In four hundred years, nothing inside the walls of the convent had changed, except the faces. The sisters had no personal possessions, for they desired to be poor, emulating the poverty of Christ. The church itself was bare of ornaments, save for a priceless solid-gold cross that had been a long-ago gift from a wealthy postulant. Because it was so out of keeping with the austerity of the order, it was kept hidden away in a cabinet in the refectory. A plain wooden cross hung at the altar of the church.
The women who shared their lives with the Lord lived together, worked together, ate together, and prayed together, yet they never touched and never spoke. The only exceptions permitted were when they heard mass or when the Reverend Mother Prioress Betina addressed them in the privacy of her office. Even then, an ancient sign language was used as much as possible.
The Reverend Mother was a religeuse in her seventies, a brightfaced robin of a woman, cheerful and energetic, who gloried in the peace and joy of convent life, and of a life devoted to God. Fiercely protective of her nuns, she felt more pain when it was necessary to enforce discipline than did the one being punished.
The nuns walked through the cloisters and corridors with downcast eyes, hands folded in their sleeves at breast level, passing and repassing their sisters without a word or sign of recognition. The only voice of the convent was its bells—the bells that Victor Hugo called “the opera of the steeples.”
The sisters came from disparate backgrounds and from many different countries. Their families were aristocrats, farmers, soldiers…They had come to the convent as rich and poor, educated and ignorant, miserable and exalted, but now they were one in the eyes of God, united in their desire for eternal marriage to Jesus.
The living conditions in the convent were Spartan. In winter the cold was knifing, and a chill, pale light filtered in through leaded windows. The nuns slept fully dressed on pallets of straw, covered with rough woolen sheets. Each had her own tiny cell, furnished only with the pallet and a straight-backed wooden chair. There was no washstand. A small earthen jug and basin stood in a corner on the floor. No nun was ever permitted to enter the cell of another, except for the Reverend Mother Betina. There was no recreation of any kind, only work and prayers. There were work areas for knitting, book binding, weaving, and making bread. There were eight hours of prayer each day: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. Besides these there were other devotions: benedictions, hymns, and litanies.
Matins were said when half the world was asleep and the other half was absorbed in sin.
Lauds, the office of daybreak, followed Matins, and the rising sun was hailed as the figure of Christ triumphant and glorified.
Prime was the church’s morning prayer, asking for the blessings on the work of the day.
Terce was at nine o’clock in the morning, consecrated by St. Augustine to the Holy Spirit.
Sext was at eleven-thirty A.M., evoked to quench the heat of human passions.
None was silently recited at three o’clock in the afternoon, the hour of Christ’s death.
Vespers was the evening service of the church, as Lauds was her daybreak prayer.
Compline was the completion of the Little Hours of the day. A form of night prayers, a preparation for death as well as sleep, ending the day on a note of loving submission: Manus tuas, domine, commendo spiritum meum. Redemisti nos, domine, deus, veritatis.
In some of the other orders, flagellation had been stopped, but in the cloistered Cistercian convents and monasteries it survived. At least once a week, and sometimes every day, the nuns punished their bodies with the Discipline, a twelve-inch-long whip of thin waxed cord with six knotted tails that brought agonizing pain; it was used to lash the back, legs, and buttocks. Bernard of Clairvaux, the ascetic abbot of the Cistercians, had admonished: “The body of Christ is crushed…our bodies must be conformed to the likeness of our Lord’s wounded body.”
It was a life more austere than in any prison, yet the inmates lived in an ecstasy such as they had never known in the outside world. They had renounced physical love, possessions, and freedom of choice, but in giving up those things they had also renounced greed and competition, hatred and envy, and all the pressures and temptations that the outside world imposed. Inside the convent reigned an all-pervading peace and the ineffable sense of joy at being one with God. There was an indescribable serenity within the walls of the convent and in the hearts of those who lived there. If the convent was a prison, it was a prison in God’s Eden, with the knowledge of a happy eternity for those who had freely chosen to be there and to remain there.