lake louise & lady florence
Jebs & I are having such fun discovering new places here in Canada, while also going back to revisit old spiritual roots - both are deeply refreshing
So I thought this time I’d give a flavour of both side by side - placing our visit to a famous (& snowy) lake resort alongside teaching about the pathway to holiness, drawn from another favourite personal mentor & spiritual guide
The visit to Lake Louise involved a climb up to a sister lake named Agnes, so I’ve christened the mountain ascent in between “Lady Florence” …
(on the road from Banff to Lake Louise …)
Florence Allshorn is an (unofficial) saint who has inspired me immensely over the last 25 years. Like many I first discovered her through going on annual prayer retreat to St. Julian’s Coolham, the community house she founded in the 1940s (now under new management as “St. Cuthman’s”)
Florence & St. Julian’s were a key part of my later feeling called to nearby Horsham … as praying here left a warm sense that West Sussex is “where God lives”, & moving to our parish 8 years ago felt much like coming home
Florence was a missionary and trainer of missionaries, and most of this blog will simply be a transcript of her own words about holiness from talks and private correspondence. However first I will let an actress named Athene Seyler introduce her for us :
“I only met Florence Allshorn a few times - over a supper table, at a bazaar, in church. Each time I had an unforgettable and almost incommunicable impression of something I had never encountered before, a feeling that she was living in two worlds simultaneously, mine and one she brought with her. This seemed to show itself in a strange and delightful contradiction in her personality. She was at once gay and yet profoundly serious around her gaiety. She appreciated and offered the best of material pleasures and comforts and beauties and yet one suspected that they really meant nothing to her. She looked ready to share one’s most trivial or sordid experience and one knew she would be untouched by it at the same time as bearing it. She gave me the impression of toughness and delicacy, like silver wire. I believe, of course, that I am trying to describe saintliness”
(still on the road from Banff to Lake Louise …)
Although an utterly different personality to John Vianney, Florence had also highly developed both the “throw off” and “run with eyes fixed” dimensions of the way to holiness, as described last time
Indeed she was always characteristically passionate in its pursuit :
“I hate being weak when what’s needed is strength. I hate being ineffective when it’s leaders that the world is wanting. I hate, hate, hate being ordinary and nice, but dull …”
Her vision for training missionaries, and refreshing them when on furlough, was similarly to kindle & rekindle in them a deep longing for holiness :
“We are suffering terribly from a kind of Christian insipidity; suffering too from a Christianity which is merely conversion, merely service - when the goal set before us is perfection and we dare not let any life settle on a less true foundation than that ‘high calling’ of which St. Paul was so aware”
(… & still on the road from Banff to Lake Louise - nearly there now!)
Florence was ruthlessly focused on dying to self - and yet at the same time declared with the full force of her being what a joy it is to be alive. This is what I understand Jesus meant when he said that those who “lose their lives will find them”…
Yet in a paper on ‘Leadership’ Florence laments that we often fail to grasp (or at least fail to seriously set about obeying) that very key principle :
“Many Christians have been shown the first mile of the Christian venture, salvation from sin, but not the second, salvation from egotism, and that is where they begin to wander in the wasteland … It is a long and costly thing to learn. Unless we are always learning ourselves - a learning that will free us from any tinge of complacency that we are safe because we know such a lot of theory, or are able to run effectively some Christian enterprise or institution - we can lead no-one out of their wasteland. So many refuse to face themselves in any deep and costing way, and that is why there are comparatively few spiritual leaders”
In training missionaries she seized opportunities to help her students face themselves, and “feed on difficulties” that could challenge their cosy self preoccupation. Florence knew that simply getting on with close colleagues is a key strategic training ground, for this holy adventure of dying to self :
“Help the student to cope with the girl she dislikes. Put them at a job together, interpret them to each other. Don’t let her off till she knows how to refuse defeat …”
When friends & old students wrote to her, telling of very difficult conditions, she used often to write back, “Good, this is your chance, don’t miss it!”
Florence’s own spiritual disciplines in the battle against self were practical and not at all po-faced. A friend remembers back to her young days during the Great War, when they were art students together in Sheffield :
“They were joyous days in spite of much that was difficult, with laughter always near the surface. With her quick free eager spirit she was the ideal companion. Her sense of fun and readiness to laugh at herself were delightful, especially when allied to self-discipline. One day I noticed her wearing an unusually shabby pair of shoes. "Aren’t they dreadful?” she said cheerfully. “It’s because I’ve just done a bad thing and whenever I behave like that again I’m going to wear my very oldest shoes as a punishment …”
(arriving at Lake Joanna - aka some other important lady apparently..)
Alongside “throwing off” all that hinders, Florence also ran with “eyes fixed” upon Jesus. Her particular pathway for contemplation was consistent throughout her life : an intense love of beauty wherever she found it, leading to an infectious enjoyment of creation, art and culture …
The world for her was ‘charged with the grandeur of God’. She took endless delight in its manifold revelation of beauty, and in being His partner in the co-creative work of perfecting it.
Here she writes to a friend on holiday (passing on excellent advice also for clergy on sabbaticals I think) :
“Don’t worry your head about theological problems. Read books with only half-a-dozen lines on a page, mostly sloppy. It will do you a world of good. Also don’t think about yourself at all, I mean your moral self. Just be a pagan, loving the sky and the sun and the smell of things and let yourself expand that way a bit. It’s no end healthy … Do you know I think one of the best things you can do on a holiday is to ask nothing, want nothing, but just praise God for everything. Always be praising him - for the little sticky leaves, the rich sombre greenness of the trees, all the kindnesses you get, on a holiday. Just one long praise of beautiful things and forget that great, big, striving, blundering self of yours. Then come back to us clean and fresh and contagious and let us too get a sight of the glory of God”
Just soaking in God’s truth & beauty - through creation, through music, through art - she is describing for us the way of the contemplative, and its power for holy transformation as we draw near to Him :
“I don’t think you will get out by being gooder, but by flinging something to the winds. Don’t pray to be made gooder, but to be made looser and lighter. It’s the poets & lovers who get there …”
(climbing from lakeside to a heavenly tearoom hidden in the mountain …)
Her students also reflect upon how central the pursuit of beauty was for Florence, when working with the raw material of character formation :
“She transformed what was commonplace to most of us into a breathless adventure. It was exciting to arrange chairs in a sitting room with her, or saucepans in a kitchen, or to build a new rabbit-hutch. Each detail held its significance because of its place in a larger vision - to love into beauty whatever she met, whether it was a soul or a material object”
“I have never met anyone who had so great a passion for perfection, together with such loving patience with the imperfections in us all”
Her approach to students was in fact more that of an artist than a teacher, working with a picture of what each person might become :
“I think my ideas aren’t any good unless you start by really caring for the perfection of people - really seeing the beauty of a soul … I think I see them that way not because I am better than other people, but because I have got an artistic sense well related all round, not just in art as such. I can’t leave people at "she’s a nice woman, but”. It’s the ‘best’ I want to help them to get at. And seeing - that’s so rare and so important and people go blind because they won’t obey the next step. They play about with the ‘but’, then escape by saying ‘we’re only human’ or ‘well, after all we can’t be perfect’. It’s finding your way out of the vague easy going life that’s the life of disciplined endeavour, only the disciplined endeavour isn’t not doing things, it’s going through and beyond things"
“Once you realize that everything - including man - has a perfection, then the perfection of each student must be desired and sought. I must be disinterested there, and take as much joy in my work for each one as a poet takes in writing a poem”
(a ‘mirror lake’ half way up - where narcissistic souls may stop & reflect)
“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you” wrote Paul to Timothy his missionary student (2 Tim 1 v.6)
Florence was clear that for her own students “All you can do for them is be a sign-post to something more real”:
“I wonder how long it will take me to learn this job. I have got to learn to disentangle the bad bits so that the good bits have room to grow, to smash fetters without smashing the hands they imprison (only souls are so much more delicate than hands) and to set feet in a true direction. We are too ‘Protestant’ here to have much use for the word beauty, but I can see beautiful things getting smothered in so many of them, mostly too not by actual sin, but by unreal Christianity and an easy self-satisfaction. Well at the bottom of each of them there is a spark of divine discontent and I’ll be the bellows to blow it into such a flame that they will be safe for ever - oh, if I could!”
“I wonder why there are so many defeated women of forty. That’s a secret I have got to learn more of. They must all have been full of possibilities once like these students. What happens? I can’t bear the idea of these young possibilities alongside the mediocre, tame thing life becomes for so many. I believe it is fundamentally the root evils that remain unconquered that rob the religious person as well as the irreligious of their radiancy and gaiety, stop growth and blind them in the end to everything that moves Godward. You can’t afford defeat anywhere in you. I must learn to find the secret in them, for them”
(lake Agnes next to the old tearoom - whose hot soup was so welcome!)
“Loving into beauty” could regularly involve Florence facing students up with unpalatable truths about themselves - the kind of tough love that we all need to receive from somewhere, if we are truly serious about holiness :
“I want a lot of things for you, but they aren’t things that come easy. I don’t want results for you, or nice things even. It’s so difficult to say what I want. I think it’s a bigger reverence for yourself - knowledge that you can’t stoop to a littleness of thought or deed”
“When I get at you again and again, try to believe that it is because I see what you could be, and that I have my arm around you, even when I am striking at that thing in you”
Sometimes we need the arm pommeling to be even more evident than the arm around the shoulder - and as a pastor Florence was certainly prepared to lay it on the line when necessary:
“The reason why you don’t learn quickly is because your first reaction is to justify yourself. This is always the place where I get angry with you. If you don’t hate your justifications like poison you’ll always dribble into things or drift out of them. But there is a truth to be faced and it hasn’t to be made to fit into what you are like. You have to toe up to it. Either you re-orientate your seeing or we go different paths …”
Holiness is our serious life challenge, and I too need both encouraging and spurring on, if I’m to take the challenge as seriously as it deserves. St. Paul expressed a similar concern (& pastoral frustration) with the Galatians :
“My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you!” (Gal 4 v.19)
(back down again, and time for a fond farewell to Louise …)
In the end the call to holiness is about going deeper into the reality of what it means to be alive, & what it means to love. To pursue it will not make for an easy life. But there is simply no more important agenda for you and me.
“I am so troubled about not loving people enough. Perhaps God will teach me to love, if I ask hard enough. I feel somehow as if I’m not awake yet … You remember when I had my teeth out and altogether did have a good deal of pain - well I found myself thanking God for that because it was real, and it taught me depths. I quite exulted over it afterwards. It was as though I had found one part at least of me that was real. And I want to feel like that about every single thing … I used to think that being nice to people and feeling nice was loving people. But it isn’t, it isn’t. Love is the most immense unselfishness and it’s so big I’ve never touched it”
“Isn’t it bewildering when you think of what the uttermost beauty, religion, makes you do - spend your life in slums and dreadful mission halls with flaring gas jets, everything ugly, or out in Iganga with filthy habits and dreadful beds which sicken you to touch, and to have your eyes pinned down on those kinds of things? And you get such tiny, tiny bits of real exaltation of soul, and it’s so utterly heavenly when you do”
(a nip across to nearby Lake Moraine, an altogether moodier madam …)
Underlying everything, for Florence Allshorn it is the contemplation of Jesus himself that will make love possible - the one who is the source and apogee of all beauty, “full of grace and truth”. So let this be the inimitable final word of ‘Lady Florence of Sussex’, to help you and I upon our way:
“If I have any advice to give at all, I would beg you to study Jesus Christ in His dealings with men, until the stand He takes every time glows and burns in your hearts, so that you yourselves can do no other when the same things happen to you, and I would beg you to pray that you may learn to love as Jesus Christ loved, with more passion and with more insistency than anything you have ever prayed for in your life, and then refuse defeat. Perhaps you will be able to do no more, but refuse defeat!”
And whether we sing it aloud or just in our spirits for now, let this 15th century prayer be our fervent and constant song in reply :
Come down, O love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing;
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn,
til earthly passions turn
to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light
shine ever on my sight,
and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
Let holy charity
mine outward vesture be,
and lowliness become mine inner clothing;
true lowliness of heart,
which takes the humbler part,
and o'er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
And so the yearning strong,
with which the soul will long,
shall far outpass the power of human telling;
for none can guess its grace,
til Love create a place
wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.