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Review of Mark Salzman's Lying Awake
(New York: Knopf), 2000
Christoper M. Leighton
Upon graduating from college, I found myself on the doorstep of a Benedictine monastery and was received as a welcome guest. My bag was packed with books and with grand hopes that the emptiness within me would soon be filled with the venerable wisdom of an exotic and ancient tradition. I expected mystical encounters with characters who had fallen from the pages of a Dostoyevski novel. What I found was a motley assemblage of individuals whose passions and idiosyncrasies carried them into remote corners of activity. Despite my awkward overtures, the monks remained graciously private. They converged when dinner was served and when the liturgical office was celebrated. They seemed loosely bound together by primal appetites of body, mind, and spirit.
After I had spent a few months living on the edge of the community, the abbot invited me to have a chat. I noted that the romance of monastic life was collapsing under the weight of routine and that my own mystical development was falling behind schedule. In his graveled voice he wryly commented, "You thought we came and remained in the monastery out of some heroic strength. You are beginning to understand that we are here because of our weakness. This is perhaps the only setting in which we can remain faithful Christians."
Spirituality turned out to be a subject that I could not master. Prayer is not an activity that inspires confidence. The usual criteria used to measure success do not obtain, and the incongruities between effort and achievement often prove a source of tremendous frustration and occasionally the basis of some humility. What is demanded is the discipline to show up and to remain present through many seasons.
Mark Salzman's most recent novel, Lying Awake (New York: Knopf, 2000), explores the spiritual rigors of a Carmelite nun who floats from a family without a reliable center of gravity into the spiritual life. Salzman paints a vivid portrait of a religious vocation. His verbal strokes are precise, even austere, but his poetic simplicity discloses an interior cathedral rarely acknowledged, much less visited. His depictions of person and place are measured, reserved, and crafted from a respectful distance. By the end of the book the reader has encountered an embodied way of life where individual and community strive in uneasy unison to sing God's glory.
The reader is introduced to the central character, a Carmelite sister known as Sister John of the Cross, as she moves through the monastic rhythms of an ordinary day. Although she once "languished in the cloister for years, her prayers empty and her soul dry," she now knows the heights and depths of the spiritual life through divine encounter. Her soul is molded in the fire and ice of mystical experiences, out of which flows luminous and critically acclaimed poetry. The divine ecstasies, however, are increasingly accompanied by migraine headaches that disrupt her communal participation and afflict her with crippling pain. At the insistence of her superior, she is subjected to a series of medical tests. She informs the doctor that the problem is bearable. Indeed, she accepts the onslaughts of suffering as an opportunity: "If I surrender to it in the right way, I have the feeling of transcending my body completely. It's a wonderful experience, but it's spiritual, not physical."
The medical examination yields a radically different interpretation. The heavenly visions entrusted to Sister John's care are identified as the products of "a small menangioma, about the size of a raisin," in an excellent position for removal. The doctor concludes his diagnosis, announcing, "Once we remove that tumor, I predict that you'll be as good as new." Sister John thus leaves the hospital and enters a wilderness of doubt. She must decide if she will undergo a procedure that will not only end her epileptic seizures, but also, in all likelihood, sever the divine intimacy that has been the source of her inspiration. Furthermore, she must balance her own desires with the needs of the community to which she belongs. Lurking at the edges are inescapable questions of truth and trust, and it is only through her reckoning with doubt that the nature of her vocation will come clear.
The unfolding story traces a spiritual move from the mountaintop into the valley. The brilliance of the novel resides in Salzman's ability to chart more than the slippage from the sacred to the profane. He maps a far more expansive landscape, one where the task is not to scale the heights but to dwell below in ordinary time and to discern the sanctity of the mundane. This habitation requires a community honed by prayer and hard work, and perhaps even some divine intervention.
The liturgical and spiritual rhythms of monastic life move to a tempo and are sung in a key that rarely registers amidst the noise of the dominant culture. The disciplines of obedience and self-surrender embodied in the cloister entail theological virtues that may not speak convincingly to many contemporary Protestants and Jews, let alone devout citizens of the secular state. The distance between the quotidian struggles of these Carmelite nuns and the daily routines that claim the world at large is not easily traversed. Yet because Christians and Jews, blacks and whites, men and women embody and practice religious traditions differently, they provide one another with opportunities to reexamine and redefine what they deem essential to their faith. Were the encounter both daring and sustained, all might discern new melodies, or at least recall forgotten ones, within their own traditions. This experience would give many of us good reason for lying awake.
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