Pop 89: Convent Mornings
By Madonna Hamel
I read the big existential guns in university, though with great trepidation. I was in my twenties and had stopped going to church, though I still held dear the rituals, the hymns, holy cards, angels and saints. In sharp relief, “No Exit,” “The Plague,” “Nausea,” and “The Stranger” seemed dry, almost crabby, reminding me of the tragic and morose posturing of the over-thinking boys I fell for in college. I felt I was in another church, but without the lovely bells and smells, the heart-felt songs and prayers. The existentialists gave me no wiggle room; they cut us lovers of mystery no slack.
In fact, they scared me, they expected far much more restraint than any Mother Superior ever did. I could not read them in the confines of my apartment. I had to sit outside, beside the fountain or under a tree. I needed to be near frisky athletic freshmen tossing footballs or young poets, strolling among the roses. I remember loving the way Camus wrote, but hating the relentless dead ends of his character’s lives. What was the point of anything? After reading Nausea I was nauseated for days.
I feel nausea now. I wake up with it. I feel haunted by things I have no control over: my brother’s health, my friend’s losses, the vagaries of aging. It doesn’t help that I am lackadaisical about what I read in the morning. This year, I made a point of not reading anything online first thing in the morning and later in the day, limiting it to a half hour. Instead of searching the internet, I would supplicate to greater forces. Read books instead. I have three thousand of them, cramming shelves and climbing corners, after all. I think often of Pascal’s words about all the world’s troubles stemming from the inability of a person to sit still, alone in a room. Did he actually mean: not reading?
My first year in Val Marie, I woke every morning with a sense of elation. And I don’t just mean I felt “rested”, “positive” because I woke “on the right side of the bed”. I mean, I was filled with joy, delight, and enthusiasm. I clapped my hands with glee before entirely conscious, like a child on Christmas morning. I felt this way, every day of the year, but especially my first three months at The Convent, nestled in my narrow but comfortable bed in the basement room next to the boiler room. The room once belonged to the Mother Superior. But when the Ducan’s rescued the defunct convent from demolition and turned it into an inn, they dubbed it The Cinderella Room. I preferred to think of it as my cell, tethering me, anchoring me, like an anchorite.
The anchorites were one of the earliest orders of monastics who withdrew from secular society and focussed on communing with God and the angels. Julian of Norwich, the 14th century mystic, and perhaps the best-known anchoress, lived in a tiny room attached to the local church. Through a small window, she could participate in the mass. Through another small window, she could address any poor soul on the road looking for wisdom and solace.
I imagine her dispensing spiritual sustenance the way fast food gets dispensed from a drive-through window today. Julian is most known for her phrase: “All will be well, and all be well, and all manner of things will be well.” That pretty much covers everything - no need for an extra package of salt or ketchup to accompany that one.
In his last section of The Waste Land, written one winter in London, T.S. Eliot repeats Julian’s phrase of reassurance, a reassurance the poet himself sought throughout the Second World War, and afterwards amidst growing materialism. Through Julian, Eliot found beauty in the practice of Aestheticism, with its focus on mysteries and rituals.
My own search for a life like Julian’s began when I packed up my car with boxes of books and sweaters, and my Mary icons and drove to Saskatchewan. All I knew is: I had a month at the convent dedicated to just writing. I attributed my new happiness to my disciplined focus. But also to the silence and simplicity of my surroundings. And the omnipresence of Nature.
On evening walks, I would encounter meadowlarks, the occasional badger or porcupine appearing around the corner, always a deer bounding over a fence, sometimes a whole herd of antelope, a nighthawk diving directly in front of me, thrilling me, stoking my sense of wonder.
Every morning, I rose early, dressed hastily, and padded my way up two narrow flights of stairs to the kitchen. Waiting for my coffee to brew, I’d read the blackboard where visitors from around the world chalked their favourite quotes. My favourite: “The wind gives the grass a voice, the grass gives the wind a face.” Though I’m also fond of: “ In life, there’s rarely justice, but there’s always mercy.” Occasionally, the Ducans would cull the quotes, erasing the ones they didn’t like and adding a few of their own.
Then, I’d carry my coffee to the far end of the building, the rising sun reflecting in the glass cabinets full of old catechisms lining the long, shiny hall. By the time I reached my desk in the sitting room, a former chapel, I would know how to begin my first line. Beside me was the old confessional. Someone had impishly replaced the doors with sheer curtains. “Just to keep me honest?” I wrote in my journal. I also wrote: “I seem to be propelled by an impulse to examine my motives and beseech the divine presence to keep me free of too much thinking.”
And here’s something odd, I recently discovered the last words in Eliot’s Waste Land are: “And all shall be well and/ All manner of things shall be well/By the purification of the motive/In the ground of our beseeching.”