Tag Archives: faith

Celine’s Spiritual Desolation: A Moving Encounter in an Abandoned Church (unpublished novel extract)

I did want to include this section in my novel, but I couldn’t find the right place for it in the overall narrative. In this section, Celine feels herself desolate and abandoned while three of her sisters pursue religious life, and she is unable to share her feelings with Leonie, her only other sister in the world. She finds a neglected country church, and in it what Celine perceives as a neglected and uncared for reserved sacrament. She is able, in her distress, to identify with its apparent neglect. This section is based, as many of my sections were, on some elements of correspondence between the Martin sisters.

I’m missing Jeanne [Adele in my final m/s]. Her wit, her practicality. Her wide-eyed stare belies the thoroughly grounded soul. And to marry: that ultimate vow of human love, the one to the other. Just as Mama and Papa were, all those years ago, before their bouquet of the living and the dead pushed through Mama’s fertile, finite flesh. 

Here at La Musse without Francis and Jeanne I am left with Leonie and Lucie [her younger cousin]. Leonie, poor pinched sister, is my shadow, except for the evenings when I retire to my room and assume she does likewise. We do not converse on the fabric of heaven the way I used to with Therese. 

Lucie is very young when measured against we two semi-orphans. It is not just the lack of years compared with us, though this is a fact. She is silly-young in a way Therese rarely, if ever was. She teases and doesn’t sense the incipient hurt feelings of others. See how she made fun of Leonie in a pose for the photograph yesterday, extending a paintbrush to mock-poke the back of Leonie’s head and distress the symmetry of our double portrait. 

And yet, there is a bright grace in her. One day she will see it in herself and be astonished.

Leonie and I walk in the country streets in the middle of the hot afternoon. July is a month of glory and unremitting glare. We see a small church, removed from the dirt track of a road down which we stroll, hotly, despondently. It is a church without a name. ‘Let’s go in, Leonie,’ I suggest. ‘It’s a hot afternoon, but I’m not ready to return to La Musse yet. Uncle and Aunt will be resting, and it’s too depressing to sit in those empty rooms, awaiting yet more coffee.’ Leonie offers me her characteristic squint and tight lipped smile. She nods, agreeing. ‘I have never excelled at politeness,’ she offers, after a pause. ‘And after two weeks at La Musse, I have exhausted the little talent I have for it.’ She turns, as I have done, to face the church. I link my arm with hers – we are both wearing white muslin full length sleeves under our tightly buttoned bodies – and we approach this little echo of what we hold most dear. 

The door creaks open; it is thick dark wood which has swollen in the heat, like our own feet and hands. I go in. Leonie follows. Motes of dust shimmer in the air which is sliced through by coloured light; narrow windows either side of the stone font provide this illumination, which is short lived as we proceed down the aisle. To the right, an uncared for statue of the Virgin. Leonie settles there and reaches in her little handbag for her rosary. I move to the front of the church where the altar is in shadows. I feel strongly that Jesus is here, and I search for the reserved sacrament. I spy him, and am distraught at the discovery.

I have found God in a poor cup.

The little ciborium rests in its recess; it lacks not only a sanctuary lamp but any light at all. Spiders and the dust of neglect could nestle there, undetected and undisturbed. I am struck by a pain in my head and my heart, and move to kneel on the unswept stone of the sanctuary floor. Is it possible? Does Jesus live on in such a place? I cannot resist, I get to my feet again and approach the small recess, shelf-high. What looks like a rag rests over the tarnished goblet. Crossing myself first, I reach out my right hand and lift the stained little cloth. A single dry host in the bottom of the cup. A pressure squeezes my chest and I can’t help myself, ‘Oh, my God!’ I say. And then I back away, step down into the poor floor of the church and sit down shakily on a wooden chair, in front of this abandoned divinity. Leonie, I assume, is repeating her Ave Marias, pacing securely through them with the aid of the beads; a tightrope walker with a safe harness. But though I am now seated, I am in free fall.

The pulse, the spark of the world, guttering out here in this lonely place. Is it possible? That God should be so discarded in a Catholic nation? I experience a terrible ripping sensation in the pit of my stomach. What is reality, what truth? I am Celine, twenty-one years old, a woman in silk dresses, gold jewellery, who lives on in the world for the sake of her father. My future is a blank canvass stained with God and duty. A bit of cloth to be blown away. My soul a dried sliver of driftwood. Is any of it real? Reality: the real presence. The presence of He who made the universe, then entered it to die, here in this poor stable of a temple. I blink to clear the sting of tears, and between blinks the whole thing vanishes: there is no heaven, no earth, no God, no Celine, no Therese. Only an empty chair on a cold stone floor, for the loveless void of eternity. What is the point of a beating heart? 

I blink again. And the old yearning structure of my childhood resumes its place, a fractured skeleton caging Celine’s soul. There is God and Jesus. Death is a return to the Fatherland, where Mother and four little children await me. Life passes in daubs of light and arcs of thunderous grey. I am mother to an aged man who babbles and bawls like an infant. My Therese, who has flown to the only safe ark in the world, is right: there is nothing to do but love. And here is love poorly acknowledged. To dwell at La Musse, with its rambling gardens, its stairwells and chambers, its parties and soirees: and all the time here in lost shadow is God. This poor place. The priests here are old, they have spent what lifeblood they possessed decades ago. I doubt Mass is said here from Easter to Easter. I understand how in poverty, requirements of the body seem greater than those of the soul. But still, to have a God, who entrusts himself in such simplicity, shunned in this way affects me deeply. I close my eyes. I breathe with concentration, offering each round of breath as salve for the lonely of the world. 

Poor Christ. And though I am feted in the plush, confined world of the Guerins while He languishes here, in another way I sense my deep affinity with Him. My three Carmelite sisters live in consecrated purity. Leonie – who knows the movements of Leonie’s soul. But she says she want to go to the Visitation, and has already shown her stubborn disregard of others when it comes to following a perceived vocation. It is only I who remain in my dusty spiritual corner, unrecognized; unable to come out. This is not the affinity I long for. And yet it is where I am placed; for this momentary lifetime. For this Year of Our Lord. 

An unpublished excerpt from Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven

This novel took me many years to write, and because of the polyphonic structure it took, there are quite a few extracts which I decided to cut from the final manuscript. Many of them I remember quite vividly still – partly because of the way the characters appealed to me so strongly. Some incidents are well-known, and some less so. Some are made up with artistic licence. I thought I could publish some here in case anyone is interested. This short section does refer to a real moment, and a real piece of ‘vandalism’ committed by Therese, such was her love for the Jesus who was her everything. (I also have a poem about the incident in my Paraclete collection Therese: Poems)

In this extract, Therese’s sister Celine (Sister Genevieve of St Teresa) is speaking.

1898

I walk with Sister Teresa of Saint Augustine along the dormitory corridor to Saint Eloise, Therese’s last cell before her move to the infirmary. It is a spring day, and lemony sunlight pours in through the cell windows and pools in the corridor beside this now vacant cell door. We are taking the last of the moveable items down to the little room next to the sacristy, where Pauline has persuaded Marie de Gonzague to allow us to store mementos of our dead sister. Down there already are her habit and veils; her workbasket with its little spools of thread, needles, and stubby scissors; the cracked oil lamp she stubbornly preferred to newer versions, and the old writing desk she retrieved from herself from the attic a few years ago, insisting I take her better one myself. Housed there also are letters and manuscripts; these manuscripts there has been endless discussion about. Therese’s book. Her poems and playscripts. Her hair even, saved from her novitiate scalping nearly ten years ago. 

But she is not there.

Today we collect the items from the entrance room where I joined the novices to be berated. Pauline has asked for the little booklets describing our rule to be collected and preserved; as well as any almanacs, holy cards, or little devotional items we may have missed. ‘Take Sister Teresa,’ Pauline had said. ‘She misses her too.’  Indeed. This sister of whom I was stupidly jealous until Therese herself told me how uncongenial she really found her: this was the reason for her efforts to be loving. Always the last are first in her heart. 

Sister Teresa moves ahead of me into the cell. She turns, touches me lightly on the forearm and indicates that she will gather the booklets in the little cabinet to the right. I nod, do not manage to smile, and gesture with my head towards the farther room, the cell proper with its mattress and little table. It will be bare of course, but Sister Teresa does not remonstrate with me. 

Entering this cell, the light seems to intensify. I close my eyes for a moment. My body fills with an infinite vacancy, then contracts to the simple pains of grief. Wanting to shut off the sounds of shuffling paper from the anteroom, I push the cell door shut. Have I ever been in the cell with the door closed? Perhaps when I gave her those terrible horse hair rub downs. I doubt I saw anything around us due to my tears. Now though, I see there are marks carved on the inside of the door. What is this? I go closer to examine it. The light coming through the window plays on the door, and though my shadow obscures it, it keeps dappling the wood and its inscription. But this is no nicely turned Scriptural quotation. This is Therese’s own childish scribble! And I stare at what she has seen fit to have written. 

Jesus is my only love.

It is scored into the wood. She must have used the blunt point of a scissor blade. I put my finger to the door and trace the etched words. Like a child exploring a new medium.  A lover carving the beloved’s name on a tree.

My eyes are stinging. But I am not purely overwhelmed with joy. Something in me is hurting. 

What about me?

All those years from the belvedere evenings to the day of her death. All those years, I was the echo of her soul: but there is no echo of me here. I gave up my life in the world for her, but she left me again, and there is no echo of our twinned souls here. All I see is the prodigal act of a child; a best friend pulled away by romance.

I pull the door open again, obscuring what I have seen, and set my face into what I hope is competent authority. I indicate to Sister Teresa of Saint Augustine that I must speak to communicate an instruction. She bows her head, booklets gathered in her arms. ‘Sister Teresa, please fetch a plaque of blank wood and some nails, and the little hammer from the sacristy cupboard. There are some marks behind the cell door which I wish to be covered.’ I indicate the dimensions of the plaque I require; the size and shape of a large book. ‘Thank you.’ Sister Teresa’s eyes widen but she does not presume to argue with me. 

While I wait I sit on the chair I used to occupy as an angry novice, and stare at the emptied bookshelves beside me.