Praying on paper

Christian Century, Nov 21, 2001 by Stephanie Paulsell

IMAGINE YOURSELF in a room where a young woman is sitting at a table before a blank page. Or perhaps she's standing at a desk; the year is 1286, and our vision can't be completely clear from such a distance. But imagine that you can see that she holds a goose-quill pen in one hand and a knife for sharpening it and scraping away mistakes in the other. These tools rest easily in her hands because she is a member of an order dedicated to the production of manuscripts, and she uses them every day. She is a Carthusian nun, and like her Carthusian brothers and sisters, she believes that the contemplative and active dimensions of the Christian life can be united in the work of the scribe. Copying the works of others protects the solitude of the monastic cell from more intrusive forms of ministry. But it also allows silent monks and nuns to "preach," as the Carthusians liked to put it, "with their hands." It allows them to reach across the boundaries of geography and time to be in intimate communion with people they will never meet, but whom they hope to lead to God. The tools and the work of the scribe are very familiar to this woman, but the work she plans to do on this day is not. Today she does not take up her pen as a copyist.

If you can draw a little closer to this woman, you'll see that her eyes are rimmed with shadows, for she has not slept or eaten well for several days. She is, in fact, reeling in the aftermath of an intense experience of God's presence, an experience for which she is profoundly grateful, but which has left her exhausted and ill. Several days earlier, the words of lamentation in a pre-Lenten liturgy had made her anxious about her salvation, an anxiety she attempted to resolve through further meditation on scripture. Her meditation led her to prayer, in the midst of which God came to her, full of sweetness, and she felt herself changed and renewed. But the God known by this woman is a God who writes, an author whose chosen parchment is the human heart. Her own heart is now congested with God's writing and overburdened with the response to it that is taking shape within her. She believes she will die if she cannot relieve her wounded heart, but she is afraid of losing what her heart contains. And so, knowing that she is about to depart from her role as a scribe, she puts her pen to the page and begins to write, probably for the first time, without a text from which to copy.

She writes in Latin, the language of the liturgy with which her life is permeated and the literature that nourishes her prayer, although she breaks into the vernacular now and then when she cannot make Latin words say what she wants them to say. And as she writes, not only is her festering heart soothed, but she finds that the act of writing brings her to another experience of God, an experience of God working in her. She acknowledges that it is impossible to find accurate words to describe divinity, but her pen nevertheless gathers up images for God as it moves across the page: mother, father, brother, friend; creator, judge, blessed food; true refreshment, precious stone; mirror into which the angels peer; medicine, physician, health itself; fragrant rose, life of the soul.

Now imagine time passing. Imagine meeting the same woman, older now, at her desk again. If you can come close enough to look over her shoulder, you'll see that she is composing a letter this time not in Latin, but in the vernacular of her correspondent. Latin is no longer the language of her growing body of writings; she now writes most often in her native Francoprovencal. She knows enough French, however, to maintain a correspondence with friends and fellow religious who do not share her dialect.

As she writes, we see that she is still preoccupied with the way a word can wound a heart, can inscribe itself so deeply that it swells and festers there. She tells her correspondent a story about a woman who is deeply vulnerable to the power of words. Hearing the word "vehement" in pious conversation, it becomes lodged in her heart, and she can think of nothing else. She believes that if she could only understand the word, she would find relief from the pressure it is creating inside her. Someone tells her that vehement means "strong," but that doesn't help. Finally, she prays to God to teach her the word's meaning and remove it from her heart.

Before she can finish her prayer, God answers her in such a way that she seems to be standing in a desert. She sees before her a dry and dying tree at the foot of a solitary mountain. The leaves on its drooping branches are inscribed with the names of the five senses. "Sight" is written on the leaves of the first branch, "hearing" on the leaves of the second, "taste" on the leaves of the third, "smell" on the fourth, "touch" on the fifth. A large circle, like the round bottom of a barrel, rests on top of the tree, keeping out everything the tree needs to flourish--the sun, the rain, the dew.

The woman gazes at the tree, and then lifts her eyes to the mountain. She sees a great stream rushing from the mountain toward the tree with such strength that the tree is uprooted and replanted upside down. With its top in the ground, the roots of the tree turn upward, its branches reach toward the sky, its once dry leaves become green and lush.