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Lorn Macintyre
He was here and then he vanished
I have spent the past week of my second biannual visit to the monastery of Pluscarden near Elgin. The 13th-century foundation was dissolved officially as a monastery following the Reformation.
In 1897 that brilliant Catholic convert the 3rd Marquis of Bute bought the priory from the Duke of Fife and devoted a portion of his vast fortune to its restoration. In 1945 Lord Bute’s youngest son Lord Colum gave the priory and surrounding acres to Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire. Three years later five monks returned to resume the Benedictine life at Pluscarden after several hundred years. They used their hands for restoration work as well as prayer.
The monastery has guest accommodation for males and females, with the males eating with the community at their long tables while, at a lectern above, a monk reads from the teachings of the Benedictines, and from new and challenging books. (Recently we heard an analysis of the papacy and anti-Semitism during the Nazi regime).
From an early age Dom Maurus Deegan wanted to be a monk. He had been in seminary, in the docklands of Liverpool, and in the wartime fire service he had witnessed appalling loss of life and suffering. He took his vows as a Benedictine monk at Prinknash Abbey in 1947, and the following year was on his way north, one of the five pioneer monks to revive the Benedictine community at Pluscarden.
On Thursday 12 May 2005, Dom Maurus set out in sunshine for his usual perambulation. He was wearing his white habit and slip-on shoes. Though still mobile at 93, he had cataracts, was deaf, and had a degree of dementia. In the preceding months he had been found, wandering and confused, miles from the monastery, and was either driven back, or one of the monks came by car to collect him. They took the placid view that it was wrong to restrict his movements. On that May day seven years ago the nonagenarian was seen going up the track to the Westerton Estate, one of his favourite walks, the many byways of which he knew totally. Hours later, when he wasn’t back at the monastery, the brothers weren’t unduly worried as they waited for a ringing phone, an arriving car.
That summer passed, but the dying foliage of autumn didn’t reveal the body of the monk, who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, as if in miraculous heavenward ascent. A monk in the south reported a vision to Pluscarden: Dom Maurus is walking in the middle of the road, as he often did, when a van comes speeding round the bend, too fast to brake in time. Perhaps the driver is a boy-racer, or there are too many points on his licence. He panics, and the body of the monk is bundled into the back, to be buried at a distance from Pluscarden.
The circumstances of his disappearance have assumed the attributes of a fable. One of his brothers was sitting opposite him in the church at Pluscarden shortly before he vanished, and the way Dom Maurus was staring at him, the monk had the impression that a silent message was being transmitted: ‘Take a good look at me, because you won’t see me again’. This interpretation is plausible, because the old monk never liked to say goodbye.
A grave awaits him among the simple wooden crosses behind the shrubberies at Pluscarden, near to the resting place of his brother, who was also a monk. Father Benedict wrote in his ‘Oblate Letter’ at the time of the old monk’s disappearance in 2005: ‘It is certain that Dom Maurus was ready for death; that his whole mind and heart was turned longingly towards it’.
Did Dom Maurus sense that his time had come, and did he set out on his last walk that day in May, to a secluded place he had chosen years before, to lie down and await the end in the landscape he loved? That possibility is in my thoughts as I walk the Westerton estate tracks in the early morning, stopping to look for remains by the wayside. But perhaps it is wrong to do this. Even if I discovered the soiled heap of a habit, and some bones that animals have not disturbed, burying these at the monastery would only be a symbolic gesture. After Compline, the last service of the uplifting day, as I watch the silent monks ascending the night staircase to their cells, I know that Dom Maurus Deegan, priest, oblate master for 40 years, former prior, cellarer, novice master, mystic, exemplary human being, has gone to a place which, he knew for certain, had long since been prepared for him.
Lorn Macintyre is a writer and poet
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