Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A nun, writer and broadcaster best known for her passionate and pithy critiques of art.
On the island
Eight records
Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1, "Military"
Well, the first disc is the one that to me sums up my youth. And I can't hear it without immediately. Going back to that sunny veranda in South Africa. With my dear friend Val. Playing Chopin inside the school hall.
Beautiful Dreamer, which is not a piece of first class music, but it's a piece dear to me because my father used to sing it round the house. He had a terrible voice. But he loved that kind of music, and it brings back that dear romantic father of mine.
You're going to hear Regina Chaley, the little Easter hymn to Our Blessed Lady. I want to have something in on Mary. because she's been such a role model for me.
Ständchen (Serenade)Favourite
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore
You're going to hear my very favourite music, Schubert's Serenade. When I was a novice, the younger novices used to sing to the ones who were being professed. And I've always had a knack for writing verse. So I wrote lines to Schubert's serenade about loving God.
On Sundays Sister Sheila, who was a very good organist, Often plays something at mass. And she plays Brahm's lullaby occasionally, and it seems to me absolutely to sum up. The Life of a Contemplative Nun
Well, the absolute centre of my life, without which I don't think I could go on. is the mess. And S. Thomas Aquinas, who was a very great saint, was also a poet, and he wrote this poem about the Eucharist, the sacrament.
Il trovatore: Act V, "Ai nostri monti ritorneremo"
Dolora Zajick and Plácido Domingo
Ah something wonderful Which represents the culmination of a great ambition. I always wanted to hear one opera. And I took it for granted it would be Mozart, but it turned out the chance I got was Vedi, and I was in Fraud.
Bryn Terfel and Malcolm Martineau
You're going to hear another of Schubert's leader. One of the few ones in which the words, at least the first words, matter. You Ah the peace. Because for me everything is summed up in God.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:19What occurs to you when you come out of your caravan and engage with the bustling wider world?
After so many people in the world. who are searching. They may not know what they're searching for, but you can see in so many faces. I look of wanting, and so I always start immediately to pray that they'll find it.
Presenter asks
2:10What is it about solitude that you find in it such comfort and solace and happiness?
I'm only there because it gives me a chance to be with God, so in fact I'm never alone. This is my great privilege to be able, on behalf of everybody who hasn't got this privilege. to stay close to God and let Him love me for everybody else.
Presenter asks
3:59How would you reply to the suspicion that nuns are shying away from the depths of emotion that the rest of us enjoy and suffer?
Well, there's an element of truth in it in that the nun has sacrificed. marriage and children and having a job, all those things that give such depth to people's life. But they're not shut away from the joys and sorrows of the world. Some sisters grieve enormously over the headlines in the paper. So I don't think they avoid the normal stresses of life, but they avoid the intensity of them.
The keepsakes
The luxury
What I'd really like would be a portable chapel, but since I can't have that with a priest inside it, I'll have a refrigerated tabernacle.
Presenter asks
8:43Why didn't you turn down the television producers when they asked you to make documentaries?
Well, they weren't slick to begin with. They were sweet. Good men whom I liked. And of course I hadn't seen television, so I'd no idea what it involved. … I thought so many people don't know God at all. Well, they will find him in beauty, and they'll find beauty in art.
Presenter asks
11:37How did you feel when your father returned from the war?
When my father came back from the war, I found it hard to acclimatise myself to my great loss of status. It wasn't to me my mother turned any more. Here was the father whom we've thought about so much and longed to have come back, but he couldn't quite accustom himself to me either. Because he'd left behind a ten year old and he came back to a a a rather Difficult, nearly sixteen-year-old, who is determined to become a nun.
Presenter asks
29:49Do you ever feel that sacrificing a family has been a sacrifice?
No, this is where you see the the nasty cold bloodedness of me. I never particularly minded. I love my parents deeply, and over the years I've come to love my brother and sister, I really sacrificed nothing. Except In a small way music.
“I'm only there because it gives me a chance to be with God, so in fact I'm never alone.”
“I think we are all born with an instinct for art, for something greater than ourselves, a kind of disguised God.”
“the life of prayer is not a sleepy life. You have to be wholly attentive to God all the time. It's a passionate life. You want to be there for God to take possession of you.”
“death is the climax of our life. when we pass into the presence of God. And I mean it's going to happen whether you try to put it off or not, so why not see it as a crowning?”