If you think you have trouble searching for God, you should try finding Sister Wendy Beckett. She lives in what she calls a caravan in the grounds of a Carmelite convent deep in the countryside of East Anglia. It is technically a mobile home, but the distinctions hardly matter since neither it nor she are going anywhere. Still Britain’s most recognisable nun from her stint as a TV art historian, she has lived here for almost 40 years, rising at 1am, spending at least seven hours a day in prayer and getting to bed by 6pm.
I have been told that she finds one-to-ones a little intense; it would help if I could take some lunch with me, and don’t forget the wine; dry white preferably. Because it’s a closed order, you can’t just walk into the grounds. Visitors need permission well in advance. You then wait in the porch while a sister answers the bell and comes to escort you to the guest block. My visit today is nothing compared with the pilgrimages that Sister Wendy has recently made, and it has been approved by the prioress only because the purpose is to talk about Sister Wendy’s encounters with God.
Those are the words that she uses to describe the experiences she had last year when she made three trips — to Rome, Kiev and Sinai — to look at the only eight known icons of Mary to have survived the destruction of holy images by the Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries. These journeys turned into spiritual hide-and-seek games, with some of the eight stored so far away from public view that even their keepers were unsure of their whereabouts. If you think finding Sister Wendy is hard, try looking for the Icon of Santa Maria ad Martyres at an altar reached by the subterranean passages of the Pantheon in Rome. When she got there, it had vanished. “But I was blessed,” she says, “immeasurably blessed in having a good friend who had worked at the Vatican communications department, and to whom all Rome seemed to be an open book.”
Sister Wendy is now 77, slightly stooped and not always steady on her feet. Her expression is beatific and impish. When we meet, she holds my hand and hangs on to it. It’s a warm act of greeting, but it’s also a quiet plea for a little help in the right direction. Surely she did not make these pilgrimages (her word) alone? No, she explains, God had arranged it so that a recently retired US Air Force chaplain, Father Stephen Blair, who lives in Norfolk, was able to accompany her. Two other friends were with them for some of the time. One of these, Annie Frankel, had got to know her by “buying” her for an hour’s tour of the National Gallery at a charity auction.
Sister Wendy felt moved to find the surviving Marys when the most recently discovered one came to light in 2003. This was found in a small auction house in Avignon. The consensus is that it had hung in a church in Egypt in the 6th or 7th century. “That’s the one that made me want to go and see the rest,” she says. “Until then I knew nothing of the others. I feel baffled by them because they don’t really fit into art. I couldn’t see how they fitted into religion either because the Western Church doesn’t use them all that much.”
Yet the best of them surely meet the criteria of art by being aesthetically pleasing, or at least representational, however naif the technique. “Perhaps, but there’s not one in the National Gallery. They didn’t want them and they sent all theirs to the British Museum.” Apart from these eight Marys there are believed to be a further 45 early Christian icons in existence, many at the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai.
After Rome, where five of the eight were to be found, she travelled to Ukraine in search of the only one kept in a museum, rather than a church or gallery. She got the wrong museum, “the lowest moment of all my journeys”, was pointed a few blocks down the road to the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Arts and there saw the 6th or 7th-century Virgin of Kiev. “I must confess to bursting into tears.”
Then came her final journey, through “the bleak and unrewarding desert” of Sinai to the Monastery of St Catherine and its 6th-century Icon of the Enthroned Virgin. In the introduction to her book about these travels, Encounters with God, Sister Wendy writes that she was “astonished and distressed” to learn that the existence of these icons remains largely unknown.
“I understand how the historians are a bit baffled,” she says. “They are flat, they have no perspective. They have a similar format. After the 9th century they started up again. They were very beautiful, but they aren’t like these.” She points at the icon found in Avignon and says: “Look at that little Jesus. What an extraordinary child. Oh, that anxious little face. Asking us to help Him . . . what is He to do? ‘Take me with all my complexities.’ And the Mother. People have said she looks aloof, but she is aware of our presence. What matters most to her is that we should look at the child.”
She says that she has no wish to resume her career as a television . . . what? Presenter? Art historian? Icon? She did have quite a grand status during the 1990s, when she presented her popular TV art documentaries. There has even been a stage show called The Sister Wendy Musical. She got into the TV work after a BBC producer had been impressed by an article of hers in Peter Fuller’s magazine, Modern Painters. There was some highbrow huffing about her being the Pam Ayres of art appreciation, but she was accessible and popular. She has been able to make these forays beyond the convent walls because she does not belong to the Carmelite order. She became a nun in 1946 in the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, but was given papal permission to become a Consecrated Virgin in 1970, living under the protection of the convent here at Quidenham.
However, she says that she would love to have these eight icons of Mary shown on TV. “I would be prepared to exhaust myself. To die if necessary. It would be a good thing to give your last energies to this because those images have something so deeply numinous, they put us in touch with so much.”
Icons, she says, were intended to be “read” as much as seen. They are not so much art as conduits for prayer. At its crudest, they are aids. But what would a non-believer read? “I think if you came to look at any of these [Mary] icons, seeking . . . I don’t want to put a noun on that. And stayed in silence before it. If you could do that, just seeking, looking, I think it would draw you into something.”
What sort of something? “I don’t know. It would draw you, I suppose, into whatever you are seeking.”
Does she encounter God all the time? “Yes, for me that’s necessary.” And can she put into words the nature of these encounters? “No, because it absolutely transcends all words. It transcends all thought, so how could you find words for it?” I don’t know.
Encounters With God: In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary(Continuum) - source: Alan Franks, The London Sunday Times, May 2, 2009
