Catholic Thought discussion
Mariette In Ecstasy
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Part 3
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P.S. Once someone asked Ernest Hemingway if he could write a short story in three sentences. Hemingway thought for a minute and then he said, “Yes.“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
That’s so brilliant. It’s the “haiku practice” I referred to.
Frances, I have kept a journal most of my adult life, and at one time intended to gather my poems into a volume. I also spent time as a neighborhood political activist and wrote letters to the editor and addressed our local officials when our neighborhood was threatened by our nearby airport. So I have a lot to work with, but between being Mom, Grammy, and dilettante, helping husband with our business, I've only been published in local papers, professional and literary journals, and contributor to a book for teachers. I Do spend a lot of time writing, though, probably too much of it just casting my thoughts to the wind. I went through a phase of experimenting with poetic forms, and sonnets were my favorite. Favorite writers: I wrote my master's thesis on Eudora Welty, love Southern writers, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and others, binged on Austen, Hardy, the Brontes, etc. Hawthorne, Twain, many more... So many giants out there, whose shoulders could I stand on? Or where to plant my ladder? I used to write because I couldn't help it. In some ways I still do, just wondering which story must be told. It's in there. Thank you, for the encouragement, and I do hope you find another story to put out there for us too.
Love that haiku. They are fun to play with.
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Madeleine, I found the place Manny recommends and look forward to replying to your messages 53&54 over the weekend. You really are accomplished.
Do we need to create a specific topic? The link won't take me anywhere....
Mod
Frances, I did find that one. Let's chat there.
Mod
I am so far behind you both! But please bear with me. I’ll be there. My husband has spinal stenosis, and today has been hard for him. I’ll be there, though.
Mod
First off, I don’t think Mariette’s spiritual “crucifixion” is really from the stigmata. That is just a sign from God. Her real “crucifixion” is the humiliation she undergoes first as she is examined and criticized, next when she is expelled from the convent that she dearly wanted to be part of, and then when for the rest of her life she is looked upon as a fraud. Those final vignettes of her leading a lonely and isolated life are very poignant.
But this theme of crucifixion through humiliation runs throughout the novel. Of course we get its opposite, pride. Pride is the one sin that is most feared. And as a seventeen year old, zealous in her faith, Mariette suffers from pride in many places. On her first day at the convent in a conversation with Sister Hermance, the two share their deepest desires. Sister Hermance first:
“When I joined the order I prayed to go away from home and have home totally forget me. I have been praying since for humiliations and hardships and perfect atonement for my sins. And perhaps, too, consumption and an early death.” She thinks for a second or two and asks, “Is it too much, Mariette?”
She shrugs. “I have been praying to be a great saint.”
Sister Hermance peers at her seriously. “Such pride, Mariette! You surprise me.”
She smiles. “I’ll try to be irresistible.” (p. 19)
We do see Mariette’s youthful exuberance in her devotion. And while we’re all called on to be saints, to want be a great saint requires an exertion rooted in pride. Sister Hermance reacts to its boldness. What Sister Hermance desires is way more humble: to be forgotten, perhaps alluding to the Blessed Mother as she fades from the center of the Gospels. She also wants “humiliations and hardships and perfect atonement.” We will see Mariette go through all that in time. Sister Hermance finally adds, “consumption and an early death.” Mariette too will undergo a spiritual death and the death of her convent life. We see in Sister Hermance’s desire what Mariette will learn.
If you read through the novel looking for pride and humiliations you will see they come up frequently. Here are some of her prides: Mariette is Mother Céline’s sister. She is the lovely girl who’s hair is still uncut. She is the one they gossip about. She is the holy one who writes the profound paper on theology. She takes on penances. She prays perfectly. When she is alone in Père Marriott’s chambers, she thinks of herself as a priest, acting it out (p. 39). In one of the embedded inquest dialogues, Sister Catherine is asked what she thought of Mariette, she says, “She is passionate. She is perhaps too proud. She is not hysterical.” Here is another Sister who sees Mariette’s pride.
And it is Mother Saint-Raphaël who publically identifies Mariette’s pride. She does at the scene of the open confessions, well prior to Mariette’s first stigmata:
“Our postulant has been too proud. She has been a princess of vanities. She has sought our admiration and attention in a hundred ways since she has joined our convent. She hopes we will praise her for being pretty and fetching and young. She is slack in her work and lax in her conscience. She has been a temptation to the novices and a pet to all the professed sisters. Ever since I have been her mistress, she has been a snare and a worldliness to me and terrible impediment to the peace and interests of the Holy Spirit. (p. 88)
Look too at Mother Saint-Raphaël’s self-discovery dialogue with Mariette, where the Mother confesses to have also had the sin of pride in her youth (p. 50-51). So when Mariette gets her stigmata, the one in a handful of people in all of history to have been blessed with one, there too one senses a pride. The first happens on Christmas Eve:
She holds out her blood-painted hands like a present and she smiles crazily as she says, “Oh, look at what Jesus has done to me.” (p.112)
This perhaps is her moment of most pride. No one has questioned her yet. No one has doubted. Clearly there is an element of pride in her manner of stumbling forth, holding her wounds as a “present.” Look at the phrasing: “Look at what Jesus has done to me,” with emphasis on the personal pronoun, “me.”
But throughout the novel, Mariette is also aware of her pride and her necessity to eradicate if from her person. In her first note to Père Marriott written on her first night at the convent, concluding Part 1, she explains:
Every day and in the midst of every kind of disobedience and failing, I have asked Jesus to have pity on me and either take my life entirely or, in his justice and mercy, give me a great deal to suffer in atonement for my foolishness and the sins of the world. While there have been times when he permitted me to enjoy the greatest consolations, there have been times of darkness and silence, too, when I felt disliked and in disfavor and, with hopelessness and pining and tears, I prayed to Jesus that was very near Hell. (p. 42)
She is quite conscious of her sins of which, from what the reader can see, pride stands out. She asks to suffer in atonement, and the process for that is mortification. Written on a rafter somewhere in the convent is “They mortify their bodies with abstinence” (p. 48). Mortification is at the center of the novel. Mortification in most dictionaries is differentiated into four related definitions. From the Online Dictionary:
noun
1. a feeling of humiliation or shame, as through some injury to one's pride or self-respect.
2. a cause or source of such humiliation or shame.
3. the practice of asceticism by penitential discipline to overcome desire for sin and to strengthen the will.
4. Pathology. the death of one part of the body while the rest is alive; gangrene; necrosis.
Definitions (1) and (2) are interrelated in that (1) identifies the result of (2) the source, but both at their heart is “humiliation.” Definition (3) identifies a process of which one overcomes an interior desire for sin, and definition (4) identifies a bodily death, which is at the etymological root of mortify. So there are three categories here, humiliation, ascetic discipline, and death, and all three figure into this grand theme of the novel.
I mentioned in an earlier comment that, in addition to suffering, humiliation is at the heart of Christ’s crucifixion, and at the start of this comment I mentioned that Mariette’s real crucifixion is her humiliation.
We see Mariette frequently mortifying herself as an attempt to extinguish desire to sin. We see her praying all night, we see her lie face down in sympathy with a punished sister, we see her use some sort of instrument to draw blood, we see her welcome a sting from a thorn, we see her scald her hands, among other instances. When she is asked about scalding her hands, Mariette mysteriously says, “I just want to hurt” (p. 70). The reader may jump to the conclusion this is part of the self-flagellation that leads to what might be a self-inflicted stigmata. Hansen makes it ambiguous but the true underlying reason is Mariette’s attempt to extinguish her pride and in turn come closer in sympathy to Christ. The pains and spilled blood of the stigmata then are not a sign from God that Mariette is any more holy than anyone else, but God’s grace of mortification for her to become more holy. In that letter to Père Marriott I quoted above, Mariette tells the priest what Christ prophecies for her:
“You will have no solace or pity, not even from your superiors. You will be tortured by gross outrages and mistreatment, but no one will believe you. You will be punished and humbled and greatly confused, and Heaven will seem closed to you, God will seem dead and indifferent, you will try to be recollected, but instead be distracted, you will try to pray and your thoughts will fly, you will seek me fruitlessly and without avail for I shall hide in the noise and shadows and I shall seem to withdraw when you need me most. Everyone will seem to abandon you. (p. 43)
That letter from that first night is actually the novel in a microcosm. Abandoned, as Christ was abandoned on the cross, Mariette achieves the ultimate mortification, a humiliation that will last throughout her life. There is nothing now that she can take pride in. She is expelled from the convent and defined as a hoaxer. Thirty years later in her letter to Mother Philomème she writes:
Children stare in the grocery as if they know ghostly stories about me, and I hear the hushed talk when I hobble by or lose hold in my hands, but Christ reminds me, as he did in my greatest distress, that he loves me more, now that I am despised, than when I was richly admired in the past. (p. 179)
We see now how her pride has been extinguished. She has arrived at definition (4) of mortification, the death of the old self into the new creation. He loves her more “now that I am despised.” So why does God bring her through this humiliation? Because through the humiliation she has arrived at true and full holiness. It is not the stigmata that made her holy. It is the mortification.
I just finished last night. I was behind on both reads and enjoyed going over all that was brought up in the three threads. Thank you for all the posts. All of my misgivings and questions and concerns were answered or clarified.
Mod
That's great Melissa. I hope you enjoyed the novel. Out of curiosity, what rating did you give it?
This novel gave me so much to think about. One thought about Mariette's father. Were some of his misgivings about her vocation due to his fear of being alone? He had already lost his wife and one daughter, how hard it must have been on him to lose another. Also, speaking as a parent, it is very difficult to see your child know that they have a call to the cloister. My son had the consolation of feeling that call and knowing the peace of following God's will. I did not have that peace of heart. I have grown to accept and even embrace his life, but it has not always been easy.
Mod
I understand your pain. As a parent of a single child, and mine is only turning ten very shortly, I can see how I would have very mixed feelings if my son were to enter a religious order that would take him permanently away from his family. Peace to you and I hope that problem with your sight has been resolved.
Manny wrote: "Hi Lisa. I'm so glad you read with us. We don't really know the father's motivation, but that is certainly one of the possibilities. Motivations can be multifaceted, so I think Hansen is putting th..."Thankfully, my vision is now very good! My daughter and I were able to spend a week with my son this May before the cloister went totally into effect. Very difficult knowing that you are hugging your child for the last time. But I am truly grateful that he is happy and I am blessed to be part of the Carmelite family.
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Lisa wrote: "This novel gave me so much to think about. One thought about Mariette's father. Were some of his misgivings about her vocation due to his fear of being alone? He had already lost his wife and one d..."In the initial interview between Celine and Mariette, Celine asks about the father's absence from the enterance ceremony and Mariette says it was because he did not want to lose another daughter to the convent.
"Is there a reason why he wasn’t present for the ceremonies?"
Mariette pauses before saying, "Papa is a good man, I think, but he has been against my religious vocation since I first began talking about it. He said he’d given the sisters his first daughter and he thought that was enough."
Page 30
Mariette sounds like a typical teen in this interview, pretty judgmental of her father.
Mod
For me, the image of freedom in Christ in the final line of this novel is one of the most profound thoughts. "We try to be formed and held and kept by Him, but instead He offers us freedom>" "And He says, Surprise me.". The surprise me that concludes this novel holds a playful note that I did not always feel in the rest of the book. And, it made me rethink so much of what was here. From the father, to Mother Raphael, to Celine, to the priest, to each of the nuns, to Mariette, to the reader, each conversation seems to have suppositions about what holiness looks like. But, this final insight from Jesus breaks that open. We want to be formed and held and kept by him, but he offers us freedom. The proud young girl who wants to be a great saint, the earnest stigmatic, the middle-aged woman quietly living an ordinary life, all of these are a delight to Christ. What should I do next? "Surprise me" because like any lover or parent, Christ can't seem to help delighting in Mariette, in each of us.
Manny wrote: "She is a typical teen, but she's also a good teen. I can see me at her age using some stronger language against my parents. I get the feeling she is understating (the pause and leading with "Papa i..."Yes, she is a good girl, she wants to be a great saint. She knows that she is talking to both her older sister who loves their father and her mother superior, so she is careful about what she says. But, despite her guardedness, she still reveals her judgment of her father.
Mod
On second thought, perhaps "impossible" is too strong a word. But it certainly would have taken a good deal of accommodation.
Mod
Manny wrote: "That is excellent insight Irene. I completely agree. And perhaps the "surprise me" puts the rigidity of the priory life into question. There is no question that the rigidity of the convent made Mar..."In some ways, the convent both made Mariette's mystical experiences difficult and easier. Monastic life is designed to level out differences. The sisters are all equal, no matter where they come from, wealth or poverty, higher education or lesser education, the cook, laundress, the infirmarian, the liturgist are all the same. Rank is determined by years in the order. So, monastic formation would try to pound down any nail that sticks out. To this extent, Mariette's trances and so on make her a nail that sticks out.
On the other hand, the convent is a world in which the religious imagination is fed. Unlike the larger world that is skeptical about religious ferver, this society believes in mystics, in the stigmata, and cultivates a yearning for God. And, the convent walls, its silence and rhythm of prayer, enable a focus on God and on prayer, on a n awareness of Christ to a far more intense level than often happens in ordinary life.
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Excellent, Manny. I especially liked how you mentioned that the stigmata were not the culmination of holiness, but steps on the way to holiness.
Mod
Thank you.
Don’t ever give up your longing to write! Years ago, when I was nursing the urge to write, but had no story, nothing, I happened to read an article about Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind. In it Mitchell told how she kept a big envelope, and when something special struck her, she wrote it down and put the page in the envelope. Eventually, she had a very thick envelope. When she began to write Gone With the Wind, she had a treasure trove of material already. I started to do that. There’s one page in my novel that is over thirty years old!
Start your own envelope, or notebook, if you prefer. Here are some thoughts I can share: be prepared to practice. We couldn’t sit down and play the piano without years of practice, and good writing — and don’t settle for less or you won’t be happy — takes practice.
Write 200-300 words a day — about anything — the weather, the loneliest student in your classroom, your favorite breed of dog — the important thing is to get into a pattern.
Who are your favorite writers? If I may, I suggest men or women who write or wrote direct, straightforward, classic prose. (I love Virginia Woolf, but she is not one I mean; her style is hers alone.) Select three or four writers whose work you love and study them. In her book Reading Like A Writer, Francine Prose tells how she always goes back to Anton Chekhov when she needs to ground herself. That’s the kind of thing I mean. One day, you will find your unique voice, the way you want to write.
Here’s something I read once that can get me through any kind of day: “Find something meaningful that is bigger than you are, and live for it.” Madeleine, writing can be that, if that’s what you want.