by Mark Salzman
Sister Christine proclaimed another Sister for falling asleep during the Night Office and snoring, then accused herself of breaking a dish in the sink in her haste to get outdoors for recreation. Mother Emmanuel accused herself of losing her place during Vespers and fumbling noisily through the pages of her breviary. Their daily life was so carefully orchestrated, and so routine, that the recitation of Faults rarely produced any surprises. When it came Sister John’s turn to be proclaimed, however, a ripple of curiosity passed through the room.
“In charity I accuse Sister John of the Cross of being absent in choir for the Office of Lauds on Monday, and for the Office of Vespers on Friday.”
Instead of imposing a penance right away, the prioress asked, “Are your headaches occurring more frequently, Sister?”
Sister John hoped no one could tell she was having another. “Yes. I apologize, everyone.”
“No one’s blaming you, Sister—we’re concerned, that’s all. Perhaps you should see another doctor.”
“Migraines come in cycles, and no one knows why. They’re inconvenient, but not dangerous.”
The prioress did not look reassured. “You could be doing more to take care of yourself. The other night I woke up at two o’clock and saw light coming from under your cell door. You’re pushing yourself too hard.”
“I don’t feel that I’m pushing myself at all. I’m being pulled.” Sister John felt the others’ eyes on her. Did they understand? Could they forgive her for enjoying these favors from God?
Mother Emmanuel studied Sister John’s face closely, looking for signs of pride or self-consciousness, but saw only determination. Sister John had an extraordinary vocation; there was no question of that. But Mother Emmanuel also knew that spiritual gifts made the soul especially vulnerable to the sin of pride. Was Sister John putting her own interests before those of the community?
“I consider this a matter of obedience,” Mother Emmanuel began, taking special care to sound untroubled. The other Sisters, she knew, would be listening for any nuance in her voice that might reveal her personal feelings. Sister John’s absences in choir had been on everyone’s mind lately. “Obedience includes getting enough rest so that you can participate fully in the life of the community.”
Sister John nodded in agreement, making the next part of Mother Emmanuel’s task easier.
“Your penance shall be to refrain from using the light in your cell for one month. No more writing at night. I want you to get more sleep.”
Sister John’s heart sank. Writing had become as important as prayer to her—it was prayer—but she also knew that the more perfectly a nun submitted to the will of the Superior, the more perfectly she submitted to the will of God. She directed her thoughts toward her Innocent Spouse, who was executed for crimes he could not commit, and accepted her penance with a nod.
Mother Emmanuel struck the clapper once more and gave the blessing for evening recreation:
O Lord, our God, we are about to spend some time in recreation. May it be for Thy honor and pleasure, and grant that this exercise may enable us to perform the works of Thy service with greater fervor, the same grace we ask of thee, O gracious Queen of Heaven.
Sister John moved her chair near the window, put a notebook on her lap, and closed her eyes. She could not afford to single herself out further by asking to be excused now.
The sounds of conversation filled the room.
Thank you even for this pain, Lord.
“Are you feeling all right?”
She forced her eyes open. Mother Mary Joseph had moved next to her without making any sound. The Living Rule’s spine looked to Sister John as if it had been bent from having shouldered Christ’s burden for so long; her deformity was a grace, no less than stigmata.
“Everything is as it should be, Mother.”
The Living Rule grinned. “You’ve noticed, too? It’s the new cereal.”
Dear God, help me bear this—
“Are you sure you’re all right, dear? You look very pale.”
“Forgive me, Mother…”
The notebook fell off her lap.
have mercy
She was sure the blood vessels in her head would give way.
please
Her mind fractured under the pressure. She splintered like broken glass, she became all edges and points and she was sure this had to be death, it had to be the end of everything, then her suffering blinked off.
an invisible sun
a shock wave of pure Being
swept my pain away, swept everything away
until all that was left was God.
Nothing outside of God, nowhere exists outside of God.
His presence is the only reality; the nightmare of suffering dissolves in the light of truth.
God awakening.
AUGUST 29
Beheading of John
the Baptist, Martyr
A knock from outside the enclosure, the signal that the car was ready. Sister John knelt before Mother Emmanuel, who delivered the prayer for a nun leaving the cloister:
May the Virgin Mary and her loving Child bless and keep you and bring you safely home.
When the prioress opened the heavy oak door, the hinges cried in protest. “You’ll be in all of our prayers today, Sister.”
Sister John kept her eyes lowered. “Peace of Christ, Mother.”
The door cried again as it shut behind her.
Sister John felt each stone through her sandals as she stepped out onto the gravel driveway. Leaving the enclosure made her feel uneasy, like being caught in an open field with a storm approaching. Since entering Carmel in 1969, she had gone out for dentist’s and doctor’s appointments, but otherwise had spent the last twenty-eight years in a world without television, radios, newspapers, movies, fashion, or men.
She approached the car and greeted Sister Mary Michael, the community’s extern nun, who wore the full habit but had not taken the same vows of claustration as the others. Sister Mary Michael lived in a small building outside the enclosure where her duties included maintaining the external chapel, greeting parishioners, and shopping for the community. She attended Mass every day, separated from the cloistered nuns by a screen, but was otherwise free to create her own balance of prayer and work.
“You’ll have to roll down your window—it gets awfully hot,” Sister Mary Michael explained over the roar of the heater. “Mr. Yoshinobu taught me to do this, it draws the heat away from the engine. The radiator is very tired, poor thing.” The community’s 1974 Plymouth Valiant had traveled nearly two hundred thousand miles, all on its original engine. The mechanic who facilitated this ongoing miracle, Mr. Yoshinobu, had earned a permanent spot on the nuns’ prayer list.
Sister John kept her eyes on the rearview mirror and watched as the monastery got smaller. When the driveway rounded a bend, the compound disappeared behind a stand of eucalyptus trees. After another bend, the car reached the street leading down toward the Golden State Freeway, and Sister John had to remind herself of God’s presence as the Plymouth merged into traffic. In less than five minutes she had traveled from a world where the present was eternal to a place where the present moment did not seem to exist at all. People in their cars, the cars themselves, the buildings, the signs—even the sky, which was turned into a thoroughfare by all of the air traffic—looked squeezed up against an infinitesimal future, like a crowd trying to escape a burning building through a pinhole. Sister Mary Michael exited less than a mile from where they had gotten onto the concrete river, parked the Miracle, then the two Carmelites began walking.
From the outside, County Hospital looked like a cross between a Masonic lodge and the Tower of Babel, with inscriptions in foreign languages carved all over its stone façade. The stairs leading up to it seemed to go on forever, blinding the two nuns with reflected sunlight. When they stepped inside the lobby,
it took their eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness. Sister Mary Michael approached the information booth and asked a man sitting behind a bulletproof window for directions to the neurology department.
“Fifth floor.”
Sister Mary Michael smiled at him. “And where might one find the elevator?”
He pointed without smiling back.
They got into a crowded elevator where a middle-aged Hispanic man, seeing the two Carmelites, removed his hat and greeted them in Spanish. The others in the elevator seemed uncomfortable around the nuns, and averted their eyes. When the Sisters got off the elevator at the fifth floor and took their places in line at the reception desk, several patients in the waiting area stared openly.
Sister John kept custody of her eyes, letting her gaze settle on the floor in front of her. She did not need to see the faces to feel the mixture of curiosity, amusement, and hostility directed toward her. This was why so many nuns in the nursing and teaching orders had chosen to abandon the traditional habit. In the cloister, the habit eliminated distractions; out here, it created them. Sister John considered the irony: the habit was originally adopted by nuns to make them inconspicuous in the world. In the Middle Ages, a plain serge tunic, linen wimple, and veil was the outfit favored by poor widows. A true habit now, Sister John thought as she glanced around the waiting room, would be a nylon jogging outfit worn over tennis shoes.
The nuns sat down under a television set tuned to a daytime talk show.
Nothing must be rejected, nothing must be despised. It is all God.
The subject of the program was paternity; a man had accused his wife of infidelity and suspected that the child she was bearing was not his own. She denied the accusations and had agreed to a blood test, the results of which were to be announced at the end of the program. Nuns and monks accustomed to silence tend to become skilled at reading faces; it was immediately clear to Sister John that the host and the studio audience, although expressing verbal support for the accused woman, were hoping she would be proved a liar. No mention was made of the unborn child, or its future.
Sister John looked away from the television, not wanting to learn the results of the test. She stared up at the ceiling and let her thoughts wander away from the hospital.
The ceiling in the attic bedroom slanted in one direction, following the line of the roof. The asymmetry of it nauseated her if she stared up at it for too long.
The window faced east. In the mornings she lay in bed and watched specks of dust flash into being, drift without reaching anywhere, then blink off. If she watched long enough, she could make herself forget about the beam of sunlight and imagine that the specks appeared and disappeared on their own. Did God make them? She would savor that mystery until it began to lose flavor, then have the thrill of remembering that something silent and invisible streamed through the window and breathed fire into anything that crossed its path. Was that God? Switching perspectives like that kept the mystery fresh.
During the summer, locusts went off like broken alarms in the trees. One of them had shed its skin on the branch just outside her window. The hollow shell clung to the bark for weeks, as if waiting for its owner to return, then disappeared during a thunderstorm. Helen found it the next morning, soggy and missing several legs, in a bunch of leaves caught in a storm drain.
The front screen door wheezed open, then shut. Footsteps crossed the kitchen, then stopped at the base of the stairs.
“A letter from your mom, Helen.”
The little girl skied down the stairs, socks polishing the steps, took the envelope from her grandmother, then returned to her attic bedroom. She lay on her stomach on the bed and used a pencil as a letter opener. She looked at the folded paper inside and made herself wait a few seconds before pulling it out.
She read it straight through and got angry with herself for not making it last longer. Then she became angry at her mother. The letter was only a page in length, told her nothing, and ended the way they all did: “Write soon!” Helen always wrote soon, then waited months for a response.
She put the letter in the drawer where she kept all of her mother’s letters, under her balled-up socks. The screen door wheezed again and her grandmother started beating the dirt out of a rug with a broom. Housework and locusts: theme music for summer tedium. Helen shut the window, wrapped a pillow around her head, and rocked until she went numb.
“Sister John?”
A nurse with a clipboard stood a few yards away.
“The doctor is ready for you. Would you follow me?”
The nurse walked with an athlete’s confidence. Her movements painted a bright rainbow through time. Sister John, by contrast, walked as if hoping to become invisible. She wanted to leave a different sort of trail behind her, a wake of serenity. She hoped it might pull others toward God without their being aware of it.
The nurse led her to a small room. Seeing that the sheet of paper covering the examination table was wrinkled, the nurse tugged at it until fresh paper spun out of the roll and covered the table. She tore off the used part—the noise made Sister John flinch—and invited the nun to sit down. The paper crackled disagreeably under Sister John’s weight.
Checking over the admission sheet, the nurse asked, “You’re here to see the doctor about headaches?”
“Yes.”
The nurse had a cotton hospital gown tucked under her arm, but, after a glance at Sister John, decided it wouldn’t be necessary. “The doctor will be in to see you shortly,” she said, leaving the room and closing the door behind her.
Alone in a space that was about the same size as her cell, Sister John found herself staring at a large plastic model of the human brain and spinal cord. The brain had been partly disassembled to reveal its white inner structure, while the major nerves had been painted red and blue. It looked like a mad scientist’s attempt to explain patriotism. Everything in the room was designed for either measurement or analysis. Scales, thermometers, charts, probes, diagnostic manuals, tongue depressors, reflex hammers. The sterile paper on the bed was a reminder that this was not a place to rest or heal; your unclean body was to lie on it only as long as it took to examine you.
Yet it was God’s room all the same. The door opened and a man in a white lab coat stepped halfway inside, then paused to give instructions to someone down the hall.
Your will, not mine.
The doctor lowered a stack of files and a ceramic mug onto the counter and picked up the clipboard the nurse had left for him. He studied the admission sheet as if unaware that his patient was in the room. This gave Sister John an opportunity to adjust to the fact that her doctor looked young enough to be her son.
He finished reading the sheet, sat down on a stool, and looked at her for the first time. His expression chilled her; she felt as if she were being watched from behind a one-way mirror.
“I’m Dr. Sheppard. How are you today?”
“Very well, thank you.”
“Tell me about your headaches.”
The smell of coffee reminded her to dwell in the moment, in God’s present. In the convent, they brewed their coffee weak as a matter of economy. Whatever the doctor had in his mug, she guessed from the fragrance, must have used a lot of grounds.
The paper under her crackled again when she began to speak.
“They started around three years ago. When I saw my regular doctor about them, he told me they were migraines, and that there wasn’t much to do about them except learn to work around them. I’m fine with that—it’s my prioress who’s concerned. She was a nurse once, so she’s especially cautious when it comes to health.” After the incident during recreation, when Sister John had not responded to questions for several seconds after dropping her notebook, Mother Emmanuel had insisted on a visit to a specialist.
“Did your regular doctor run any tests for you?”
“No, but if anything
was seriously wrong with me, I think he would know it. I’ve been seeing him for almost twenty years.”
Dr. Sheppard began taking notes. “How often do you get the headaches?”
“Sometimes twice a month, sometimes every other day. They seem to come in cycles.”
“Do they ever wake you up at night? Out of a sound sleep?”
“Not that I can recall.”
The doctor finished his coffee, then began the standard neurological exam by asking her what day and year it was and to name the current president. When she answered those questions without difficulty, he asked her to remove her sandals. Lowering himself to one knee, he cradled one of her feet in the palm of his hand and drew a cotton swab across the sole and over her toes, testing for sensation and reflexes. He did the same with the point of a safety pin, using it so skillfully that it neither hurt nor tickled.
During this procedure, Sister John thought of Mother Mary Joseph, who, every year on Holy Thursday, used to kneel down in imitation of Christ to wash the feet of all the nuns. She pictured the doctor kneeling before patients every day, holding their feet and listening to their complaints and struggling to cure their diseases. How could she have taken so long to welcome the Christ in him?
Each time I forget You, I add to your suffering.
He washed his hands as she put her sandals back on and asked, “Do you notice anything else around the time of these headaches? Funny things happening to your vision, say, or a sense of altered consciousness?” When she hesitated, the doctor’s face showed interest. “Even if it’s something trivial, like smelling broccoli or hearing advertising jingles,” he added.
How, she wondered, do you talk about infused contemplation with a neurologist? She took a breath to center herself, then said, “I try to see the pain as an opportunity, not an affliction. If I surrender to it in the right way, I have the feeling of transcending my body completely. It’s a wonderful experience, but it’s spiritual, not physical.”
