Святые сердца

She turns to Zuana and her eyes are shining. To look at her you would think she was positively enjoying herself. At recreation the more mischievous nuns sometimes speculate on what a perfect wife for a great noble she would have made, running his family and his palace as efficiently as she runs the convent. They do her an injustice, Zuana thinks. It is not a mere palace she should run but a state. For surely in its way that is what she is doing here. Right down to a network of spies and agents to help keep her authority intact.

There are scholars, great men of the present as well as the past, who believe that God created man because only through us could He celebrate the power of His vast creation. And thus it is both our pleasure and our duty to witness the wonder. You cannot hear it, can you? But even now as we stand here, under the earth a thousand bulbs and seeds and roots are budding and cracking and sprouting, an army of small tendrils and shoots rising up, moving through the earth toward the light, each one of them so tender that when you see them you will marvel at how they could have moved such a weight of soil above them to emerge. Imagine that, Faustina. Each year the repeating miracle of it.

The picture he painted was so strong, and he had such awe in his voice, that whenever she reads about or imagines the Second Coming, she sees graveyards like vast herb gardens, with bodies, as tender and young as those new shoots, pushing up against the rotten wood of their coffins and rising up toward the light of God to the sound of trumpets. Flesh incorruptible. She had told him of this vision once and he had smiled in that way parents do when their children are wiser or more charming than their years. But she could see that for him it was in some ways no more impressive than the more humble version of God’s glory that nature presented.

Zuana can still remember the time, years ago now, when an old bishop with a new broom set out to ban reflecting surfaces entirely from the convent. It took barely a week for the first silver tray to arrive under a relative’s skirts, during which time a number of the nuns had spent their resting hours poised like Narcissus over the surface of the fishpond. The overzealous confessor recruited by that bishop didn’t last much longer. After six months of confessions where a queue of nuns kept him busy from morning till night with a litany of misdemeanors so trivial as to be unpunishable—except to the ligaments in his knees— he begged to be transferred to another convent. The day before he left they sang specially composed Vespers and slaughtered three chickens for supper. All in his honor, of course.

So much is she her father’s daughter that by the time she became old enough to understand the Passion of Christ her instinct had been to save rather than worship Him. In her first weeks in the convent, when her future had felt like a life sentence, she had kept herself from despair during the endless hours in chapel by studying that great hanging body, detailing the ways in which, had she been called upon, she might have repaired the damage: which poultices and herbs she might have used to stanch the flow of blood, the salves with which she would have treated the whiplashes and the cuts, the ointments she would have rubbed around the jagged flesh to avoid infection. Even, most heretical of all, the draft she might have given Him to blunt the agony.

“What? You think because nuns serve God we should have to die sooner or hurt more?”
“No. I mean …well, there is not much praying about it.”
“Oh, but you are wrong.” Of course she has heard it before, this blindness to finding God in anything that does not involve praying or suffering. “This room is full of prayer. Look around you. Everything here—every herb, every juice, every ingredient of every remedy—comes from nature and the earth, which along with the heavens has been created by Him for us to worship. Even our capacity to understand it is given by Him. Honor the physician for the need one has of him. For the most High has created him. Ecclesiasticus 38, verse 1.”

It is always hard, understanding what is being gained in the moment at which something is also being taken away. For such a young woman to appreciate the different meanings of incarceration and freedom. How, for example, outside these walls free women will live their whole lives dictated by the decisions of others, yet inside, to a remarkable extent, they govern themselves. How here each and every nun has a voice and a vote (where else in Christendom would you find such a thing?), where they discuss and decide everything together, from the menu for the next saint’s day to the appointment of a new abbess or a choir mistress or a dozen other posts essential to the smooth governing of what is, in effect, a business as well as a spiritual refuge.

In this prison there are no fathers to bully or rage at the expensive uselessness of daughters, no brothers to tease and torment weaker sisters, no rutting drunken husbands poking constantly at tired or pious wives. Women live longer here: the plague finds it harder to jump the walls, and they are saved from all the scabby pus-filled diseases that pass from husband to wife through the marriage bed. Here no one’s womb drops out of her body from an excess of pregnancies, no one dies in the sweated agonies of childbirth or has to suffer the pain of burying half a dozen of her children. And if it is the sweetness of cherub flesh that pulls your heartstrings, there are young ones enough to coddle and nurture, either in the girl children sent to learn to read and write or in the newborn wide-eyed infants who pass through the parlatorio on family visits. Indeed, while angry new novices might laugh at the idea of leaving the gates open to the world, the fact is that for each half-dozen young women who come in howling, there is often an older one, newly widowed or longing to be so, eager for the moment when she might enter of her own accord.

Girls of their age are greedy for sleep, and Matins, slicing its way through the middle of the night, is the harshest of all the convent offices. Yet its brutality is also its great sweetness, for its very meaning is to coax and draw up the soul through the body’s resistance, and when one is pulled from sleep there can be less distraction from the noise and chatter of the mind. Zuana knows sisters who, as they age, grow to love this service above all others, to feed off it like nectar, for once you have disciplined yourself to transcend tiredness, the wonder of being in His presence while the rest of the world is asleep is a rare gift, a form of privilege without pride, feasting without gluttony.