We don’t often review novels here, but perhaps we should more often. Many of us turn to novels for companionship and vision, and the reading experience can be just as spiritual as with a book of “spirituality.” The good novelist doesn’t tell us what to do or think but offers a world and characters among whom we may find a part of ourselves.
This novel feels like an invitation to see the world as full of love and connections. It is also a paean to how relationships once were, before we all became so distracted.
Little Hours is of a sub-genre called the epistolary novel: telling its story through correspondence between the characters. For other examples, think of bestsellers The Color Purple, by Alice Walker; White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga; and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
It opens with a first letter from Miriam, a 42-year-old perhaps unhappily married woman with two teenage children, to the Sisters of St. Hildegard of Bingen, a religious community in Weymouth, Massachusetts, on Boston’s South Shore. Miriam writes innocently, “Today I got thinking that I’m like a religious Sister, working and praying through each day in a big cycle that seems ridiculously endless. But then I don’t know too much about nuns.” She also says that she’s a Baptist, interested in Catholic things, and would love to visit them one day, but then, “what do I do about my husband?”
Sr. Athanasius writes immediately back, on behalf of the religious community, a lengthy letter of responses to Miriam’s questions. The Sister anticipates what lies behind some of Miriam’s questioning, as well, offering advice relevant for anyone: “At various and frequent points in our lives we all necessarily question our places in the world.”
Also, since Miriam mentioned in that first letter having purchased a book written by the Sisters on the subject of identifying small birds (that’s how Miriam found out about the community), Sr. Athanasius offered: “We spend many hours in the stone chambers of our chapel, chanting the psalms and hearing the birds respond in kind from the outside. Praying with our small sisters, the birds, draws a heart close to our Lord as we watch the creatures live in simple praise.”
Their correspondence continues for nearly two years, as Sr. A. along the way introduces Miriam to a dozen or so of her fellow Sisters, each with particularities and passions, whether for owls, the Holy Ghost, baking, bird migration, St. Frances de Sales, healthcare, or spring training in baseball. We don’t witness firsthand more of Miriam’s letters, but we know the questions she’s asking by how Sr. A. writes back, over and over again, with increasing affection and attention.
For instance, we hear Miriam asking about pain and suffering in her life, in Sr. A.’s response: “In this monastery there is little screaming, but Miriam, oh, screaming must be done. For me, the psalms, no matter how quietly I pray them, house my anger, my dread, my most awful moments…. They form the private interior place of great yellings at God.”
Little Hours — the title refers to the prayer times that nuns and monks in Christian monasteries observe in the quiet middle of every day — is a book to remind us all of the spirituality of patience, doubt, hope, and longing. This novel is a spirituality of no answers. Or, a spirituality of questions, as when Sr. A. responds to Miriam: “And what of those who feel they have lost their way? I wonder if this could be a way God calls someone, to look over the same landscape again and again, and then finally notice the stirring and quick flight of the yellow warbler? God knows.”
