by Mark Salzman
Alone in the choir, she noticed the votive candles on the left side of the altar flickering. When she looked at them directly, they stopped. As soon as she averted her eyes, the flames started dancing again. A stab of pain behind her eyes confirmed what was to come.
Into Thy hands.
When the others returned for Terce, she sensed their eyes on her as she lifted her breviary to mark pages. Could they detect the heaviness in her movements?
In You, dear God, I take refuge. If it be Your will, let others’ scorn be my cross.
Terce ended with five minutes of silence. On the other side of the screen, Sister Mary Michael rang the tintinnabulum. Heavy footsteps echoed in the building as Father Aaron strode down the aisle of the chapel and took his place at the altar.
When he began chanting the Mass, the walls, floor, and ceiling turned into a resonating body, an instrument for sacred music. His voice was a rich sienna, the color of reassurance. Sister John heard each of her Sisters’ voices as if they were chanting alone: Sister Christine sounded as if her throat were lined with mother-of-pearl, while Sister Anne’s voice had more texture, like a bowed instrument. Sister Angelica sang like a coloratura soprano, with modest power but intense feeling.
Sister Elizabeth sounded exuberant, while Sister Bernadette sounded resigned. Sister Miriam sounded afraid. Mother Mary Joseph’s voice was mostly breath, forming a kind of white sound that helped blend the others. Mother Emmanuel seemed to anticipate the others by a fraction of a beat, like the conductor of an orchestra.
Going even deeper into the sound with her mind, she heard each voice as a rope of faith, composed of many thin strands woven together. In these strands she heard courage, fear, selfishness, and selflessness. Nearest the core of the rope, she heard the cries of children and animals in darkness, huddled together for safety.
The very center of each rope was hollow. Was this the silence of the void, or God’s silence?
At the moment of the Breaking of the Host, the congregation said in unison:
Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world.
Hearing the voices together, she perceived them as all woven together to form a tapestry, stretching not only across the world but backward and forward into time.
The tapestry lit up.
Like a piece of quartz viewed under a black light, her soul went from achromatic to beyond chromatic. Fractures and other imperfections—including her epilepsy—became irrelevant; a much deeper beauty revealed itself now.
Faith is light, doubt is shadow. If You remove the obstacles to faith, all shadows disappear.
She opened her eyes. When had she last closed them? She was lying down. She had on her white mantle, the special garment they wore for Mass, but she was not in choir.
“Are you awake, Sister?”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in the infirmary. You became ill; we had to bring you here to rest.” Mother Emmanuel looked tired. Tired love.
Sister Teresa stirred in the next bed. She looked bleached, like a piece of driftwood.
“Father Aaron explained your condition to me, Sister. He had to, under the circumstances. I explained it to the others.”
“We are as God made us, Mother.”
Mother Emmanuel sighed. “After your seizure, you were telling us how beautiful the view was, how beautiful everything was. Do you remember saying that?”
“Yes!”
The only word I will ever need again. Every breath a
Yes, every thought a Yes.
“Have you thought about what the view looked like to the rest of us, Sister?”
My trust in God alone.
“Perhaps you aren’t aware of yourself during those moments,” the prioress continued. “Just when God offered Himself to us through the Eucharist, you stood up and began wandering around the choir, staring at the ceiling and humming to yourself. If Sister Christine hadn’t gotten to you in time, you might have walked into the screen and knocked it over. Do you remember any of that?”
Sometimes, when we follow God, we appear to cause others to suffer. God plans everything down to the smallest detail.
The prioress rose from the chair next to the bed. “I’d like you to stay here for the rest of the day. We’ll talk about this more tomorrow. In the meantime, try to get as much rest as you can.”
Sister John looked to the crucifix over the door for encouragement, but instead saw a rebuke. Now that the brilliance of her seizure had faded, doubt lost its shadow-appearance and became solid again. The horizon between reality and illusion—between the spiritual and the material, between faith and self-interest, between love and self-love—vanished.
Too restless to stay in bed but forbidden to leave the infirmary, she pulled a chair up to the window and stared out at the garden. I must stay calm, she thought. As long as I’m more careful from now on, and go to my cell as soon as I feel a headache coming, I won’t disturb the others again. It will mean more absences from choir, but quality of time given to God is what counts, not quantity. What if the seizures become more frequent, or more severe? What if I’m not able to work in the kitchen, or answer the Turn, or do my share of cleaning? How much inconvenience am I willing to impose on the others before wondering if this is really God’s will after all?
Pineapple sage grew at the base of the fountain. The narrow crimson blossoms reminded her of the wounds on Christ’s body.
Doubt is inevitable, she told herself. Saint Teresa of Avila was tormented by doubts right up until the end of her life, but she did not give in. She knew that it was better to have a dream, and pay a price for it, than to be lukewarm. Sometimes the price of following a dream includes confusion. In her diaries, Teresa often wrote, “I didn’t know what to do.”
Sister John thought: I can’t bear the thought of going back to who I was before. I prayed and scrubbed and went through the motions with no feeling of love, only a will to keep busy. If the surgery were to take my dream away, everything I’ve gone through up to now would seem meaningless. I wouldn’t even be able to draw inspiration from the memory of it; I couldn’t face that desert again, not this late in my life.
But what is my dream? Is it really to know God, or is it to know personal happiness? Didn’t Teresa also warn that the price of following a dream includes painful setbacks, even having to start all over again? Sometimes it means facing things that we think we can’t face, to learn the depth of God’s mystery and of our need for faith.
My God, I feel as if I am being torn apart.
That evening the air was especially dry and still. When Sister John opened the infirmary window, she could hear her Sisters chanting the Night Office as clearly as if they were chanting in the courtyard.
You have taken away my friends
and made me hateful in their sight.
Imprisoned, I cannot escape;
my eyes are sunken with grief.
She formed a mental picture of the choir, with all the lights turned off except for the vigil lamp at the altar and the candle illuminating the Virgin Mary’s shrine. The liturgy built to a cadenza as the two sides of the choir alternated vows of submission to God’s will, then halted as the Sisters took up their instruments of penance.
Alma Redemptoris Mater, qua pervia caeli
Every Saturday evening the Sisters bared their left shoulders for the chanting of the Miserere, an ancient psalm of repentance. The knotted leather cords of the discipline whistled through the air, then struck flesh. With each blow, the Sisters prayed for the exaltation of the Church, for peace on earth, for the souls in Purgatory, for those in the state of sin, and for all men and women in captivity. It was not enough to be sorry for past offenses, or simply to forget them. The Sisters came to Carmel to make reparation—not only for their own sins, but for every sin ever committed. Penance stripped them of self-will and self-love, not as an end in itself, but as a means of c
learing away all obstructions to the love of God.
peccatorium miserere.
When the poem ended, the monastery entered the Great Silence. The nuns would be covering their shoulders and rising from their stalls.
Sister John listened as eight pairs of sandals brushed across the floor on their way to the dormitory. She waited until she heard the Caller deliver the retiring sentence in the dormitory:
But those things I used to consider gain I have now reappraised as loss in the light of Christ.
After the final clap of wood, she slipped out of the infirmary. Alone in the choir, she noticed that everything looked flat and insubstantial; the cross above the altar looked like a fresco on the wall, the vigil lamp like a photograph of a candle.
She knelt before the Eucharist, but did not pray in words. She maintained a spirit of humility and expectancy, but did not ask for anything; she felt she no longer had any right to ask God for favors. When her legs hurt too much to kneel anymore, she sat in her stall. She did not allow herself to consider going back to the infirmary, because to retreat into the oblivion of sleep would have been to let her spirit die. She was prepared for the struggle of her life. She would not leave the room until she had decided either for or against surgery, and was prepared to live with the consequences.
Jesus faced his most difficult trial—his moment of doubt—alone. He had asked his disciples to watch and pray in the garden with him, but they had all succumbed to the weakness of the flesh and fallen asleep. When the soldiers came, the disciples were surprised and fled in confusion. Because they had not watched with Jesus, they were not ready to suffer, die, and rise with him. Sister John bared her shoulder and struck herself with the discipline several times in an attempt to shake off exhaustion, but she was fighting a losing battle. At the point where she felt she was about to fall asleep, she whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Her thoughts began to unravel.
Then a hand touched her shoulder, pulling her together again. Someone had entered the choir so quietly she hadn’t heard.
Mother Mary Joseph signed, I watch for you. Rest.
The Living Rule sat down in her stall, back bent but spirit alert. It was clear she was capable of sitting through the night, and that she intended to.
Sister John resumed her vigil, feeling her strength return. The two nuns did not look at each other, but an understanding passed between them and held. They became like two life rafts lashed together on the sea. After an hour, Mother Mary Joseph stood suddenly. She did not look tired, but after paying her respects at the altar, she left the choir.
A moth, attracted by the vigil lamp, spiraled toward it as if it were trapped in an invisible nautilus. Just when it seemed sure to destroy itself on the flame, it looped out to begin a new orbit.
Footsteps approached the choir. The Living Rule returned to her stall holding a candle, followed by Mother Emmanuel. Within a few minutes the entire community, all holding candles, rallied to keep watch with Sister John. Their presence turned night into day, midnight sun at the end of the earth. Nothing was said, but the message was clear: a Sister might feel lost, but she was never alone.
When she first became a contemplative, Sister John had envisioned a relationship to “souls in need.” The foundation of religious life, after all, is a commitment to look beyond oneself. She prayed for the souls of the world every day, and assumed her efforts made a difference. When it came to her Sisters, however—who were also souls in need, but whose troubles could not be visualized away so easily—she had been stingier, more guarded. She had never really done anything for them that didn’t serve her own interests.
Yet here they were, staying up all night with her so she wouldn’t have to struggle alone.
She had failed to discern God’s will in the matter of whether or not to treat her disorder, but she had seen today how her seizures could become a burden to her Sisters. To give up her ecstasies for their sake would be, if not a spiritual decision, at least an honorable one. She looked around the room and tried to etch the scene in memory, praying that whatever her own future might be, God would reward her Sisters for their generosity of spirit. She rose, bowed to them as a signal that her vigil was over, and returned to the infirmary.
Thank you, God, and forgive me.
1997
Surrender
SEPTEMBER 26
Cosmas and Damian,
Martyrs
She drew the curtains around her bed, paused to stand in silence before God, then removed her habit. After putting on the hospital gown, which felt as if it were made of tissue paper, she pulled the curtain aside.
First night away from my cell in almost thirty years.
Bright room. So many sounds.
She sat at the foot of the bed and ran her fingers over the spot behind her right ear.
A medical student visited her to complete the admission paperwork. His white lab coat and badge made Sister John wish she had not changed into the hospital nightgown. Without her own version of a uniform, and with her arms and shaved head fully exposed, she felt like a plucked bird. The medical student, who was Chinese and spoke with a heavy accent, had the smoothest skin Sister John had ever seen on a man. He explained that before Sister John could sign the consent form for surgery, she had to be warned of the risks.
“With surgery, there is always a chance that things can go wrong. You could come through the operation but be unable to see or speak or even think clearly. Or you could lose the use of an arm or leg. Or you could hemorrhage and die during surgery. These are all possibilities, but very unlikely. Your surgeon is very experienced, he’s done hundreds of operations like this.”
She stared at his perfect hands while he spoke, then signed the form without reading it. When he’d left, she turned off the light near her bed and tried to pray, but her mind churned.
How will I be changed after tomorrow? If I come out of it not able to think clearly, what will I do with the rest of my life? What if I can’t write or read? What if I come out of it feeling that my vocation was as false as my visions?
Low clouds had blown in from the ocean and absorbed the light from the nearby freeway lamps, turning the sky a murky purplish orange. The color of sacrifice.
Into Thy hands.
SEPTEMBER 27
Vincent de Paul,
Priest
When a nurse came in to get her at six, Sister John was more relieved than anxious.
“I’ll give you an injection now, Sister.”
Everything in the room softened. A familiar face appeared. “Good morning,” Dr. Sheppard said. “Today’s your tune-up.”
She felt glad to see him. The drugs made her feel giddy. “I smell coffee,” she said.
“I wish I could give you some, but it’ll have to wait.”
She studied his face. His features reminded her of the portrait of the young Saint Augustine hanging in the scriptorium—studious, exhausted, determined. He promised to see her in a few hours.
The nurse helped her change into a gown as white as the bridal dress she had worn at her Clothing Ceremony, then she lay down on a gurney. An orderly with mahogany skin and a gray mustache pushed the gurney out of the room and down the hallway toward the elevator. He hummed a tune as he pushed, and Sister John began to feel as if she were riding the music rather than a metal cart.
They hummed down a yellow corridor, then a green one. White uniforms smeared out in time as they hummed past, then they changed to the same green as the walls. Surgical scrubs. The ceiling turned to white tile. An overhead light was so bright it looked dark.
More green uniforms closed in. Someone lowered a mask over her face and told her to breathe normally. All she could see of this person were his eyes.
She shrank to a little point and blinked off.
Vines? Rigging of a ship? Sea snakes?
Tubes.
Colore
d lights, monitors, beeping sounds.
Sister Mary Michael and Mother Emmanuel, chatting with a nurse.
“Would a cloned human being have a soul?”
“God would find a way.”
The nurse pointed out that identical twins were already clones in a sense, and Mother Emmanuel suggested that the soul to worry about belonged to the person who would have himself cloned at great expense when so many unwanted children were going hungry.
Drawn blinds.
Would a community of nuns cloned from a single Sister get along perfectly? If two cloned Sisters became infatuated with each other, what would you call that?
Sister John fell asleep again.
Dr. Sheppard visited her several times that day to monitor her recovery, assuring her and her brown-robed visitors that the operation had gone exactly as planned. Sister Mary Michael and Mother Emmanuel stayed by her side until it got dark outside, then promised to return the next morning.
For two days Sister John drifted in and out of sleep, feeling peaceful but disconnected from everything going on around her. On the third day she woke up feeling sore all over. A priest gave her communion before breakfast, but when she tried to read from the Office after the doctors’ morning rounds, she found that she could not concentrate well enough to take the words to heart.
