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A few days ago the Â鶹Éç announced that Â鶹Éç4, the television channel devoted to arts and culture, is to become a place for archive only content. It’s a shame because I found that Â鶹Éç4 often produced programmes that took me inside worlds I would otherwise never know.

One such gem was broadcast last week. Brotherhood – The Inner Lives of Monks, was filmed in the Catholic monastery of Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire. The monks are Cistercians, living a particularly strict and simple life, dedicated to physical labour and prayer.

Mount St Bernard is not a place to hide from the world. The monks are involved in it through the prayer requests made to them, and they have become brewing entrepreneurs, making their own brand of Trappist beer. Yet their lives are unworldly too: slower, with a clearer timetable, and a lack of possessions. Above all, there’s a quiet patience about it.

One of the brothers reflected as another worked patiently at his potter’s wheel how the wheel keeps moving and the clay takes shape as the potter’s hand stays still – something that has often been used in Christian thought as a metaphor for God’s work. While his hand lies still upon humanity, it takes shape. The monks trusted God to form them.

There was a trust and quiet patience, too, in the dying days of two of the monks. They lived as if in a waiting room, suspended between what they knew – this life – and what they hoped was to come. It seemed to me, in many ways, rather like today for Christians, the day between Good Friday when Christ’s crucifixion is commemorated, and then tomorrow, Easter Sunday, when Christ’s rising from the dead is celebrated. It’s a moment when everything is suspended, just as the monks hovered between being of this earth and being on the next stage of their journey where they longed to be with God for eternity.

If the monks in this documentary waited so trustingly for their end it is because they had spent a lifetime practising patience. I suspect many listeners are like me, in contrast to the monks. For I’m impatient: impatient for this lockdown to end. It can’t come fast enough. But rather than wish these days away, it might be better for me to relish these quieter moments, contemplating the signs of spring: birdsong and earlier dawns, flowers pushing out of the earth. Like the creatures around us we are sloughing off these last months and emerging into the sunlight. It seems a particularly appropriate moment to mark Easter, as Christ comes out of the tomb with the promise of new life.

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