Stone Yard Devotional
A Novel
“Do you have to believe in God to join a religious order?” the unnamed narrator of Stone Yard Devotional muses. “Nobody has ever asked me, specifically, about belief. And anyway, I haven’t ever joined. Not really.”
She has lost her faith. She was never a devout Catholic, though the novel opens with her first visit to the isolated convent where she eventually will come to live. Rather, the calamity that brings the narrator to the convent, and then back to her hometown in rural Australia, is her loss of hope in the future. After decades of working for environmental causes alongside her husband, she has lost her faith that our damaged world will continue on or that her efforts have made a difference. It is this loss that drives her to the convent, despite having left religion behind long ago.
The people in her former life have no room for her grief. Her husband blames her for their separation; her coworkers respond with contempt; her best friend writes her scathing letters and encourages other people to do so as well. Her despair isn’t meant to hurt her friends; indeed, she agrees that despair is a noxious presence in a soul and in a community: “I read somewhere that Catholics think despair is the unforgivable sin. I think they are right; it’s malign, it bleeds and spreads. Once gone, I don’t know that real hope or faith—are they the same?—can ever return.”
