Matrix

Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.

Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.

Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.

Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.

For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.

How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.

For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandneur of spirit so vast that it takes one's breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.

Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability.

It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

For long hours they sat without thinking, when, in the earliest stirrings of the long dawn, the fog lifting in peels from the surface of the warming water, Marie saw at the farthest edge of the pool the shape of a deer. And it was a doe, because a fawn was nuzzling at its belly, but it was unworldly, because it wore a rack of antlers upon its head and its body was made of the purest white. Seeing this creature as if fog gathered and made flesh, Marie held her breath and went entirely still. If her aunt had seen the doe, it would already be dead, blood unspooling in ribbons into the water. Then the white doe lifted her head and looked at Marie across the pond; looked her entire self into the girl. She spoke something there into the wordlessness at the center of Marie. Time stilled. The forest watched. Then the doe turned and with a single bound disappeared into the shrubbery with the fawn leaping behind.

Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Endure and be tough, this pain will be of use to you one day.

Foolish creature, old Marie would say to that child. Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.

Those to whom god has given understanding and eloquence must not be silent or hide their gift, but must return the gift so that it flowers under the admiration of others.

...she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to god--not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil--but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.

First they showed me that the war so often vaunted between them was a falsity created by the serpent to sow division and strife and unhappiness in the world. For, I saw, it was from Eve‘s taste of the forbidden fruit that knowledge came, and with knowledge the ability to understand the perfection of the fruit of Mary’s womb and the gift given to the world. And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.

Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.

The abbess is exhausted and pale. She smiles and says, Oh of course I made it up. Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs. And then, lulled by the rocking of her fat little horse, the abbess falls asleep.

but greatness was not the same as goodness.

Only when she has re-created in ink upon parchment what she saw does she fully understand it. Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.

All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.

And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.

Of her own mind and hands she has shifted the world.

What women can do when given a task! Their abilities seem limitless.

Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.

She will suffer, but suffering is the lot of humanity, and every moment of suffering brings the earthly body closer to the heavenly throne.

She rises, they hush. She speaks. She tells movingly of what she has seen in town, the poor mother leper and her child, the spitting, the human life lesser than that of street bitches with their teats scraping the earth. How in the Bible, the lepers are healed with love. How it is the nuns’ duty to care for the most wretched of the earth.

Marie lets the infirmatrix dress her. Nest pulls Marie’s hands away from her face and says sternly, no no, oh prioress, there is no shame in this bodily release, that it is an expression of the humors, not unlike bloodletting, it is utterly natural, it has nothing to do with copulation. She will still meet her god a virgin. It’s simply that some of the nuns require such expression of the humors more than others. Some as often as once every two days, some once a year. Nest has often wondered that Marie might be one who required it rather frequently. There is sometimes, well, a wild look in Marie’s eye. She tells Marie to come back to the infirmary when she feels the need. Marie

What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.