Random Reading Reviews

April's reading list covered several genres - novel, short stories, spiritual reading, memoir. The Ninth Hour was by far the best, but I did pick up a couple I want to remember, such as Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage, which I think I enjoyed reading more since I went to Canada last year (although to the opposite coast). Munro's stories are meticulously written, realistic and detailed; she has won many awards, been anthologized, studied, and is often mentioned as influential in interviews with other contemporary writers. I gobbled up her stories, but they left me feeling woeful. Not the thing to read just before bed, they seem to take an unextraordinary unhappiness and make it larger.  On the other hand, the stories did seem to stand out as prompts to encourage reflection, and a couple hint at the endurance of marriage despite challenges. There was one of the last, "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," in which an aging philanderer puts his senile wife in the nursing home where she begins a tryst with another resident.  Knowing that his own affairs had not limited his love of his wife, he allows her affair to continue to flourish. And he himself continues to visit even though she doesn't recognize him.  His fidelity is not conventional, but devoted to her happiness.  Why does he facilitate this love affair? As punishment for his own infidelities? Because he wants to see peace in her last days?  The story "Nettles" describes the relationship between two pre-pubescent kids, a friendship with a overtone of romance. The children grow up, marry other people, and reencounter each other as adults. Although a reconnection occurs, the two people recognize how they have changed and don't re-engage, mainly because the man, who has lost a child, doesn't allow the moment to become physical. He remains faithful to his wife

Love and marriage are complicated and messy in these stories. Often marriages are weakened by a strong imagination. For example, in "What is Remembered," a woman has a one night stand with a man whom she never sees or hears from again - and he dies a few years later, so no reunion is possible anyway. She continues to relive the experience for the next 20 years in her imagination, but it doesn't seem to affect her marriage.  Is this because her marriage is chronically unhappy, or because the fantasy is really harmless and might actually help her marriage, or because no day to day human relationship can fulfill the inner longing for being known and loved perfectly, so she creates a perfect love story in her imagination?  Or because a physical encounter, no matter how fleeting, does change who we are?  Is the man a metaphor for something else - the creative process? Her inability to forget perhaps reflects a longing for a more perfect love, a longing that might in a different person be directed toward God, but Munro focuses more on how human beings betray each other than on how they remain faithful. And just as painful as the marital infidelities are the familial ones, such as "Family Furnishings," in which a young woman uses the story of an eccentric aunt as the basis of her foray into creative writing, betraying the faithfulness of the aunt, who has always looked out for her, despite being relegated to the outskirts of the family because of her unconventional outlook. At the end of the story, the narrator looks back on herself as a young woman and realizes the ways she hurts and uses her family members in her fiction. Not exactly uplifting, but an exercise in self-analysis that results in an honest understanding of the ways she was ungenerous to her family.

Perhaps the only story that touches on faith explicitly in this collection is the story "Comfort," in which a professed atheist who teaches high school science commits suicide because he is facing death by cancer and because his reputation and his pleasure in teaching have been compromised by the activism of fundamentalists in his class and community. They have hounded him because he doesn't want to talk about evolution in class. When he retires because he has cancer, he doesn't want the community to think he has given in.  His wife is not surprised he has committed suicide, nor particularly grief-stricken. But she does seem bereft when she doesn't find a note. Eventually, the undertaker brings her a piece of paper he found in the dead man's robe, and it turns out to be a bitter poem addressed to the community, nothing personal, nothing addressed to the wife. She invites the undertaker to sit down for tea because they knew each other as young people, and for a brief moment, they reconnect. Throughout the story, the wife seems to be embarrassed by her husband's righteous atheism and to be sympathetic to believers. She asks if the undertaker believes in life after death, and he confesses his hope.  She seems to hope to have hope. A moment of communion between the undertaken and the widow ends when he returns home to his family. Is the title meant to suggest faith as a real or false comfort?

Munro does have a gift for illuminating the complexities of relationships. But other than "Comfort," religious faith is not a part of the marriages and friendships she writes about. I wanted to keep looking for more suggestions about the inner life of the soul amidst all of these explorations of the heart. And if I had time to puzzle over these stories more, perhaps something more could be gleaned, but I sat down the book after turning the last page wondering about the capacity for people to remain lonely in a world full of others. This is the human condition that becomes a longing for God

Quite different is Henri Nouwen's book, The Living Reminder, although it delves into the longings and absences and desire for intimacy that Munro's book illustrates. This is Nouwen's address to ministers originally given as lectures to the Canadian Association for Pastoral Education. These lectures are meant to help ministers serve as teachers and preachers without losing their sense of "wonder, joy, gratitude, and praise."  Nouwen focuses on the role of the minister to serve as a reminder to the people of Christ's life of service and prayer, which requires that ministers sometimes step back and focus on Christ and prayer themselves, instead of always serving and teaching themselves.

Elie Weisel's writings about remembering the Holocaust provide a framework for Nouwen's thoughts. Weisel reflects on the importance of rembeFirst he addresses ministers as "healing reminders," then as "sustaining" reminders, and then as "guiding" reminders. Memory is necessary to keep us connected with the past and with the "Great acts of redemption ... through memory the gulf is spanned, and the exiled people share again in redemptive history."

Nouwen emphasizes the importance of memory because memory can bring us closer to others, and to God, than physical presence. It provides the distance to see the spirit, the meaning, in things and people. Physical bodies can hide as well as reveal and "block intimate communication," whereas memory "clarifies, purifies, brings into focus, and calls to the foreground hidden gifts." Memory requires absence, but "at the same time, however, the loving memory always makes us desire to be in touch again, to see each other anew, to return to the shared life where the newly found spirit can become more concretely expressed and more deeply embedded in the mutuality of love. But a deeper presence always leads again to a more purifying absence. Thus the continuous interplay between presence and absence, linked by our creative memory, is the way in which our love for each other is purified, deepened and sustained."
 
 Perhaps this is why temporary absences can be good for marriages and retreats are good for the soul. It is also why Jesus leaves us with an advocate - "God entered into intimacy with us not only by Christ's coming, but also by his leaving." Oftentimes it is during an absence when the heart grows fonder because you can focus on the positive attributes of the absent one, instead of getting bogged down in the day to day work of life. And then when the beloved returns, time takes on a holiday feel, when work is set aside to enjoy being in each other's coming. We've often experienced this in our marriage. The challenging part of God's absence is that we have to try not to grow weary seeking Him. This is why, as Nouwen suggests in the section on prayer, that adoration, quiet time in prayer and retreats are so important in keeping our relationship with God strong. 

Nouwen warns against the dangers of creating an atmosphere of being ok, of artificial joy. (again a connection with Munro - her realism doesn't allow for too much happiness). This artificial joy is something that has always bothered me with the idea that you just need to have faith to find peace, or to overcome all natural selfishness and pettiness. Another temptation is the vanity of trying to always appear ok, or like we've got it all together, that our family and our marriages are perfect because we are people of faith, when in reality we fall apart just like our agnostic neighbors. Although Nouwen addresses ministers, his words of caution are appropriate for anyone.  We all have to watch pretending that everything is great because then there is "no empty space left for the affirmation of our basic lack of fulfillment. In this way God's presence is enforced without connection with his absence." Again, Nouwen emphasizes the need we have for the Eucharist in order to avoid that artificial joy.  "We forget that it is in memory that the Lord is present. If we deny the pain of his absence we will not be able to taste his sustaining presence either."

 Ministers must be able to withdraw, not only avoid burnout from being too present to their congregation but also to be present to God. Intimacy with God is what enables a minister to have intimacy with others, especially if the time apart provides the minister time to recreate stories of saints and heroes, and to find the words to retell their stories, to become, like God, a storyteller. As Wiesel writes, "God made man because he loves stories." Withdrawing to pray, to ponder these stories, to read scripture, to quit the busyness, to leave behind artificial busyness always a minister to be steeped in memories, in the stories and experiences that enrich the life and imagination of the minister, so that he can be present and re-present these experiences to others. This little book was a reminder for me, as a minister to my family that some things can't be made okay by doing. Some things will never be done, and my family will have to turn to God because of my inability to love perfectly.

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I also skimmed through Ready Player One, but I couldn't bring myself to read the whole thing.  I tried. I read the first fifty pages, but got bogged down by the annoying self-righteousness of the main character and the stilted dialogue, so I skimmed to see if the story got any better. It didn't. The main character is anti-religion and pro-video game, the exact opposite of my kind of hero. And he apparently spends his entire day watching 80s television reruns and living in a video game. This is an online gamer's dream book: to save the world, all he has to do is be familiar with 80s trivia and to fight bad guys in a video game.  I guess nostalgia for the 80s and love of video games can sell books, and not just TV and games. This is one book that I'm guessing makes a better movie than a novel.

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The other book I wanted to remember is Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. This book of essays describes some of her experiences with growing up, but isn't a traditional memoir.  It begins as a meditation on a quote from the Gerek Meno, "How will you go about finding the thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" Solnit is asked this question by a student, and it leads her to ponder the way we discover mysteries, especially the mystery of our selves.

She writes, "The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration -- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self in unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"  For believers, this someone else is the holy self- becoming a saint, right? The Nouwen book has this message as a subtext; it is about making sure that the desire to be with God doesn't get turned into a desire to be God.

Solnit reflects on this desire to be transformed, to transcend boundaries of the known world: "Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the talk that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophecies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own.  She connects this ability to dwell in uncertainty with Keats' description of "negative capability."

These initial reflections return in her later essays about the ability to find what you don't know you are seeking. She talks about the difference between being lost and being an explorer, about being ok with being alone and being ok with distance. In fact what she writes about distance being necessary for desire connects nicely as a secular counterpart to Nouwen's praise of being absent, alone.   Solnit even quotes Simone Weil: "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated."

Because children are never absent from their parents, it is only in maturity that they see how they have been formed by their familiar relationships. The loss or separation from parents, from the familiar brings a sense of loss, but also facilitates growing up. Maturity, Solnit writes, brings "an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses that time brings and finds beauty in the faraway. ... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost; some things are not lost only so long as they are distant." We begin to crave the stories of our family and our ancestors only when they are distant.  Solnit suggests the landscape as a metaphor for this appreciation for the beauty of the faraway. "Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit."  Sounds religious, no?

Another essay reflects on the Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, who spent 10 years wandering the south and was so changed that when he encountered a different group of explorers, new to the new land, the natives didn't recognize that he was one of them.  This same essay recounts stories of young women who were kidnapped by Indian tribes and end up preferring to stay with their captors, rather than return to their people when they are "rescued," because they have new families and identities.

Another essay touches on faith when she writes about a priest who mnisters to skid row inmates. She connects his story with the "love which moves the sun and other stars," when she reads Dante in the desert. "There are moments of harmony that rise to the level of serendipity, coincidence, and beyond, and certain passages of time that seem dense with such incidents. Summers and deserts seem best for them."

A later essay reflects on the blue paintings of Yves Klein and a photo he posed titled "Leap into the Void." The early explorers were willing to go into the void -  early cartographers named California for an imaginary place and once thought it was an island.  But what Klein wanted to approximate was the feeling of flying. He wanted to capture a man leaping so that it seemed he was flying.  Solnit meditates on this desire to fly, to exist unsupported by gravity, to be free of the laws of nature:

"For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps for some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for hte hundred miles races. We fly, we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured."

The opposite of the human experience, which is never to feel at home, is the experience of the tortoise, who always is at home.  In Native American stories, the tortoise is an emblem of endurance and toughheartedness, but they now are dying out. The desert is a place of death, especially after nuclear testing in Death Valley. But in some places species are coming back: bald eagles, osprey, elk, elephant seals, brown pelicans, creasted egrets. The sea goes on. In others, new life takes the place of what has died. Where grizzlies and brown satyr butterflies once lived, there is now a Catholic University where Solnit here's a Zen monk say, "It's okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty. It's okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped...It is not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about a world according to me."  This seems an easy answer to the restlessness of the previous parts of the book, but the idea that we give a gift by letting others help us is something I have realized over time.

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One last book I skimmed in April, but didn't have time to read, was Terry Tempest Williams' The Hour of the Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. I picked this up after my Grand Canyon hike, and enjoyed what I read about different National Parks. Williams is a long time conservation activist and writer about environmental issues, in particular the protection of national lands.  Her political enthusiasm for protecting the land stems from her familiarity and love for the natural lands she grew up with in the west. Her family hiked and camped and lived near rugged environments.  - the Grand Tetons were her childhood playground.  She explores them, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a new one in North Dakota, Acadia in Maine, Gettysburg, Penn, Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, Big Bend in Texas, Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, Canyonlands in Utah, Alcatraz Island and Golden Gate National Recreation area, Glacier Park in Montana, and the Gulf Islands in Florida in Mississippi. I haven't been to very many of these, but visiting the big ones in California has been rewarding, despite crowds and managed experiences. 

Another touching part of Williams' book was the dedication. She thanks her husband, Brooke: "And lastly my love belongs to Brooke, who explored these parks with me, joyously. For more than forty years, we have been in partnership without a map, only a lifelong search for Beauty. He is the strongest person I know and the most wild."  She also thanks to her deceased father for his inspiration and strength, and acknowledges the poetry of Jorie Graham as a muse. "WE" published in London Review of Books in Jan. 2015,  provides the chapter titles:  "a poetic crossing ... which follows the arc from physical motion to spiritual action ... into another type of consciousness, a more heightened reality. It is a move beyond the ttemporal a visionary passage."

Scenes from Mother's Day

The lovely thing about traditions is that they remove the difficulty of making decisions.  We have a tradition now on Mother's Day of eating a big breakfast, going to Mass, and then taking a hike. This is just the third time we've done this, but twice in a row is enough to create a tradition in our household. The kids usually complain about the idea of hiking, but since it is Mother's Day, they tone the whining down. We had beautiful weather today to head outside, so once they were in motion, the complaining stopped. My favorite part of the day was watching them talk to each other as they walked in the sunshine. 

Big breakfast made by the kids 

Family photo with the big boys home from college - they got home the day before. I love when we take up the whole pew - it means everyone is together.

Spring in the Cleveland National Forest. 

We have done this hike before a couple of times, but we needed to do something flat because my oldest tore his ACL. But even though the spot was the same, the flora was different. Lots of wildflowers were blooming.  I think this is a penstemon variety. 

Wait for me!

Having fun amongst the wildlfowers.

The lovely lupine was in bloom.

Some kind of thistle?

Big Laguna "Lake." The lake was dry, but birds were in abundance. After watching Big Year, the move with Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson as birders (thumbs up), we were on the look out for birds. I counted mallards, coots, another kind of duck, egrets, some kind of swallow, sparrows, blackbirds, red wing blackbirds, crows, and juncos while I was paying attention. I could be talked into being a birder in my old age - a good excuse to travel to beautiful, remote natural places. 

Picnicking in the sun.

Another unusual wildflower

A belated wish for happy Mother's Day blessings to all who mother!

Reading in Review: The Ninth Hour

Once again, Alice McDermott kept me up late at night reading. This time it was The Ninth Hour, her newest novel about a widow, her daughter and the nuns who welcome them in. This book is a portrait of a time gone by in Brooklyn when prams, nuns in habits, handwashing laundry, train travel, and Catholicism were a part of the fabric of life.  McDermott has a gift for bringing to life this time period and her characters and interweaving the difficulty of believing in a just God with acting with mercy in a sinful world.  [spoilers ahead]

The conflict between prudence and mercy strains the conscience in many of the character's (particularly the nuns) actions. Maybe prudence isn't quite the right word for the choices in this book, but justice doesn't seem quite right either.  Since I find myself sometimes struggling to moderate prudence that vacillates between vice and virtue and a desire to be a more extravagant Christian, generous with charity and acts of mercy, a generosity that doesn't come naturally, that particular word came to mind as I read McDermott's lovely novel. 

The book has a tight focus but spans generations. It follows the relationship between a young Irish immigrant named Annie, the sisters of Little Nursing Sisters of the sick Poor Congregation of Mary before the Cross Stabat Mater (their community's name a source of humor later in the book), and her daughter Sally, who is born after Annie's husband's death (and named St. Savior after the nun who first consoles her mother).  In the first part of the book, named for the prayers of the first hour, "Lauds," the sisters come to Annie's aid. One sister, Sister St. Savior, even goes so far as to try to get Annie's husband a Christian burial despite the fact that he has committed suicide and endangered the other members of the tenement by leaving on the gas.  

The sisters find Annie a room to rent with the large, cheerfully chaotic Tierney family, and give her a job helping with the convent laundry, which includes not just the sisters' habits, but also linens of the sick and deceased and donated clothing for the poor.  In other words, lots of laundry.  "With sacred solemnity, Sister Illuminata demonstrated for Annie how a garment should be properly shaken and hung." With lines like these, McDermott displays both the humor and profundity of doing small acts with great love.

While the book is too short to really round out the characters, McDermott gives each of the nuns has a distinct personality. Sister St. Savior is old and proud, but full of mercy; she wants the suicide buried with a funeral on church ground and truly loves the poor. She has a heart "Mad for mercy." Sister Lucy is busy, and a bit rough with her justice, saying things like "You can't pull the wool over God's eyes." But she, too, looks out for the poor, and asks young Mrs. Tierney another young pregnant mother with a stroller and toddler if her husband is good to her. She arranges a friendship between these two young mothers. And though she is judgemental, she is also intent on the good of others. 

The most beloved sister, Sr. Jeanne, is tiny and sweet and loves children. I'm not sure why at the end of the book she says she gave up heaven a long time ago. Because she loved Sally so much? Because she turned a blind eye to sin? Because perhaps she offers her salvation as a sacrifice for allowing an illicit relationship between Mr. Costello, the milkman, and Annie to begin and continue? Sister Lucy had warned her that Annie needed a proper husband and was flirting with Mr. Costello, but Sr. Jeanne does or says nothing, although she obviously sees when others act out of desire instead of out of prudence. She "believed with the conviction of an eyewitness that all human loss would be restored. . . . because fairness demanded it. " She believes God gave us the idea of fairness because he meant to give comfort and recompense to the suffering people in Heaven to repay them.  She has a ghostly visit one day from Jim, the man who threw away his chance to know and love his bright young wife and adorable baby. This vision haunts her, perhaps also is a warning, of what I'm not sure.  But her tenderness and self-sacrifice suggest that she is motivated by an abundance of love for others.  Maybe her statement only suggests the depth with which people tend to judge themselves and their sins of thought. 

Finally, the laundry sister, Sister Illuminata, is old and grumpy, bothered by aches and pains and old TB. She retells tales of her past, which suggests a break with convent rule, but makes small animals out of soap for baby Sally and is jealous of how her helper loves Sr. Jeanne.  In the end, it is this grumpy sister who is revealed to be most understanding of Sally when she is conflicted about her vocation. 

The book is told from the point of view of the children of the young people. "Our Father" and "Our Mother" are Patrick Tierney and Sally, who grow up over the course of the novel. They are babies when they first meet in their strollers, but almost adults before they acknowledge any affection. But the book is not their love story; it is more the story of what formed them into the adults of children of adults who seek out the stories the made their parents who they are.  We find out that Sally and Patrick have married and have children, who must be hushed when their mother has to go to her room to sleep off melancholy. The Sisters come to care for the children (and their mother) during these times. 

Two other characters flit like ghosts throughout the story: Old Aunt Rose and Red Whelan. They are a part of the Tierney family lore: a maiden aunt who comes to stay for 40 years and a poor man who was paid $300 to substitute in the Civil War for Patrick Tierney's grandfather.  Red returns without an arm or a leg and lives upstairs in the Tierney family home, a literal skeleton in the closet. Aunt Rose cares for him with Tierney family support. Patrick's family has been haunted by the specter of Red Whelan, who nurse him in acknowledgment of the debt he paid with his arm and leg.  Patrick's father eventually leaves home angry because of family disapproval about his Irish fiancee, but he goes to the funeral with Patrick, who learns the family legends.  Patrick eventually, as a married man, takes in the aged spinster aunt who spent her life nursing (loving) Red Whelan. Aunt Rose doesn't stay long, but she presages other sufferings in the future  - fidelity and madness. Aunt Rose is sent to die in a nursing home run by other sisters (little Sisters of the Poor, I imagine - the order Sr Jeanne was supposed to join) because Sally is delicate. Maybe also because she reminds Sally of her mother - a woman who for years loved a man who wasn't her husband? These old broken people move in and out of lives reminding the younger generation of their connection to a past that held mysteries of intertwined lives before their time in the world began. The relationships of our ancestors become our inheritance.

The title of the book is a reference to afternoon prayers at three pm, "the hour of prayer" in the Old Testament, and the time Christ's death on the cross, a time of sacrifice.  Sr. Illuminata would go upstairs for community prayers, but as she ages, she stays in the laundry to pray - like being banished to the dungeon, only a welcome exile. At some point, Sister Jeanne begins coming to the basement to give Annie a chance for a break, to go upstairs for tea with the cook or to go shopping. Eventually, it also gives her time to rendezvous with Mr. Costello, who is married to an unhappy, invalid woman nursed by the sisters.

Sally grows up in the convent, a pet as predicted by Sister Lucy, a bit spoiled and sheltered. She, of course, decides she wants to be a nun.  She loves and trusts her mother, shares a bed with her, loves the Tierney's rough and tumble but loving home life, but still decides one day she wants to be a sister despite her mother's opposition.  Does Annie oppose because she doesn't want Sally to leave her?  Sister Illuminata shares that her own vocation came not from a sense of sacrifice, but as a call to be a "pure, clean antidote to filth, to pain" to which all mortal things tend. The life of a nursing sister is the "antidote to the devil's ambition" to make life stink and discourage people.  Sister Illuminata washes and irons the clothes for donations and the other sisters' habits before washing her own. She is the laundress because she had tuberculosis, but she still sees herself as ministering to purity.

Sally is given the opportunity to follow Sister Lucy and Sister Jeanne on their rounds in order to test her vocation. She is exposed to the sick and poor, and first meets Mrs. Costello, the milkman's wife, who is half mad and has only one leg, having lost the other to an infection following a dog bite. Mrs. Costello is needy and grim, but Sally pities her.

Sally also is drawn to the boy Charlie who, it is discovered by the sisters, has tied up and abused his sisters.  The conviction that Sally was making eyes at him leads Sister Lucy to say "Marriage might settle her... I say give God what He asks for."

Sister Jeanne, who meditates on the scent of roses at Sister St Savior's death "The beauty of heaven in the scent .. . Just the smallest notion of it -- of what is promised. As much of heaven's beauty ... as we on earth can bear," seems to see what is beautiful in others, even though there is so much ugliness around.  She suggests that Sally's vocation is an opportunity for redemption for Annie - Annie thinks she means for Jim's suicide, but Sr Jeanne knows about her relationship with Mr. Costello.  So she is willing to allow Sally has a vocation as a sacrifice in retribution for the sins of her parents. (Is that the fairness Jeanne desires?)

Despite her mother's opposition, Sally persists in thinking she has a vocation and heads off on a train to go to the novitiate in Chicago.  On the train she meets with the mass of brutish humanity which she was sheltered from in the convent, even though her nursing internship showed her some glimpses.  First Sally encounters a woman who talks filth about her last man, and then Sally is cheated by a girl to whom she gives money in an attempt to be virtuously generous.  The girl is revealed to be a huckster.  Sally had left Brooklyn believing that "love stood before brutality in that moment on Golgotha and love was triumphant. Love applied to suffering. . . like a clean cloth to a seeping wood." But she learns that she can't cure suffering by purity. She wanted to be a "pure antidote to human pain" in her lovely habit .. but not to mocked on fooled, contrast with bums on the train, stumps of cigars, the rude woman, whom Sally finally is provoked into hitting in the face. As soon as she arrives in Chicago, she tells the sister who meets the train, "The truth is ... I've thought better of it." She gets a sleeping car with what is left of the money her mother saved up to go home. 

The next chapter is titled "Stabat Mater," which ends up having all sorts of irony when Sally enters her home and discovers her mother making a snack for Mr. Costello in bare feet. Her mother looks at Mr C with the assurance of her love that she used to give to Sally.  Sally sees it with her father's eyes, "envious, lonesome, buried, bereft."  She departs feeling betrayed and forsaken and goes to live, like her mother once had, with the Tierneys.

At the Tierney's Sally is shown tenderness and the difficulty of relationships with fathers "He could have forgiven you," is a refrain that echoes between the generations. Mrs. Tierney also seems to think Sally should forgive her mother, but welcomes in the daughter who feels rejected. Mrs. Tierney is a model of hospitality; she is open to life, welcoming babies and stragglers into her home, and she loves the chaos they bring. She is "bored" by holiness, but encourages Annie to confess and make peace. Annie, though, does not want to confess what she does not feel sorry for.  

The last part of the book drifts between what is true and what is not and the gray area. The frame story - that the narrators of this book are the children of Sally and Patrick - allows for discrepancies in the chronology and in the understanding and misunderstanding of another person's actions and motives.  The chapter called "True" begins with the story of Jeane Jugan founding the order Little Sisters of the Poor (the order Sister Jeanne was supposed to join).  Her work as foundress was overshadowed by the priest who was involved in the paperwork, and her saintliness was overlooked until 1855, but as McDermott writes in the words of the narrators, "Truth reveals itself. ... God wants us to know the truth in all things, big or small, because that's how we'll know Him. .. In all her simplicity, old Sister Jeanne told us..."

When the truth is revealed about the double life Annie has been leading, the sisters have to decide if she can continue to work in the laundry. They meet to discuss and pray over the matter. Although her daughter refuses to live with her, Annie is allowed to continue working at the laundry, in part because Sr. Illuminata recognizes that Annie had "a hunger to be comforted" that the nuns couldn't fill. 

In reparation for her mother's sin and for her own failure to stick with joining the order, Sally continues to help the sisters with their nursing rounds even though she also has begun working at a hotel, where she encounters more rude jokes and complaints (did her years in the laundry make her too sensitive to humanity's dirty side?).  She commits to caring for Mrs. Costello, with whom she shared a bond of betrayal, even though Mrs. Costello apparently knew nothing other than she was left alone all day.  When he realizes how sick his wife is, Mr. Costello breaks off the affair with Annie to be more attentive to his sick wife. 

Sally, perhaps consumed by the same hunger to be comforted as her mother, is inspired by an overheard conversation at the hotel, to make it possible for her mother to live an honest life.  She secretly takes some alum from the laundry and is going to give a spoonful of poison to Mrs. Costello in her tea.  Just as she is giving Mrs. C the first spoonful, Mrs. Costello is consumed by a coughing fit and dies.  It is hard to tell whether Sally had given her the first spoonful or not, but Sister Jeanne whispers to Sally as she is leaving that she had no role in the invalid's death. Apparently Sister Jeanne either guessed what Sally was thinking or saw the alum in the handkerchief in Sally's purse, which was left open in the kitchen.  Does Sister Jeanne's later comment about having given up Heaven indicate a role in Mrs. Costello's death, an offering of herself for her friends' sins, or some less active sin?

Overcome by the events of the day, Sally returns to the Tierneys and sits at the table crying when Patrick approaches her. When he takes her hand, the story of their life together begins, although the narrators say he remembers he met her first when they were in their prams. 

The years are fast forwarded from this moment of crisis. Annie and Mr. Costello marry and have a baby named Grace. Sally and Patrick marry and have multiple children. Old Aunt Rose comes to live briefly with the family, but Sally's bouts of melancholy (depression) prevent her from taking care of Aunt Rose. Sister Jeanne comes frequently to the Tierney's to help with the children when Sally is ill (related to her conscience for attempting murder or relating to her genetics, a mental illness inherited from her father?)  Sister Jeanne delights in the children and tells them about God and heaven and love. "God has hidden these things from the wise and prudent, See? He's revealed them only to the little ones." The children recognize her love:  "We felt her delight in us, which was familiar as well, delight in our presence, our living and breathing selves... a tonic for all sorrow" But Sister Jeanne also tells them she is unworthy of heaven, although the children see it as humility or holiness: "God knows my heart . . . So I don't ask for his forgivess, see. . . . I gave up my place in heaven a long time ago, she said. out of love for my friends." 

Eventually, the convent is taken over by the bishop and sold. The sisters age and die off.  The children of Patrick and Sally piece together their parents' history.  Sally apparently told Patrick at one point of her misdirected attempt at murder because the narrators know about the incident. Patrick also sees a connection between Red Whelan and Mrs. Costello, "The one-legged among us." 

"Growing old ourselves, we indulged him. We listened to the same stories told again and kept silent about the truth: that our mother's midlife melancholy was clinical depression, unspoken in those days. That Great-aunt Rose's happy tremor as we guided her up the stairs was surely the Parkinson's that had visited us as well. That the holy nuns who sailed through the house when we were young were a dying breed even then. The bishop with his eye on their rich man's mansion even then. The call to sanctity and self-sacrifice, the delusion and superstition it required, fading from the world even then. How much would they have paid him -- Red Whelan -" 

In the end, even the truth about Jim's suicide comes out, when the children (adults old enough to have Parkinson's) find a newspaper article when they are looking up our much men were paid to substitute for another man in the Civil War.  Apparently, even Sally didn't know how her father had died, or if she did, she never told. Is it a mercy to keep the dirtiness of life hidden or a delusion that prevents someone from living in the truth? Does the ugliness of life turn us toward or away from God?  Does prudence demand that we have to choose between loving people and loving God or does mercy demand the opposite?  Are there people today who still witness to the kind of self-sacrifice and devotion that the sisters lived? Is this a delusion or superstition, as the children say, or holiness? Mc Dermott's novel raises all these questions without answering them directly. As reader like me sees the story of people trying to love other people despite betrayal, poverty, and the dirtiness of life, and in those love stories sees a little glimpse of Heaven, like Sister Jeanne.