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Mystery of Religious Passion
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20459 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
2,600 Words |
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Lucy Mazareski
Lucy Mazareski reviews frequently for Catholic publications. |
MARIETTE IN ECSTASY
Ron Hansen
New York: HarperCollins, 1991
179 pp., $19.95
In a culture obsessed with eroticism and addicted to quick successions of thrills and action, it doesn't seem likely that a novel in which almost all the action revolves around a community of nuns' quotidian routine of laundering, candlemaking, floorscrubbing, and praying can compete in capturing the modern imagination. But affairs of the heart have always fired the imagination, and Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy is about the most enduring, perplexing, and consequential love affair of all.
In the summer of 1906, seventeen-year-old Mariette Baptiste enters an upstate New York priory of the Order of the Sisters of the Crucifixion, a 200-year-old order founded in France. The sisters, especially the novices and younger nuns, have been awaiting her arrival with an admixture of curiosity, gossip, and awe--she is the younger sister of the 37-year-old prioress, Mother Celine, and daughter of the local physician, the esteemed and cosmopolitan Dr. Claude Baptiste. The new postulant is riveting. Especially contrasted with the more rustic sisters, Mariette is the picture of beauty, refinement, and sophistication.
From the start, it is not only her beauty and refinement that set her apart: Even in a community brought together for the express purpose of seeking God, there is something elusive, otherworldly about her. At the same time, she is unpretentious and sparkles with humor. Slowly, in glimpses and snatches of conversation with the other sisters, she is revealed to us. We learn almost as much about her from what she does not say as from what she does. We learn about her from her letters to her confessor, the 80-year-old Rev. Henri Marriott, and from written meditations discovered under the floorboards of her room.
Hansen leaves no room for doubt about Mariette's reason for locking herself away from the world: she is in love. From the time when, as a child, she had visions of Christ, she has been a soul genuinely and profoundly in love with God and who is in work, as in prayer, utterly absorbed in His presence. She settles easily and happily into the rigorously structured community life: 2:00 A.M. risings for prayer, 5:00 A.M. second risings, the daily Great Silence, bone-wearying chores, classes--all punctuated and placed into perspective by daily observance of the canonical hours: matins, lauds, prime, terce,
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