A number of years ago I served on the Board of Directors of a private Catholic girls high school. The school was sponsored by an order of nuns whose "Mother House" was in another state. One year the Board was invited to the Mother House, along with the Boards of other schools the nuns sponsored, to share ideas and to "recharge" ourselves. During our visit we were given a tour of the property which was, among other things, a working farm. At the far end of the property were some small bungalows that we were told could be reserved by outsiders for "silent retreats". I was a busy corporate lawyer at the time and the whole concept of a "silent retreat" fascinated me. The idea of being away from work, family, responsibilities, for a period of time with NO ONE talking to me, and NO ONE expecting me to talk to them, sounded like heaven. I kept the possibility in the back of my mind but never followed up.
I was reminded of this while reading Stone Yard Devotional, a beautifully written novel by the Australian author Charlotte Wood, in which an unnamed narrator visits a rural convent property inhabited by members of an unidentified order of nuns and stays in a small bungalow on their grounds. She basically is there for a silent retreat.
The convent property is near the town where the narrator grew up and where her parents are buried. The nuns appear to be part of an enclosed order which interacts with the outside world only as needed. They go to the little church on the property many times a day to pray. The narrator at first wonders how they get anything done since they are constantly interrupted by the bells bringing them to prayer. Then she realizes that prayer is the work. The narrator makes clear that she is not religious but at some point she decides to permanently leave behind her life in Sydney and live with the nuns, although she does not become a nun.
The novel is written in the form of an undated journal. But Wood's use of the word "Devotional" in the title is, I believe, illuminating. A Christian "Devotional" is a book that is not a theological treatise or a commentary on the Bible but is usually filled with accessible writings meant to be helpful to ordinary people in connection with their faith. Its form is flexible but in this context the most appropriate definition is a series of meditations. The journal that makes up this novel is partly a record of daily happenings but it is also a series of meditations on the past experiences of the unnamed non-religious narrator that helps her in her life journey but may also be enlightening for the reader.
There are two epigrams at the beginning of the novel that give us a clue as to what her meditations will focus on. The first is a quote from Nick Cave: "I felt chastened by the world". This is from Faith, Hope and Carnage in which he discusses, among other things, his grief over the death of his son. It isn't clear at first how this is applicable to the narrator who has no, and has never had any, children. But grief is universal. The second is a quote from Elizabeth Hardwick's novel Sleepless Nights in which her character confesses that what she is willing to tell us about her life may be distorted by the passage of time and the life she has chosen to lead. And, in fact, Wood's unnamed narrator tells us little of the life she left behind in Sydney where at one time she was married and worked for (perhaps led?) an organization devoted to endangered species conservation. Her memories are mostly, but not solely, of earlier times.
This is not a plot-driven novel, but three events occur that shape the life of the narrator and the nuns. Wood uses the word "visitations" for these events. The first is the return of the bones of Sister Jenny who went missing, presumed murdered, in Southeast Asia years before while running a shelter for abused women. Jenny left the enclosed order because she no longer wanted to withdraw from the world and pray but wanted to be out in the world directly helping people. The nuns want to bury Jenny's bones on their grounds but that needs council approval and the novel takes place during the pandemic when getting administrative approvals for anything was time-consuming.
The second "visitation" is the arrival of Helen Parry, an activist nun with, everyone seems to agree, a "difficult" personality. Helen went to high school with our unnamed narrator who remembers her as a friendless girl, abused by her single mother and bullied by the local teens including the narrator. It is Helen Parry who brings the bones of Sister Jenny home to the nuns but then she stays on for months, partly due to the pandemic. The third "visitation" is a plague of mice through the summer brought on by climate change (something that apparently really happened in Australia).
The novel is divided into three parts. In the first part the narrator's journal entries are concerned mostly with factual matters of day-to-day life and her observations of the lives of the nuns. But in the second and third parts the nature of the entries change very slowly to more personal memories and into meditations on despair, death, grief, guilt, and forgiveness. The narrative arc of the novel is the evolution of the attitude of the narrator towards her past, her current life and the community of which she is a part and yet not a part.
The factual circumstances that caused the narrator, who is in her early sixties, to leave behind her life are unclear to the reader and maybe even to the narrator, but she admits that it had to do with despair. She admits that she could no longer "pretend to a fervor" about her projects that she no longer felt. At lunch with a young colleague who worked at her organization she realizes that her despair is infecting the people she works with who still want to believe they can save endangered species and change the world. She writes:
I read somewhere that Catholics think despair is the unforgiveable sin. I think they are right; it's malign, it bleeds and spreads. Once gone, I don't know that real hope or faith -- are they the same? -- can ever return.
Sister Jenny, apparently in hope, left the enclosed life to be a part of the outside world and try to directly change it. The narrator, in despair, left the outside world and stopped trying to actively change it. The reader can compare her choice to retreat from the world to the choice of Jenny and, especially, of Helen Parry, to meet the world head on. Is one way more right than the other? Or is there room in the world for both kinds of people? And how does the narrator compare with the nuns she lives with who have retreated from the world but believe in prayer, which the narrator says she does not.
The narrator begins to meditate on the concept of forgiveness and how it is affected by death. Death means, among other things, the inability to offer apologies or grant forgiveness, on the part of both the living and the dead. She observes the grief of Sister Bonaventure over the death of her friend Sister Jenny and tries to offer Bonaventure comfort, misunderstanding Bonaventure's grief. The narrator believes Bonaventure wishes she could apologize to Jenny for questioning her choice to leave the order for the outside world. But Bonaventure isn't praying for Jenny's forgiveness, she's trying to find it in herself to forgive Jenny for not understanding why Bonaventure would continue to lead an enclosed life of prayer.
I have never forgotten that strange feeling, left standing there in the wilderness with my regret and my remorse still around me, suspended in the air. Not denounced, not forgiven. It made me admire her, if I am honest, this refusal to alleviate my discomfort. It made me wonder what forgiveness actually is, or means. What was it that I wanted from her that day?
Many of the narrator's memories are about her own parents, especially her mother. The narrator claims that her focus on her mother is because she completely understood her father but never completely understood her mother even though they were close. At one point she says that "My mother trusted me and I trusted her" and she wishes should could have told this simple truth to her mother before her death. But, as with apology and forgiveness, death forecloses further communication.
Her parents were not ones to stand back, they jumped in to help people and to make the world better. Her mother composted before anyone else did and while the narrator was embarrassed by this her mother didn't care. Her parents helped to re-settle Vietnamese immigrants while the narrator pretended to her friends that she didn't know them. Her mother raised funds for an obscure English charity that no one else knew or cared about. But she continued to send them money until the day she died. People were always telling the narrator how good her mother was. When the narrator is trying to comfort Bonaventure she says that we "all make saints of the dead, it is the only way we can bear it" but that is really a reflection on her own memories of her deceased mother.
The narrator is constantly thinking about death, although at first you don't really notice that. There are daily encounters with death that the narrator mentions in her journal (Sister Jenny's bones in her casket, a baby chick that needs to be buried, a local animal stealing the chicken eggs, a local farmer who dies). On a daily basis the community is forced to catch, kill and dispose of mice, hundreds and hundreds of mice. Living with the mice is bad enough but worse is figuring out out how to dispose of all of the dead mice. The smell of death permeates the grounds and neither the narrator nor the other nuns ever become completely inured to finding and disposing of the dead mice. As the mice plague gets worse it seems to be the impetus for the narrator to meditate more and more on the deaths in her own life and the fact that one day she too will die.
As a child, the narrator viewed people who suffered the death of a loved one somewhat dispassionately, mostly with curiosity. In school there was the boy whose mother was killed moving cattle across the road. Later there is the boy who kills his parents with a shotgun. And, indeed, she observes the nuns' grief over Sister Jenny ("their sister") from a distance. But perhaps the distance is a protective measure. As she delves deeper into her memories of the deaths she has encountered throughout her life, including the death of her friend Beth but especially the death of her own mother from cancer when the narrator was a young woman, she meditates more and more on the helplessness she felt in the face of death. At one point the narrator wishes "for the thousandth time that I had been older than I was when [my mother] fell ill. I feel sure more maturity would have brought with it some greater capacity to help her than I had." (No, I thought. It doesn't.)
The narrator finally comes to understand some of of Helen Parry's younger life and wonders that no one in the community she grew up in, not even the narrator's mother, did anything to help her. No one, not even her mother, is perfect in their attempts to help in the world. And Helen Parry, who has much to forgive, needs to deal with it in her own way.
The narrator eventually comes to the realization that, for her, grief and shame are intertwined, not just the shame of not being able to apologize or forgive or to tell a loved one the depth of our love, or to be more helpful to them in their dying, but the shame of feeling grief itself. We live in a society that does not appreciate grief. We are told to get over it. Especially grief over long ago deaths, like the death of Sister Jenny and the death of the narrator's parents. But grief never leaves us, she realizes, it recedes and then returns. "The fact of grief quietly making itself known, again and again." It is this realization that helps to free her.
The push and pull between prayer for the world and activism in the world is a constant theme in this novel but Wood never comes down on one side or the other. Both seem to have their place depending on the personality of the person. The narrator's mother was a non-conformist always active in helping people in the town and perhaps that's why the narrator chose to work for an organization that wanted to change the world and married a man with many projects to make the world better. But the narrator did not have her mother's personality and in the end despaired of her ability to make change, leading her to withdraw from the world. Nor was it likely that someone like Helen Parry would ever decide to join a cloistered order and not be out in the world pushing for change. The world needs active people; it is the actions of Helen Parry that finally allow Sister Jenny to be buried. But Wood does not condemn the life of the nuns or imply that they are misguided although perhaps she draws a distinction between withdrawing for the purpose of prayer (an action) and simply withdrawing (inaction).
At the beginning of the novel, when the narrator stops at the graves of her parents she remembers thinking that lowering a casket into the ground by ropes "instead of arms" is so impersonal. And she remembers little to nothing about the decisions about the burial or what she was feeling. At the end, when Sister Jenny is finally buried, the community lowers her casket into the earth by hand into the hands of two people standing in the grave and the narrator now thinks of her as "our" sister.
This is a novel that I will be thinking about for a long time. There are ideas in this novel that I haven't mentioned, such as the nature of prayer, the relationships within a community, our connection to the earth and the impact on lives of the pandemic and global warming. If you are a person who requires a plot driven novel, this definitely isn't for you. If you are looking for a novel of ideas with an intriguing main character, give it a try.
