It was an old half-jest between them, but only half a jest, since it cut too near a constant truth. The odd thing-or not so odd a thing-was that God always did provide, if not bountifully, at least enough that as yet no guests had ever been turned away unfed or the nuns starved.
Had gone somewhat hungry sometimes, but never starved.
Someone began to ring the bell in the cloister’s garth, calling to Vespers, a summoning that enjoined immediate silence as well as immediate obedience. Willing to both, Frevisse nodded her farewell to Ela and left the guesthall. The rain had stopped but the clouds still lowered. Dark would come early this evening, she thought as she crossed the cobbled yard, making her way between puddles. Coming almost dry-footed to the cloister door, she let herself in, shut the door firmly between her and the world until tomorrow, and followed the dark passageway into the lesser shadows of the cloister walk. Dame Claire was just passing hurriedly toward the church, a faint, trailing odor of mint telling she had been at work with her herbs. Frevisse followed her, finding herself last into the church. Curtsying to the altar before slipping into her own place in the choir stalls, she saw Sister Cecely had after all been allowed to shift into what had been-and was now again-her stall. Kneeling there after all these years, did she feel relief, even gratitude, that the circle of her life had brought her back here? Frevisse wondered, then let go thought of her as Domina Elisabeth began the Office.
The waning afternoon’s gloom was enough that the candles had been lighted along the choir stalls, making a softly golden glow along the two lines of heads bent over their breviaries open on the slanted ledges in front of them. The varied voices-Domina Elisabeth’s firmly leading, Dame Perpetua’s light and confident, Dame Juliana’s lately beginning to waver with age, Dame Claire’s deep and determined, Dame Thomasine’s thin but completely given over to the pleasure of prayer, Dame Amicia’s wandering in search of her note and rarely finding it, Dame Johane’s steady as a watchman’s tread, Sister Margrett’s richly weaving through the words.
What her own voice was and how it seemed to others, Frevisse did not know. For humility’s sake, she reminded herself of that now and again, because in her early years in St. Frideswide’s she had been too often distracted from the Offices by annoyance at others’ ways and voices, had known it for a fault and struggled to overcome it, sometimes strangling it down but never being rid of it, until finally in her third or maybe fourth year of nunhood she had found herself so angry during Prime that she lost her own place in the second psalm of the Office and, in her confusion, broke the pattern of the prayer. For that, at the Office’s end, while everyone else remained seated, she had had to rise from her place, go and kneel before the altar, and kiss the hem of the altar cloth in sign that she humbly admitted her fault.
Truly humbled, she had asked leave later that morning to speak alone with Domina Edith, and kneeling in front of her in her parlor, had confessed her trouble-had even been able to bring herself to name it a fault without being prompted-and asked for help. Domina Edith had laid a thickly veined old hand on her shoulder and said, kindly, “You are not the only one to whom Dame Emma is a trial.”
Frevisse had startled at that. She had named no names, but Dame Emma, with a busy mind that did not run deeply, had a way, when she was not thinking about something else during an Office, of throwing herself at the psalms with a vast eagerness that had no heed for what the words meant, only for saying them as vigorously as she could, and while she was not the only nun with ways that irked Frevisse, she had indeed been Frevisse’s undoing this morning. Domina Edith had leaned a little toward her and said, as if imparting a deep secret, “She wears worse than anyone else on me, too.”
Frevisse was so relieved not to be alone in her fault that she had burst out, “If only she prayed as if she understood what she was saying!”
With a hint of laughter in her voice, Domina Edith had answered, “We’re commanded to sing joyfully in the Lord’s name. The psalm says nothing about being a delight to the ears of others while we do it.” While Frevisse paused with surprise at that way of seeing it, Domina Edith had sat back in her chair and added, “Now, there is your fault to be mended.”
Frevisse had stirred restlessly at that. No matter what her intent, she had still found it hard to think of her irk at discordant prayer as a fault.
Probably easily reading that thought, Domina Edith had said, “There is, of course, the matter of penance for your anger and for losing your place in the prayers, but I suspect that learning a quiet-hearted acceptance of others ‘flaws’ will serve best as both your penance and your cure together.” She had smiled. “I would tell you, as our Lord told the adulteress, to go and do no more sin, as if that would settle your trouble, but I know, as surely our Lord knew, that it isn’t as simple as that.”
Unable to keep her dismay to herself, Frevisse had exclaimed, “No, it isn’t!” She had wanted Domina Edith to somehow make things better, not lay a task on her that she had instantly and deeply doubted she could do.
But very quietly Domina Edith had said, “Child, it’s not in having our own way in everything that we come to God. It’s in giving up ourselves that we free our souls to grow.”
“I’ve never understood…” Frevisse had started but found herself already discouraged enough that she had been unable even to finish the sentence.
Gently, Domina Edith had said, “It’s among the hardest of things to understand. We’re too wrapped and led by our bodies and our thoughts to understand easily the freedom there is in going free of both our body’s and our mind’s demands. Nor is it an effort you will succeed at once and be done with.” She had smiled. “Not unless you become a saint. Although I gather holiness doesn’t always sit easily on even a saint. No, child, you will not find this quest an easy one, unless by God’s mercy you are particularly blessed.”
Frevisse had not been particularly blessed. With more failures than a few in her long struggle toward quiet-hearted acceptance, there were times when she did not feel blessed at all; but in those times what helped the most was the last thing Domina Edith had said that day. After bidding her to rise and making a small, dismissing movement of one hand, she had said while Frevisse curtsied to her, “Remember, too, when next your impatience rises, that you don’t know how well or ill your own voice accords among your sisters. You may be as much a trial to someone of them as Dame Emma is to you.”
These years later, Frevisse could laugh at how that thought had startled her young self, but then it had discomforted her enough to let her begin the long work of learning that Domina Edith had set her. And a long learning it was, nor yet completed, she feared. One thing she had come to understand, though, was that holiness need not include outward loveliness at prayer. For an instance, Dame Thomasine was more removed from the world and probably closer to God than anyone Frevisse had ever known; it had not made difference to her thin and reedy voice in the Offices. But with her wider understanding, Frevisse had come to accept-which was a step further than merely knowing-that all the nuns’ voices were part of the pattern of prayer that was the heart of the priory’s reason to be at all, and it had been with an unexpected ache this Lent that Frevisse found she missed the part that had been Dame Emma’s, now that Dame Emma was no longer with them but buried in a quiet grave in the nunnery’s orchard.
Domina Edith had been right-she was larger souled for being less wedded to demanding how the world should be for her.
At least she hoped she was larger souled.
But if nothing else, she was able now, most of the time, to give herself up fully to the Offices’ prayers and psalms, to the heart-easing, mind-lifting pleasure of letting go the world’s weight and going into mindfulness of all there was beyond the passing matters of every day. As she and the others were now saying, “Domine, non superbit cor meum…Immo composui et pacavi animam meam. Sicut parvulus in gremio matris suae; ita in me est anima mea.” Lord, my heart is not prideful…Rather I have settled and quieted my soul. As a little child on the lap of his mother, so in me is my soul.