Stone Yard Devotional

by Charlotte Wood

Arrive finally at about three.

Nobody would have to know, until the end of one’s stay, that a person might choose to end their life here on this clean carpet in a warm, silent room. At this moment I cannot think of a greater act of kindness than to offer such privacy to a stranger.

I lie on the carpet, arms outstretched. When I wake I see Jesus on his cross, looking down at me.

In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what’s happening but I’m drenched in a weird tranquillity so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being almost completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.

The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.

You do not announce on Facebook that you, an atheist, are leaving your job and your home and your husband to join a cloistered religious community. I mean you could, and it might be a better way than I chose, which was not to announce anything to anyone.

It was interesting to me, watching the men greet each other in this agitated way, as if it were essential they be seen in motion, as if it were necessary to assert themselves physically here in the female space of our sitting room. As though, in their drinking tea and eating cake, Richard had caught them doing something womanly.

The noise stops but the feeling doesn’t, that she is leaving us with all the world’s catastrophes, all the justice work undone, the poor unsupported, the natural creatures unprotected, rights unfought-for. She brings into our home, without apology, everything we so painstakingly left behind.

What does it take, to atone, inside yourself? To never be forgiven?

Lying awake in the dark, I understand that this low vibration is telling me a dreadful truth: that I will die. This knowledge that remains mostly hidden from the self but is always there, gaining ground inside us, unstoppable. This is why I hate the mice; I know this now, in the humming darkness. And knowing it doesn’t stop the hatred.

It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.