Getting to Know the Grille

The photo on this post is of a typical parlor grille.  Visitors sit on the "public" side of the grillwork, cloistered nuns sit on the other (inside the enclosure), and they are able to spend time together.   

The grille is a powerful symbol.  I would go so far as to say that, in the cloistered heart way of life we describe here, it is the important symbol.  It is a place of separation and, just as importantly, it is a place of encounter. 

It is only through the grille that many cloistered individuals connect with the world.  For the purposes of our analogy (which we will discuss next time), this "only-ness" is extremely important.  

In order to catch the implications of the analogy, we need some idea of what grilles in actual monasteries are like - how they function and how they look.  

Which is like this....

Click on the following links for a look at: 

A Grille at Regina Laudis

A Grille of Carmel

"The Gaze Behind the Lattice Work"

Picture at top:  Poor Clare Monastery, Barhamsville, VA.  Photo by Connie Wells

For a look at OUR grille, click this line

Feast of the Visitation

 

Painting:  Ubaldo Gandolfi, Visitación, 1767

A Long Climb to Yes

Desiring to live within the boundaries of God's will, I am reminded of the following letter.  

This was written to a cloistered nun around twenty years ago (this is not a current situation, and I apologize to anyone who thought it was!).  

At that time, Sister and I were both facing medical tests.....

Sometimes I wonder how a person so bent upon the Will of God that she accepts it as her 'enclosure' can so struggle against it over and over!  Every new situation seems to bring me to a deeper crossroads at which I find two parts of me struggling.  I am at this spot again of late; perhaps I'm always there.

This time it involves some upcoming medical examinations that I dread with every fiber of my flesh.  I grow quite weary of being poked, prodded, sliced, diced, scanned, stuck, frowned over, charted.  It's like my mind and body are absolutely quaking, going 'white with fear,' while my heart is at peace and knows that I want nothing other than the will of God, no matter what that should ever entail.  This is incredibly hard to describe, but somehow I think you will know what I mean.

I felt such a resonance with your words:  'I feel so ashamed that my feelings seem to have gotten the better of me.  Yet deep in my heart I do accept, embrace, and love God's will for me.'  Yes, that's it exactly.  You have put words to what I cannot, and I don't feel so confused anymore about this constant struggle, nor so alone.

Sometimes I feel I am embracing God's Good Will with nothing more than raw decision, a decision often made amidst my own terrified screams.

I wonder if it might be when we feel our flesh quaking that our 'yes' to God can reach the heights...

Painting: Carl Gustav Carus



To return to the 'Monastic Adventure in Sequence' post, click here

A Saint Speaks of our Boundaries

 

"Take the holy, gentle will of God as your spouse, 

wedded each moment by the ring of faith 

in which are set all the jewels of hope and love." 

St. Paul of the Cross 

This post is part of our "New Cloistered Adventure."  For an explanation of what that means, click this line.   

Painting:  George Hitchcock,  in US public domain due to age 



For a further look inside our 'walls,' click here

Just Shadows

“As the wall remains the same however many shadows pass across it, and as the looking glass remains the same however many changes of expression it reflects, so the soul that is held fast in God remains uninfluenced by the waving shapes and images that come and go.” (Dom Hubert Van Zeller, The Yoke of Divine Love, Templegate, Springfield IL, 1957, p. 226)
 
Sin casts shadows.  Living in the world as I do, I can't help but see them.  Shadows of sin wave daily across my enclosure walls.  I walk into a room with a TV and I might hear them.  I step into a store and they are there. 

Wanting to live enclosed in the will of God, I choose the boundaries of that will in circumstance after circumstance.  Yet unless I run away from everything in the world - unless I run away from my very own self, and my selfishness, and my memories - the shadows of sin remain. 

"Be intent on things above rather than on things of earth," Scripture tells me, and I want to do exactly that. "Put to death whatever in your nature is rooted in earth:  fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desires, and that lust which is called idolatry.  These are the sins which provoke God's wrath.  Your own conduct was once of this sort, when these sins were your very life.  You must put that aside now:  all the anger and quick temper, the malice, the insults, the foul language.  Stop lying to one another.  What you have done is put aside your old self with its past deeds and put on a new man, one who grows in knowledge as he is formed anew in the image of his Creator."   (Colossians 3:2-10)

'Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may judge what is God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect.'  Romans 12:2

"The way we can be sure of our knowledge of Him is to keep His commandments.... The way we can be sure we are in union with Him is for the man who claims to abide in Him to conduct himself just as He did."  (1 John 2:5-6) 

Today I make the choice to live within the boundaries of God's will.  In this time, in this place, I make the choice.

And the shadows?  They will be there.  They will tempt and remind and whisper; they'll try to frighten and condemn.  But when it comes right down to it, they do not bring anything into the enclosure.  They are only reflections of things outside.

Shadows are just shadows, after all.    


Public domain photo 

Text not in quotes © 2014 Nancy Shuman.  All Rights Reserved.

thecloisteredheart.org     


To look further inside our 'walls,' click here