My OperaDame Catherine Gascoigne (1600 - 1676
Friday, June 26, 2009 3:32:51 PM
Dame Catherine Gascoigne was one of many English Benedictine nuns living in exile in Flanders in the mid-1600s. She was the abbess of Cambrai Abbey.
Dame Catherine was caught up in a dispute within the Catholic Church over the forms of prayer allowed. Somewhat in contrast to the then popular Jesuit spiritual exercises, the nuns at Cambrai Abbey practiced a contemplative form of prayer taught by Father Augustin Baker, who was himself influenced by such medieval English Christian mystics as Julian of Norwich, John Tauler, Henry Suso, and the book "The Cloud of Unknowing."
Dame Catherine and her well-known fellow nun, Dame Gertrude More, wrote defenses of Father Augistin Baker's method of prayer -- producing two deeply inspired and influential works on contemplative prayer as a pathway to mystical union with God.
The prayer-poem "One thing alone I crave" is taken Dame Catherine Gascoigne's manuscript translated as "This One Thing Only", available from Stanbrook Abbey in England (bookshop@stanbrook.org.uk).
Poems by Dame Catherine Gascoigne :
One thing alone I crave / Unum sit mihi totum
One thing alone I crave
namely
All in everything
This One
I seek
the only One
do I desire
Rooted in One
is all
from the One
flows all
This is the very One
I seek
will have
only then
be filled
Unless I drink
this Spring
I thirst
for nowhere else sup I to be fulfilled
What or Who this One is
I may not say
can never feel
Nothing
more or less
is there to say
For the One is not simply in all
the One Being is over all
YOU are my GOD
holding me
within my very SELF[/ALIGN]
