An Accidental Grace/The Way to St. Ives
Culbertson, Diana
Freedom, faith, fidelity AN ACCIDENTAL GRACE Irene Mahoney St. Martin's, $14.95, 337 pp. THE WAY TO ST. IVES Sonia Gernes Scribners, $13.95, 266 pp. Diana Culbertson BOTH of these novels...
...His offer plunges the small community of St...
...The world of women in religious congregations still needs the wit of Eudora Welty and the brutal vigor of Flannery O'Connor to capture its peculiar intersection of sin and grace...
...Rosie's initiation is a powerful study of the pain of entering into adult moral responsibility...
...The old Rule comments archaically, with ironic applicability to the new contingencies: Each sister will have a room of her own which she will keep in perfect order at all times...
...After the death of her mother and her only brother, she must face a new existence which will bring with it the pain of a maturing conscience...
...Here we meet Rosie Deane, a forty-one-year old spinster, who confesses to impure thoughts after seeing Dr...
...The most vivid characters are dead...
...This study of a convent-in-crisis reveals the tensions and hostility that can ravage a Christian community, but we can also see the intense and not unworthy loyalties that can occasion hostility...
...This portrayal of what is perilously close to the actual experience of many contemporary women religious is not without flaws: characterization is weak (the sisters sometimes blur into one another), and symbols are too overt (here and there a pathetic fallacy...
...Irene Mahdney is neither, but she is still very close to what this world feels like to the insider: how it hurts and purifies, and how it offers yet its own exemplification of the Christian community in via...
...The sisters have changed, priests are leaving...
...Here she was in the pew with no real penance and without the tidy feeling of groceries listed and purchased and stacked away . . . Father Griffin had not chided her: he had not brought up Our Lady of Fatima or the flames of hell, but somehow it didn't feel right...
...Diana Culbertson BOTH of these novels about what we tidily call the "Catholic world" address the power struggle between the voices of the past and the conscience of the present...
...There is wonderful texture here, from Rosie's childhood memories of barnyard birthing and the bloody circle out of which a bitch strains her puppy, to the final dissolution of the old world: "The path curved upward, and another sculpture came into view: a strange creature with a tiny head and two rows of spade-like fins down its back...
...Even if one balks at the humorlessness of Ruth, whose introspective brooding shapes the novel, this story of a community's corporate struggle to be faithful, to love, and to forgive has moments of delicate beauty and astute spiritual perception...
...When Rosie experiences her first lingual kiss amidst the purity and stillness of frozen water and snow-covered Minnesota trees, in a scene which is the geometric center of the novel, we sense meticulous crafting beneath this simple story of the loss of in-nocence...
...It had little feet and a little horned tail, and somebody killed it, and now it's dead.' She felt a wave of sorrow for the vanished baby dinosaur...
...Zhivago and wonders if people on their honeymoon take their clothes off...
...We lead each other into mystery not because of what we are but because of what we believe...
...Ruth Arendt, having been dispensed from her vows in 1969, has returned to the small community of St...
...and Father McGraw and his regular penance of a decade of the rosary are no longer with her...
...and the disembodied voice of the Foundress overshadows the text like a stern and uncompromising assistant to the deity...
...Aidan's into a crisis of fidelity...
...She leaned her head against a concrete body in Rapid City, South Dakota, and wept that the brontosaurus and the stegosaurus would be no more...
...No comforts of any kind will be permitted, although should health or the climate require a small rug may be used...
...The walls will be bare except for a simple crucifix...
...An architect wants to buy the convent and turn the building into a studio...
...Another kind of Catholic community - this one a small parish in western Minnesota - is the setting of Sonia Gernes's first novel, The Way to St...
...Aidan's to begin her religious life again...
...It didn't look much taller than Rosie...
...But beginning her new life, she discovers that even the church seems to have abandoned her...
...I am not certain how many outside the contemporary convent world will want to read this novel, but it probably should be read by all of us in it...
...The best part about this new novel set in the shifting world of mid-century Catholicism is her awareness that Sister Mary Ignatius Hasn't Really Told It All...
...Irene Mahoney's insights are quite worth our savoring: "We hurt each other...
...Her language is finely carved, especially in narrative passages, where exceptional clarity and thematic consistency reveal steady awareness of the function of every word...
...Ives is (only very slightly) flawed, the characterization is sure, and Sonia Gernes is in complete artistic control...
...It's a baby,' she said, 'a baby dinosaur...
...She is the victim of a cruelly protective mother, and the survivor of a parochial school education which she has internalized completely...
...Nothing is left to mystery...
...Without animus, Sonia Gernes leads her Rosie out of pious dependency, and into freedom, with compassion, as well as relentless honesty...
...The rooms will be small and will contain nothing extraneous...
...Irene Mahoney, an Ursuline sister and college professor, admits us in An Accidental Grace to the post-Vatican II convent world of changing values, conflicting claims to fidelity, declining membership, and diminished structural supports to faith...
...Ives...
...we misjudge, ignore, resent, and yet we give each other life...
...If the plot of The Way to St...
...Salinger, but in this contest of affection, Sonia Gernes offers competition to both of them...
...There is a reliable tradition that only God loves his characters more than J.D...
...One looks in vain for the superfluous gesture, the unnecessary phrase, or a landscape that does not somehow intensify our vision...
...If Rosie's victory seems modest, we taste life in it and find ourselves rejoicing...
...Belief and its consequences among those whose lives are rooted in it - and make no sense without it - is the presiding force in An Accidental Grace...
...and especially, the anguish of trying to save community identity...
...Remembering the thriving, spiritually confident community of the sixties, she is faced upon her return with the desolation of the eighties: the struggle to sustain the community school, the problems both of caring for the aged and retaining young members, the challenge of new apostolates...
...For Rosie, who has identified all that was "right" with what she learned as a schoolgirl, growing up at forty-one would be a new kind of baptism: the shock of sexual discovery, disillusionment with Father Griffin and Sister Carol Ann, whose collective frailties betray her, the deception of friends, and the final confrontation with the choice between risk and psychological death...
...In her pronouncements all problems have solutions...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 20
