Stone Yard Devotional

  ‘'God does answer prayers. Maybe not always the way we want Him to, but He does answer prayers and He does listen.''
Our unnamed narrator arrives in a strange monastery, leaving the disappointments of a strained life behind. From the very beginning, we enter a world of graveyards, gloomy days, silence mixed with peculiar sounds. A world graced with singing voices dedicated to the glory of God. And then, a strange plague follows in a land already hit by a pandemic. Mice contaminating the house of God and the people's souls. Mice that eat just as guilt and regret eat us from within.
‘'We pray for all those who will die tonight.''
The setting of the monastery is pure masterpiece. You can almost ‘hear' the silence, the sounds of the steps in the cloisters, the hymns during the Vespers. You are beyond repair if your soul doesn't find tranquillity while reading these marvellous chapters. The beautiful, serene imagery of the peace one can only find in a church often moved me to tears. For me, going to church is finding moments of true serenity and deep faith and Charlotte Wood delivers this experience to perfection via a character who claims to be a non-believer but in reality, she is anything but.
‘'A heavy spring frost this morning. Crossing the grass I made a clean track of footprints, deep green on the white spread of the lawn. It returned me to my childhood, to the sense of secret authority, imprinting one's presence into a place with those clear, sharp prints. I exist.''
Soon, we start going back and forth into the narrator's life as she confesses inappropriate behaviours, moments of cruelty and tenderness, as she asks herself what one can do to forgive, what we can do to heal the deepest wounds caused by grief, guilt and death. She is not a believer, yet her soul slowly opens to the voices that have the power to lead her closer to God.
In scenes of unbearable beauty and scenes that are extremely unsettling, Wood speaks to us about all facets of death. The unavoidable Cavalry of losing your beloved parents, the loneliness in death that even Our Lord Jesus Christ had to face, the violence towards innocents, strange accidents and suicides. And yet, death is not the final step. This is what our faith wants us to understand, as difficult as it may sound. 
In a world that tries to convince us to withdraw from Christian spirituality and bow down to the hideous, the unnatural, the satanic, in societies that do not want us to surrender our pain to God, this book helps us face the questions of forgiveness and despair, and find a refuge for all. The deep heart of our faith in Jesus.
Naturally, this novel did not win the Booker Prize. Naturally, trash like The Book of Disappearance which propagates the acts of Hamas's acts of terror and butchery is now longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Mice have long been attempted to gnaw on our faithful souls. They haven't succeeded. They will never succeed. The resilience of the narrator is an example for all of us. And like Helen, we do not betray our belief and our principles just because the modern mob has forgotten their own.  But by all means, keep bowing to the social media and their purple-haired maenads who march in favour of Muslim rapists. Much good may it do you... 
A masterpiece that should be considered a modern classic.
‘'Autumn is here. The poplars and willows long the reeks have turned their creamy yellow, and it is Ash Wednesday, and we remember that we are dust.''
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