By the time I was fifteen, the Abbess realized I had a talent for Latin and writing and my education was taken over by her directly. Instead of the lush gardens where one might have a moment of peace, warm up in the sun, or find an extra mouthful of food, I was now sent daily into her dark quarters to assist in her many transcription projects.
It was an honor, but I felt it more as a horror. The Mother Superior’s quarters were just as austere as our own, excepting for her two prized possessions—a crucifix fixed to the stone wall above her bed and an illumination of the Abbess Hildegard of Bingen that sat in the square window, so that the sun might light it every afternoon. She should not have either—none of the other nuns were allowed sentimental things, but I knew enough by then not to comment. I did not know who the woman in the picture was at first, but nearly every day Mother Superior referenced her in some way. I thought she loved Hildegard more than Jesus, and even in my youth I could see the Mother hoped that with her own writing and her own work, she might be remembered as an Abbess like Hildegard. One day, she set me to transcribing Hildegard’s account of herumbra viventis lucis:
From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision.
I do not hear them with my outward ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses, but in my soul alone, while my outward eyes are open. So I have never fallen prey to ecstasy in the visions, but I see them wide awake, day and night.
I stopped writing, my heart pounding, unable to stop myself from reading ahead.
Thwack.The Abbess smacked me with the supple rod she kept just for this purpose across the back of my shoulders. “Do not stop,” she scolded.
“Forgive me, Mother,” I said, dipping the quill into the ink. “I was only taken by her testimony.”
“Yes, it is miraculous,” she said. “But we must not get carried away from our work by any feeling.”
I tried to phrase my question very carefully, equally as careful in the ink on my page. “Does God … does God appear to others in this same way? Does he gift others?”
Usually, the Mother Superior hated my questions—I believed it was because she either did not know the answers or did not like to think about the implications. She saw me as an instrument in her hand and found it exasperating when I showed any signs of being human—down to even using the pot. But today she pursed her thin lips in consideration and stared at the illumination of Hildegard. “If one is pure in spirit, pure in heart, and God wills it to be so, then yes. But most of us fall far short. I myself have prayed and postulated for many years, and yet God has not seen fit to answer in such a way.”
“How does one tell the difference between a holy vision and an evil one?”
She gave me one sharp, assessing look, but it was not an irregular question from me. And for Saint Hildegard, she had patience for any question. “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin,” the Mother recited in Latin. “An evil vision … magic such as witches and sorcerers practice … is but a sickly illusion of the truth. A holy vision can only come from God, and we can only have fellowship with him when we walk in his light, when we are faithful, when we are devoted anddisciplined to his word. It is easy to walk in the darkness of sorcery. That is the easiest road there is. It is when we are most broken, most heavy, most desperate that he can finally make use of us. No matter how painful it may be to our bodies or our minds, if we are to be in fellowship with his holiness, we must subjugate our wills, abandon our selves, dedicate our every thought and feeling to him. We cannot possess anything of our own, for he must remove our dross with holy fire so that we may become fine silver.” And having finished this impassioned preaching, she gripped my shoulder with her bony hand. “I hope you ask these questions as a sign that God is finally working in your heart. Go and pray on these things.”
Gratefully, I slipped away, to the garden to hide in the bed of fragrant thyme until the midday meal.
Lying on my back and watching the sunlit dapples on the arms of the great forest oaks that grew over the stone walls, my heart was stirred. Though I resented the Abbess for her stoic cruelty, her rare, impassioned words awakened a longing in me. A hopefulness. I was not Hildegard, but perhaps I could become devoted, and in that process, my visions would be transformed. Or even taken from me. I could be free of the fear of being called a witch. I could be redeemed of this curse. Then I would not be a danger to myself or anyone I loved.
I told Rochelle that afternoon. We were sent to pick rocks out of a newly plowed field, and as we trudged through the dirt, I told her all about the saint, what I had read and what the Mother had said.
“But you are good already,” Rochelle said when I finished, wrinkling her nose.
“No, I’m not,” I cried, disappointed that she didn’t seem to understand immediately. “I am slow to rise. I am angry at everyone. And … and everyone hates me!” I blurted out, feeling rather childish, but unable to find the words to say my true fears—that I was cursed, that I would be revealed as a witch at any moment, that I was already condemned and the nun’s reaction to me was the instinctive revulsion of holiness in the presence of evil.
“Everyone is angry,” Rochelle said with a shrug. “And no one hates you.”
She didn’t understand—she was seeing me through her own experience, she who the nuns adored, who could not see the shadows of the otherworld always in the corners of her eyes.
“You aren’t angry,” I pointed out.
“Of course I am. I don’t understand why we can’t, just once, sleep in and miss services and lie in the grass and eat our fill. What is so holy about being miserable?” She picked up a rock, but it was just a clod of dirt, and she squeezed it in her fist and sowed the dust back into the ground. “Some nights I can’t even sleep, I’m so angry. I lay awake in my cot and I just think how much I hate the God who would ask this of a person.”
I stopped, nearly dizzy with surprise. I’d never heard Rochelle talk like this. She was the one always encouraging me to try, to be patient, to be dedicated. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t ask me such things as if you don’t also think it! How could a god be so cruel as to have made us full of desires and hungers, placed in this weak vessel of humanity that cannot hope to contain it, and then condemn us for it? Why would he give you this sight and then cast you out for it?”
“To strengthen us?” But the nuns’ words felt bitter in my mouth.
“But why? For what? I am strong already. You are strong! We have survived our birth and our only mother’s murder. We have survived eight years of this convent. We are strong. I don’t want to be strong. I want to beloved. I want to be destroyed and put back together. I want to unhinge my jaw and swallow the stars.”
I was both horrified to hear her talk and elated that I was not the only one who felt these things. Rochelle always seemed so placid, so at peace, but something in her was furious—I could see it now, like a light in her that could not be quenched, a light that seemed to shine beyond the naked eye, not dimmed even by the white veil that covered her hair.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, and a kind of shadow fell between us as she turned away. “I think it is good you have found a saint to model yourself after. I want things to be easier for you. I want you to be happy.”
“I want us to be safe,” I said, putting another stone into my pocket.
She grabbed my hand and squeezed. “I’ll keep you safe. I’m always watching out for you.”
II.
