They say that Santa Teresita is a very miraculous saint and that she sends you a rose to confirm that she heard your request. And this is how she wakes up in Marie, the protagonist of my novel “The Song of the Hours” (Zorzal Books), the religious vocation. At that moment, receiving a pale rose, he makes the irrevocable decision to leave your family and its environment to live day and night behind the walls of a cloistered convent and never go out again.
Although it is a fiction, I was inspired to write the novel in my own experience. Even before I turned 20, I felt spellbound by that call. It was magical. I felt it and I knew it, my life was not going to be like the others around me. It was going to be special and have a unique meaning. Was a infatuation, a passion, I felt it even on my skin. The door to a change was opened for me. It implied leaving everything that did not satisfy me and giving myself to a transcendental mission. Nothing could convince me to wait, rethink, or consider other options as my parents begged me to.
The call to religious vocation in the youths, perhaps too young, often begins like this, with what is perceived as a message from God, from a saint, or simply from heaven. But it is? Where does that call really come from?
The adolescent is in itself a changing, thinking being, in permanent search.
How many adolescents and young people of 18, 20 years old seek to make of their life something great, transcendent and special? Do something, or everything, for the world, for justice, for the defenseless. Living in a search for intensity seems to define the adolescent character, and the perception of a sublime “call” can respond very well to this search, especially if it is a monastery in which peace, community life and silent work they represent the perfect surrender of body and soul for such a noble purpose. Responding to that call, the restless and changeable adolescent suddenly finds himself submerged in the depths of a life that is anchored in stability and permanence.
Certainly, in retrospect, I recognize the immaturity of my 20 years. An impulsive and pedantic character that convinced me that I was the only one who knew what was happening to me, and that there was no other option for me. And there I launched myself, unconsciously, on a path that I believed to be purely spiritual, purely ideal.
The monastic and contemplative life is beautiful. An ordered, aesthetic life, marked by the rhythm of the liturgical hours and rites, and charged with inner meaning. It is permanence, it is silence, it is of a profound loneliness accompanied. It is of a forced lonely company, day, after day, after day. But it is not for everyone. It wasn’t for me. It took me too many years to leave that life, 12 years of doubts, fears, guilt, until I saw it clearly. What I felt as a teenager was not a call from heaven.
This novel aims to delve into the life of a young woman who listens and responds to this call and leaves everything that surrounds her and what she knows to lock herself in a cloistered monastery with that tempestuous and confused illusion of the adolescent. There she encounters a world unknown to her and surrenders to the wisdom of experienced spiritual guides, meekly entrusting her future to them. The reader travels with Marie, the protagonist, the depths of a mysterious life, hidden from the world that is outside those walls.
Perhaps this text contributes something to a reflection on the importance of discernment of the religious call, especially in the youngest. A discernment that falls essentially on the spiritual guides who accompany the young person in his first steps of religious life. Priests, monks, mother superiors, those “experts” who receive these spirits and restless minds, malleable and idealistic, and often fragile.
Just as, spiritually speaking, life in a cloister aspires towards the highest, it is impregnated with a daily life that can be suffocating. Frictions of coexistence, ambitions and conflicts are common currency and can only be overcome if there is emotional maturity and a genuine vocation. Otherwise, the consequences are sadly painful and often irreversible psychological breakdowns.
FLORENCIA LUCE was born in Buenos Aires. She studied Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, United States, and trained in creative writing with Hugo Correa Luna in Buenos Aires. She lives with her husband and her daughter in New Jersey, where she writes and teaches languages and translates texts.
In 2016, he published “Until today I remember each verse”, a chronicle of his family’s immigration from the south of France to the province of Corrientes, Argentina. “The singing from the hours” is a novel inspired by his experience in a contemplative monastery.
by Florence Luce
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