Lying Awake

by Mark Salzman
Knopf
181 pp. $21

 

by Gwen Glazer

Mark Salzman’s latest novel is about many things - religion, cloistered life, poetry, euphoric states - but most of all, Lying Awake is about the power of restraint, both in Salzman’s words and in the actions of his main character, a Carmelite nun. He has written a terse, compact novel that avoids general pronouncements on the realms of medicine and faith and instead concentrates (very successfully) on the story of one particular woman.

Sister John is a poet as well as a cloistered nun. Her writing is voluminous, and her poetry has a ripple effect on her California community. Its publication brings her a measure of popularity, and also provides a chance to speak at the Vatican. But most importantly, the poetry has enabled her to understand God’s mysteries after years of feeling disconnected from her faith.

Through a series of flashbacks, Salzman traces Sister John’s difficult spiritual journey: The glimpses of her past add an unnecessary but welcome dimension to the story, enhancing its reality, almost like a shadow. Known then as Helen, Sister John was an unhappy, overweight girl who was raised by her grandparents and attended Catholic school. She studied the nuns, imagining that ‘they slept standing up in church, their hands tucked in their sleeves and their veils billowing out like tents “”

    The nuns taught the children that there were as many ways to love God as there were Christian souls, but vocations to the religious life were especially pleasing to the Lord. By the second grade, every girl had asked God for the grace of a vocation to become a nun, and every boy had announced a calling to the priesthood.

But Helen’s calling stuck and she entered the community at Carmel as a young woman. Once in the convent, though, she endured years of personal suffering - Salzman calls it ’spiritual aridity” - before the poetic visions start that would define her life as a nun. As the story is told, Salzman seamlessly weaves Sister John’s poetry as well as liturgical verses through his prose. It’s an extraordinary device, one that emulates the process of Sister John’s own thoughts. Here, Salzman describes the intensity of her disconnect from her God and community:

    Thirteen years had passed since Sister John came to Carmel, and now her heart felt squeezed dry. God thirsted, but she had nothing to offer. The Gregorian melodies, sung without harmony, sounded like dirges. Her arms ached, her back felt sore, and she was hungry. Each hour in choir was a desert to be crossed on her knees. Mirages of peace shimmered and beckoned, only to recede as her spirit approached. There was no shade, no shelter, no water.

For my days vanish like smoke; 
        my bones burn away as in a furnace.
I am withered, dried up like grass, 
        too wasted to eat my food.

In sharp contrast, after Sister John’s transformation she becomes nourished and whole. She fills notebooks with poetry, often writing late into the night; she believes that God is speaking to her through the words, and the mysteries of the universe begin to unravel on the pages. But the poetry is accompanied by ominous, debilitating headaches. As their severity increases, Sister John’s prioress insists she see a doctor at a nearby hospital.

Writing in the third person, Salzman keeps a respectful distance from Sister John, allowing the reader to follow her discoveries, unburdened by morality-laden language. His language is precise and specific - the book is a mere 181 pages - and Salzman maximizes the meaning of each word. He uses her forays out into the world to highlight the aspects of monastic life that most people find hardest to understand: the vows of poverty and obedience, the long periods of silence, the essence of - and reasons behind - cloistered life.

    In less than five minutes she had traveled from a world where the present was eternal to a place where the present moment did not seem to exist at all. People in their cars, the cars themselves, the buildings, the signs - even the sky, which was turned into a thoroughfare by all of the air traffic - looked squeezed up against an infinitesimal future, like a crowd trying to escape a burning building through a pinhole.

Sister John is eventually diagnosed with a form of epilepsy known to provoke great amounts of writing and religious fixation. She must learn to endure bodily suffering and find meaning in God’s plan for her - and decide whether to have the tumor removed, risking the loss of the source of the poetry and alienation from her faith. Her terror at the idea that the poetry might stem from a medical illness is told with heart wrenching simplicity. The gravity of the news easily could have sent a lesser author spiraling into flowery religion-speak. But the restraint Sister John shows during her monastic life is mirrored in Salzman’s words themselves. As the doctor is addressing her condition, she reflects:

Please, God, take anything, take my life

” “The results of your tests are back,” he said, “and while it might not sound like good news, I think you’ll see that it’s not so bad, either.”

    but don’t take Yourself away from me, don’t tell me I haven’t known You at all

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning God: A Biography, Jack Miles writes, “The combination of these two elements - divine access to the human heart and divine omnipotence and mystery - has remained the defining incongruity at the core of the word God as it is understood in the vernacular languages of the West.” Sister John’s miraculous understanding of this incongruity is ultimately put to a test: To undergo the surgery would mean a potential loss of understanding, but to live with the pain would mean living with the realization that the poetry and visions may not be the result of divine intervention.

The bridging of science and faith is, hundreds of years after the Enlightenment, a very controversial topic (contrary to Dorothy’s proclamation, we are, in fact, still in the same Kansas we have always been in - literally and figuratively). The challenge this controversy presents becomes crystal clear when discussing the potential reality behind mystical experiences. Lorenzo Alcabete, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., recently wrote a column in The New York Times Magazine about the difficulty distinguishing between mental illness and mystical experiences. An intern at a psychiatric hospital told Alcabete she was frustrated with using drugs to control ’socially incorrect” behavior. "If he showed up here tonight," she said, "I would drug Vincent van Gogh so that he would never paint again." 

Despite the anxiety of the social unacceptability of potential visionaries, popular culture has a long history (think It’s a Wonderful Life) of blending mystical experiences into the everyday. The writers of television programs ranging from Touched by an Angel to the X-Files, or films such as The Sixth Sense, have provided us with plenty of heroes with miraculous visions and supernatural powers. Faith, in this context, finds its own niche in the modern ’secular” world.

Sister John, however, transcends most of pop culture’s supernatural heroes; Salzman has touched on something of a universal experience in the sensitive portrayal of her character. Alcabete wrote: “[T]hough science and religion will never speak the same language, they both speak loudly, and we are left to try to translate from one to the other.” This attempt at translation is at the heart of Salzman’s novel - although the answer may not be clear, the sheer beauty and power of Lying Awake will echo through many more years of debate.

Gwen Glazer is a copy editor and freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.

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