Stone Yard Devotional
“Our Simone once took me to task over my ‘sneering’ about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn’t even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous."
The story follows an unnamed narrator in her late 50s or 60s who abruptly abandons her marriage, her social circles, and her decades-long career as a wildlife conservationist in Sydney. Burned out by the "inescapable imperative to generate garbage" and paralyzed by climate despair—the agonizing realization that her lifelong efforts to protect the planet have failed to halt its destruction—she flees.
She takes refuge in a small, cloistered Catholic convent hidden away on the stark, dry plains of the Monaro region in rural New South Wales, near her childhood home. Crucially, the narrator is a staunch atheist. She has no desire for religious conversion, nor does she know how to pray. Yet, she finds a profound, radical comfort in the passivity, absolute silence, and strict liturgical labor of the nuns. What the sisters call prayer, she simply calls thinking.
I appreciated the author's ability to maintain tension in a book where "not all that much happens, yet worlds are revealed." From the first page, I wondered what kind of book this was. Wood explicitly explores "action as the antidote to despair," contrasting the unusual activism of Helen Parry with the quiet, structural, day-to-day "habitual kindness" practiced by the cloistered nuns. By the end of the book I just wanted to return to the beginning and reread it. It was that good.
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