints had a similar mission to the laity but also treasured solitude, as Cuthbert did when he fled to the Farne Islands. Brother Harold definitely needed both, and when he first went to live at Shepherd’s Law, in 1971 in a cold caravan wrapped in straw-bales containing rats, he often wondered what on earth he was doing. He made sure to get a mobile phone.
圣弗朗西斯也曾面临这种困境，他曾命自己的信众去各镇传教，自己也身体力行。但是他喜欢在偏僻的石头多的地方修行。每个方济会的信众都会问，弗朗西斯也会问自己，他到底属不属于这个世界。北安布里亚的圣徒也有类似的向普通大众传教的任务，但是他们也很珍视离群索居的时光，卡斯伯特（Cuthbert）就曾逃去过法恩群岛。哈罗德（Harold）绝对也是两种状态都需要，1971年他第一次去到谢佩尔兹罗（Shepherds Law），住在一辆冰冷的大篷车上，车上铺着稻草，老鼠窸窣作响，他常常问自己到底都在干嘛。他当时想方设法都要给自己搞台手机。
2，卡斯伯特（Cuthbert、约634年—687年3月20日）是7世纪诺森布里亚的一位凯尔特圣人。他曾在古梅尔罗斯和林迪斯法恩等地传教。
He had decided to raise money for his hermitage-house by working in a geriatric ward, tending frail old men who steadily died around him. But at Shepherds Law fellow-friars and local people, from the village of Eglingham and round about, soon lent a hand. Traditionally, hermits and anchorites always drew visitors. Clearly most locals liked having this curious solitary nearby. As he built his hermitage—thick walls of local stone and concrete, clay pantiles on the roof—donations of material kept coming. Since sanitation for years was a slop-bucket and an Elsan, he exchanged dog-walking for baths. His letterbox was at the bottom of the hill, to save the postman trouble. Villagers would leave cakes and other offerings there. The Friends of Shepherds Law were set up to raise funds for him. Over his 50 years of hermithood he became a village character: smiling, scruffy, missing a front tooth, and devoted to his Thomas the Tank Engine woolly hat with earflaps.
为了筹集隐居小屋的资金，他决定在一家老年病房工作，照顾那里年长体弱的老人，伴着他们相继离世。但是在谢佩尔兹罗（Shepherds Law），其他的修士、埃格林杰姆（Eglingham）村和周边的居民很快就伸出了援手。一直以来，各种隐居士的存在总会吸引访客。很显然，大部分当地人都挺喜欢这个令人有些好奇的独居者生活在附近。当他建造他的隐居所——用当地的石材和混凝土造的厚墙、用瓦片铺盖的屋顶——时，源源不断地有人捐赠建筑材料给他。由于多年来他的卫浴设施只是一个便桶、一瓶马桶清洁剂（注：Elsan，英国常见的马桶清洁剂品牌，也生产其他卫浴消毒产品，但以马桶清洁最为知名），他通过替人遛狗来换取洗澡的福利。为了给邮递人员省去麻烦，他的信箱放置在山脚下。村民们也会将糕点或是其他捐赠放在那里。为了给他筹集资金, 还成立了一个“谢佩尔兹罗之友（Friends of Shepherds Law）”社团。五十多年的隐士生活，他俨然成了村庄的标志人物：笑呵呵的，衣服有些破破烂烂，还缺了一颗门牙；总是戴着一顶有耳罩的托马斯小火车图案的无檐针织帽。
His purpose there, though, was prayer. Prayer both Anglican, from the Book of Common Prayer, and Catholic, since in 2004 he had turned to Rome. He loved, and used, both liturgies together. At first there was nowhere to pray but in the biting wind; then in a lean-to against the ruined wall, roofed with corrugated iron. Money from his mother, after she died, paid for a beautiful Romanesque chapel in local stone, dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert, with icons and stained glass and a relic of Cuthbert under the altar. The walls contained fragments of brick gathered from the beach at Lindisfarne, his Holy Island. Seven times a day, for the canonical hours of matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline, Brother Harold would ring a medieval bell and enter to sing the Psalter. He had spent hours unearthing and translating Latin liturgies from archives in Durham and elsewhere, fitting them to Gregorian chant he had composed himself on the backs of envelopes. Chant, like his icons, pointed to the Mystery.
不过，他在隐居所的目的仍然是祈祷。既包括英国国教的祈祷（来自《公共祈祷书》），也有天主教的祈祷。因为2004年起，他已经转投了罗马（注：罗马教廷，指代天主教）。两种礼拜仪式他都深爱，也都会使用。起初，除了在凛冽的寒风中，他没有其他地方可以祷告；后来来到靠着废墟墙边搭的小披棚里，一层瓦楞铁板便是屋顶。他用母亲去世后留给他的钱建造了一个漂亮的罗马式小教堂，使用的也是当地石材，献给圣玛丽和圣卡斯伯特。小教堂里有圣像（注：圣像画，基督教中被用来注视、思考、以此进入神的秘境并与圣人联结的绘画，非礼拜用）、花窗玻璃，圣坛之下还有一件圣卡斯伯特的圣徒遗物；墙壁上嵌有从林迪斯法恩圣岛的海滩收集的砖块碎片。一天的祷告有七次，在基督教礼仪时辰中的夜祷（matins，子夜时分）、第一时辰（prime，六点时）、第三时辰（terce，九点时）、第六时辰（sext，正午）、第九时辰（none，下午三点）、晚祷（vespers，点灯时分或下午六点）、睡前祷（compline，睡前或晚九点）时，哈罗德修士会敲响中世纪的钟，进入小教堂，吟唱《诗篇》。他花费了几多小时，从杜伦和其他地方的档案中发掘并翻译拉丁教会的礼拜仪式，配上自己在信封背面谱写的格里高利圣咏。圣咏如同圣像，也指向着神的秘境。
Usually he was alone. He had built four well-equipped cells for visitors, each with its upstairs oratory; quite a few stayed, but no one stayed for good. Perhaps they disliked the smell of paraffin lamps, or objected to the meals of cold baked beans. It didn’t matter too much. As long as he himself remembered God continually, as he did, and addressed Him on behalf of the world and its troubles, and allowed God to enter his heart and dwell there, all was well. Between the verses of the Psalms, sheep bleated outside. He was perfectly still.
通常，他都是独自一人。为了访客，他建造了四个设施齐全的单间，每个楼上都配有自己的祈祷室；不少访客都曾在里面留宿，但没有人长期留下来。或许他们不喜欢煤油灯的气味，或许他们拒绝把冷茄汁焗豆当作一日三餐。这都不重要。他只需数年如一日，一直记得主，一直代表这个世界和这个世界的困扰向主祈祷，并允许主进入他的内心、驻留在那里，就够了。《诗篇》段落之间，外面的小羊在咩咩地叫。而他，岿然如山。
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