Retreat

Creative Nonfiction by Dev Murphy

Before your cousin leaves for the convent she makes everyone promise to recite lines from her favorite TV shows to her through the grate.

When the convent doesn’t work, your mother visits you on campus in the hills of Appalachia and plots: “She should become a politician instead, or a lawyer.” “Or Mrs. Von Trapp,” you say over coffee, though your cousin has always said she was not formed for marriage — too boisterous, too ungentle. “Wouldn’t that be adorable?” your mother says. “We live in such a selfish culture, so anti-family. But if you marry young — a nice, rich Christian man, maybe a doctor — by the time your kids are grown you’ll have the rest of your life ahead of you to focus on yourself.”

You realize she is talking about you now.

Your mother, who was a wild child until she got married at twenty-four, doesn’t believe you when you, at that same age, say that you have never kissed anyone. When you think of your youth, you don’t think of kisses and you don’t think of career planning; you think of waking up at the devil’s hour from nightmares of condemnation and inferno.

Your cousin returns to her own mother and to a home scent, the mixture of goats and a wood burning stove, a bookcase filled with more than Bibles, a wardrobe filled with more than habits. While she wasn’t looking her little sister on tiptoe got herself to a nunnery, somewhere in New York, never to be seen again; now she is called Elizabeth.

You wonder if the younger sister observed her older sister’s faults, her boisterousness, and thought

I know what it takes to stay.

That spring, your second semester of graduate school, Elizabeth sends you a Dover copy of St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle and a note sealed with blue wax that reads

This remarkable woman was not well educated, but her deep understanding that the Blessed Trinity dwells within us led to mystical experiences and a wisdom deeper than any learning can bestow.

You still haven’t read the book. Despite being an English major, you’re having a hard time lately focusing on reading, on anything.

Your cousins are well educated — more educated than you are. Philosophy, theology, mathematics, literature, biology, medicine. But because both her daughters are committed to the Lord, or are committed to committing to the Lord, your aunt desires to set you up with every homeschooled Christian boy she knows. The next best thing to being married to God is being married to a Christian man, and bearing his children. At family weddings, Lake Erie in the summer, New Year’s Eve by the wood burning stove, you smile, and you tell your aunt you enjoy your solitude.

The summer after your older cousin is rejected by the first convent is the summer you realize you don’t know what you want to do with your life but you think you want to be an artist. Your mother and your aunt pay for you and your cousin to go on a silent retreat in a church in rural Ohio. Your cousin cannot keep silent, and so you call it a “mostly silent retreat.” You have the entire campus to yourselves, except for a bishop from a nearby parish. The hosts instruct you not to speak to the bishop but he smiles and waves at you whenever he passes you in the halls. You spend your days sketching the woods and the telephone poles and the Transfiguration and praying and telling yourself you feel something — the hand of God, mystical experiences. Anything.

On the last evening, your cousin stands by the fireplace in your shared room and tells you to rank the following in order of importance:

Beauty. Goodness. Justice.

Packing your shirts you think and you tell her, “Goodness. Beauty. Justice.”

She puts Justice first and Beauty last. You wonder if this is why she has trouble in the convents. She tells you her younger sister said: “Beauty. Goodness. Justice.”

She tells you that leaving a convent is like ending a relationship she thought would end in marriage. But the vision of God is what draws her back and back. You consider the reverse of that — that you are probably anticipating God in everything you covet, and that this is why it is taking you so long to be touched.

You fill your bag and place it at the foot of the bed.

You sit on the bed.

Silently, in a voice you are too tired or self-unknowing to dispute, you or a version of you prophesies:

Devan. The anticipation of God will send you to hell, or perhaps to your own cloister.

Dev Murphy’s writing and art have appeared or are forthcoming in The Guardian, The Cincinnati Review, The Rupture, Passages North, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She is a reader for CRAFT Literary, and her chapbook, The Not Getting It Ages Like Wine, or a Mythos was a semifinalist in CutBank’s 2020 chapbook contest. She lives in Pittsburgh with her cat, Nick. You can find her on twitter or Instagram @gytrashh.