It was a spring day today; sweet and gentle air seemed in control, vanquishing delightfully the normal smells of fertilizer and car fumes. The light was slightly slanted, and warm, so that each leaf on each tree was lit in the splendor of new green, and the Poor Clares Convent nestled in the little valley below the coastal hills like a hen settling into her covey for the evening.
We parked, and ten percolating little girls bubbled out of the cars, spilling merrily along the sidewalk toward the convent entrance. A bell rang, far off in the silence, and a little hunched-over nun opened the door. She looked an era old, but was resplendent in the habit of St. Clare. There was a busy-peacefulness about her, as she settled us in the visitor’s area in front of the grille, the lofty patchwork of wood that was the boundaryline between our world- a choppy, rushed, windswept and kalediscope place- and theirs- a mystery. I had never been to a convent. Being there is different than seeing it on a movie or reading about it, for there is a thousand immediacies which cannot be caught on film or page: the kitchy-seventies chairs from the little kitchen, a kitchen with only the essentials; as one little girl put it, the ‘nun-spiders’; the quiet, serious statues and paintings; and that grille, a strange conjunction between jail-visiting and a chosen desert.
The door in the room on the other side of that grille opened and Mother Trinitas of the Indwelling wheeled herself in. The ten girls all stood up, and she came to the grille and stood up, her small, old face peeking at them. She had a way of looking carefully and at close proximity, but not from infirmity, rather from interest. And she looked at each child in a slow and quiet rhythm, a rhythm it seems born from a different life. She would talk, in soft tones, and it seems no word was wasted; each sentence pregnant, each movement a harmony of silence. Yes, I remember her words. But I remember most her rhythm and the powerful exhortation she made to us: “Do not be afraid of silence. It envelopes you; in it is music, and you listen to God in that silence. When you are helping your mother, when you are at church, stop for a minute and let the silence take over: and listen.” That exhortation was a jewel set in a heavy gold ring, the ring that was her manner; a manner cultivated over many years of silence, purity and prayer.
Another Sister came in, and as they related to each other and to the little girls, our Little Flowers Club, I watched their eyes. There was happiness- to see us, yes, but a happiness that cannot be but an old happiness. Have you ever been to a flower show, to see some very rare and carefully raised breed of rose or peony? Or perhaps an Italian villa, built carefully over centuries by the same family, where every plant, every stone, every field and stone wall has been tended? You can recognize the fruit of many years when you see it. The happiness in their eyes, seemed to me to be the fruit of many years.
We drove away, and I didn’t want to talk about what was in my soul, so I made some jokes with the girls. The rest of the day, I was so happy, as if some grace from their crystalline fountain had been poured into me.
I wonder: can we cultivate something of that grace, that fullness -of -silence rhythm in our lives? Or is that the gift of the Bridegroom for His brides alone? It seems to me that it is a gift, that it is a certain loveliness reserved for the Brides of Christ. Yet this does not make me unhappy, rather it makes me see that like the peonies, we all have different fragrances; that at the end of St. Paul’s race, at the fullness of our life with Christ, whether we are, like Ven. Anne, eleven- or like Mother Trinitas, eighty: that at this fullness, we give glory to God in the way He assigned to us. The way He made us. Perhaps it will be the fragrance of suffering, perhaps the fragrance of the missionary, or my fellow mothers, the fragrance is coming from the reddened and workworn hands, hands and breasts and faces worn in childcare; a life sacrificed and not selfishly held. So perhaps we do not know what fragrance we give off as we reach our fullness. Perhaps the Poor Clare nuns we met do not know how sweetly their souls smell.
Pray for vocations.
