ANGELINE Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from Anna Quinn’s novel ANGELINE. This story examines the formation of identity through the lens of loss and guilt, and the power of women creating a non-hierarchal space. Quinn is the author of The Night Child, (Blackstone, 2018). When she isn’t writing, she’s reading, biking or hiking somewhere on this beautiful planet.
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Meg lies prostrate on the stone floor. Her body, a cross. Incense curls around her white gown and spirals up like tiny resurrections. When she rises, they dress her in black and call her by a new name: Sister Angeline. It is the twelfth of December, 2014. She is twenty-three years old. She is now, after six years of discernment, officially, a bride of Christ.
The bishop, dressed in reds and blacks, slides a gold band on her ring finger. A choir of nuns sing the psalm “De Profundis,” a celebration of her death to worldly things. They sing something beyond the swell of human voice, something closer to white birds wrapping her in silk and promising to be there when she emerges.
And she stands there among them, head lifted toward light pouring through stained-glass windows. It is then, when she opens her eyes, she sees the baby floating in the perfumed clouds of smoke, a crown of lilies on its tiny head. Sister Angeline wipes her eyes, her face, and whispers I love you, and the baby flies away through the night.
With the exception of singing and chanting and an hour of conversation each day, the twenty nuns live together in complete silence. Their daily lives divided by bells, moving them from one prayerful hour to the next, reminding them to pay attention to the moment. Even though there are no cell phones, computers, televisions, or radios, and the windows are frosted, a cloistered nun can become distracted.
The first bell rings at 12:30 a.m. for Matins, and Sister Ange- line rises from her bed, kneels, and places her forehead on the floor. Attempts to relinquish ego. Washes her face. Dresses in full habit but leaves her feet bare. It is a breach of discipline to hurry, so she moves steadily, not with haste, and strives to stay in a perpetual state of prayer.
Once the nuns are gathered in the chapel, the prioress, Sister Josephine, exposes the Blessed Sacrament. She opens the door to the tabernacle, and there in the form of wine and wafers lies the body and blood of Christ.
Sister Angeline absorbed by this metaphor. The thought of all becoming one body—no one separate from the other—but there are those who drink the wine and eat the bread who still feel alone, afraid, hungry, desperate, and ashamed.
She is one of those.
The nuns chant then, an ancient Latin call and response, creating a primal echo, a oneness of heart, extinguishing a silence that can sometimes suffocate.
Afterward, they return to their cells for three more hours of sleep. Sister Angeline undisturbed by this bifurcated sleep pattern—she hardly sleeps anyway. To fall asleep means ghost bodies crawling in and dead sparrows floating in coffins filled with blood.
Another bell at 5:30 a.m. The nuns gather to pray the Rosary. Father Condon arrives at 7:00 a.m. to say Mass. He has a heart condition and a kind temperament and must be helped to walk. Sister Angeline likes that he drinks the consecrated wine from the golden goblet with such gusto.
After Mass the nuns eat breakfast, usually eggs and buttered toast—sometimes there’s blueberry or strawberry jam—and freshly squeezed juice and coffee. The only sounds: chewing and drinking and the muffled throb and scream of traffic through the double-paned windows.
Once the nuns clean up the kitchen, they pray for an hour in solitude. Sister Angeline prays in her cell, on her knees, head in her hands. She prays for the suffering, the sick. She prays to be with the ones she lost. She prays to be forgiven.
After prayer she assists with the laundry and cooking, polishing, sweeping, sewing, and gardening in the tiny, enclosed plot behind the convent. Sometimes, while she works, rappers perform on the other side of the brick wall. It seems to her that rapping requires an incredible grasp of human nature. Also, fearlessness and urgency.
Today a young man recites words rapidly, “These streets are shit, why can’t I speak, I ain’t telling you how to survive, ain’t telling you, babe, when to cry, when to die, these streets are shit, why can’t I speak?”
She can hear him breathing hard, and she feels an ache of pain for him, and it makes her call out, “I hear you,” and there is a sudden silence, and then he says, “Thank you, whoever you are.”
Lunch is the biggest meal. Never meat, but sometimes fish, usually lentils and rice, and if it’s a feast day, they might have cookies.
After lunch more prayer and manual work. At 4:30 p.m. they sanctify the day with Vespers, by singing and chanting psalms. They must sing louder at Vespers because of the yell and bellow of rush-hour traffic.
The evening meal always consists of soup—the idea is to fast with only liquids until morning. Fasting is not an end unto itself, but a means of sharpening their minds and bodies for spiritual growth.
For an hour after the evening meal, the nuns may use their voices for conversation, though Sister Angeline doesn’t participate. She prefers to use her free time to pray, not because she feels spiritually superior, but because she feels she owes a great debt.
In the beginning she’d waited for Sister Josephine or one of the other Sisters to say something about her lack of interaction, to insist she socialize, but no one ever said a word to her. Though, once, Sister Leon whispered ice princess as they passed in the hall, and Sister Angeline’s throat tightened, and for moment she was back in middle school where the bullies lived.
She’d been harassed in school for her strange eye colors, one blue and one brown. Kids passed rumors, said she was a witch, said she cast spells, blamed her for everything from bad test scores to a teacher’s suicide, pushed her up against walls, and once, an older girl, a girl she’d only seen in the hallways, held a lit cigarette to her neck in the bathroom and said, I never want to see you using this bathroom again or I’ll burn you hard, Meg. After that, she only used the bathroom by the nurse’s office.
The doctor explained that she has heterochromia—a difference in coloration in two structures of the eye that are normally alike in color. He said it wasn’t a negative thing.
Yet.
There was always someone within striking distance who made it so.
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The monotony drives some of the nuns away. The monotony kills some of them.
For Sister Angeline, the surrendering, the predictable rhythm carries its own body,
its own blood,
its own redemption.
Marriage between humans is a dare, a summons, a trial. Marriage to God is a microscopic introspection, a quantum leap, a release. A chrysalis.
Excerpted from Angeline by Anna Quinn. Released Feb. 7th, 2023. Published by Blackstone Publishing. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.
ANGELINE
A moving, lyrical, melancholy and spiritual novel by the acclaimed author of The Night Child, in which Sister Angeline, unwillingly sent to a radical convent and confronting her tragic past, asks the deep question, follow your heart or follow the rules?
After surviving a tragedy that killed her entire family, sixteen-year-old Meg joins a cloistered convent, believing it is her life’s work to pray full time for the suffering of others. Taking the name Sister Angeline, she spends her days and nights in silence, moving from one prayerful hour to the next. She prays for the hardships of others, the sick and poor, the loved ones she lost, and her own atonement.
When the Archdiocese of Chicago runs out of money to keep the convent open, she is torn from her carefully constructed life and sent to a progressive convent on a rocky island in the Pacific Northwest. There, at the Light of the Sea, five radical feminist nuns have their own vision of faithful service. They do not follow canonical law, they do not live a cloistered life, and they believe in using their voices for change.
As Sister Angeline struggles to adapt to her new home, she must navigate her grief, fears, and confusions, while being drawn into the lives of a child in crisis, an angry teen, an EMT suffering survivor’s guilt, and the parish priest who is losing his congregation to the Sisters’ all-inclusive Sunday masses. Through all of this, something seems to have awakened in her, a healing power she has not experienced in years that could be her saving grace, or her downfall.
In Angeline, novelist Anna Quinn explores the complexity of our past selves and the discovery of our present truth; the enduring imprints left by our losses, forgiveness and acceptance, and why we believe what we believe. Affecting and beautifully told, Angeline is both poignant and startling and will touch the hearts of anyone who has ever asked themselves: When your foundations crumble and you’ve lost yourself, how do you find the strength to go on? Do you follow your heart or the rules?
Category: On Writing
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