Religious vocation and a useful life

Stella’s search for a religious vocation is an effort to make her life more devout, useful, and responsive to other people’s needs, not simply an attempt to enter a religious institution. Her private prayers and service at Mass show that faith already shapes her daily practice; her visit to the Begijnhof tests whether that practice can become a new form of life. The answer is painful: the women’s community remains real, but its religious character has largely disappeared, and age rules exclude her. The failed application forces Stella to reconsider what a vocation might mean and what changes she can still make in her life with Gerry.

A vocation rooted in daily practice

Stella’s religious life is visible in the private routine Gerry happens to witness in their hotel room. Through a mirror, he sees her kneeling beside the bed in her white nightdress, hands joined, and stops himself from interrupting with a joke. At home they usually go to bed at different times, so he has not known that she still prays. Her practice is intimate and disciplined: a mantra keeps her attention from wandering as she remembers family members, including relatives living far away, and gives thanks for her life and survival.

Prayer also binds ordinary time to memory. Stella recalls her father’s body laid out in the front room, with people staying so that he would not be alone; his hands were tied with a rosary. Later, a man sang “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland” in the kitchen. Her nightly prayer resembles checking on a child before sleep, but its reach extends beyond her family to refugees and people fleeing war. She recognizes that these repeated prayers can become spiritual tidying, a way of putting the world to rites morning and night. The distinction matters: the routine offers steadiness, but Stella wants a life in which devotion also becomes active service.

From devotion to useful work

When Gerry asks about her visit to a woman at the Begijnhof, Stella says she is tired of living as they do and raises questions about how to live well. She does not expect Gerry to answer them for her. What she seeks, she explains, is a more devout life involving charity and prayer. Her word for this aspiration is devout, a term from her childhood that she feels has fallen out of use. She is exploring rather than claiming to have found a settled answer.

The aspiration has a longer history. About thirty years earlier, during a teachers’ conference, Stella heard about the Beguines and was intrigued, though there was then no urgency. Now time itself supplies the urgency. She wants a life that is spiritual and useful, and imagines making even a small contribution to a better world. Her concern also includes women’s place in the Catholic Church. At tea with Kathleen Walsh, Stella recalls a nun’s joke about future meetings of the bishops: first with their wives, then with their husbands. The joke makes institutional exclusion visible without displacing Stella’s more personal question of how to live faithfully.

Her religious seriousness is also witnessed in the memory of Christmas Mass. Gerry remembers taking a small nightcap, diluted with water, while trying to understand why he was thinking about Stella differently. He recalls her telling him that she and Sister Francis were Eucharistic ministers. Stella leaves him, walks up the side aisle, receives communion with the nun, and then helps distribute hosts from a gold chalice. Watching her stoop toward each person, Gerry sees her as both changed by age and not fully known to him. When she returns to her seat and puts her face in her hands, he hears her breath catch. Her participation makes religious service concrete, even as Gerry remains an observer, uncertain what her tears mean.

The Begijnhof and its limits

Stella’s inquiry moves from the woman at the office, Hennie, to Kathleen, a resident who offers to show her where she lives. Stella asks how someone might apply to become part of the community and live there. In a later conversation with Kathleen, she again describes her purpose as investigating the place, the order, and its way of life. Kathleen asks why she wants to join and what makes the matter urgent; Stella answers that time is the reason. Her aim is not merely a room but a spiritual and useful existence.

Kathleen clarifies that the sisterhood is real and includes many admirable people, but that the religious element has largely vanished. Women can still live there, though the waiting list is very long. The residence has firm conditions: applicants must be women prepared to live by themselves, between thirty and sixty-five, and able to afford it. The wait may be five years or more. Stella takes in the answer and concludes that she is too old. The obstacle is not presented as a judgment that she is too old to believe or practise religion; she is too old for this particular organization’s eligibility rules.

The woman in charge, Astrid Hoogendorp, confirms the practical limits. She speaks plainly, and Stella understands that the Begijnhof is now a community of independent women rather than a religious order. Accommodation is treated as a real-estate transaction governed by supply and demand, not as entry into a spiritual institution. The gap between Stella’s hope and the institution’s present form is therefore not only a matter of waiting: the vocation she imagined is no longer available there in the way she had understood it.

Rejection, age, and the life that remains

After the meeting, Stella weeps alone in an airport toilet, trying not to be heard by the women in the neighboring cubicles. She judges the plan she had constructed to be a dream and feels that her attempt to repay a spiritual debt has failed. The encounter with Astrid has confirmed Kathleen’s account, while Stella has not disclosed what happened to her in Belfast. The rules have closed one path without resolving the need that led her there: she still wants to live her Catholicism through kindness, generosity, justice, and humility.

The disappointment sharpens her awareness of age and memory. Sitting on the toilet, she notices two round red marks on her thighs and realizes they are the impressions of her elbows where she had leaned while crying. The marks send her back to childhood memories, including her examination certificate and the card and wrist tag kept for Baby Gilmore. A single thought can carry her across sixty years, while other periods seem to have vanished. She keeps up with crosswords as a form of mental exercise, fearing the loss of memory she witnessed in her mother and grandmother. She also observes that Gerry forgets meals and social engagements, sometimes appearing unshaven and poorly dressed at events she has prepared for. These concerns make time more than an abstract reason for urgency: it is also a question of what each of them may lose and how much of their remaining life they can shape.

Stella’s thoughts turn from admission to the Begijnhof toward a possible life apart from Gerry. If his drinking continues, she thinks, they could sell their tenement flat and buy two small flats; hers would need a garden. Even as she imagines separation, she catches herself organizing Gerry’s future—his books and CDs, his meals, and the convenience of living near Marks & Spencer. The habit exposes the care embedded in their relationship, but also the burden of continuing to manage him. Her image of relationships as involving a flower and a gardener, one who works and one who displays, gives that imbalance a memorable form.

Vocation beyond the institution

Stella’s search does not end with a new religious home. It changes the question from whether she can join a community to whether she can make a useful and spiritually serious life under the conditions she has actually been given. Her understanding of faith combines repeated prayer with an ethical desire to contribute; institutional rejection cannot undo the practices or values that preceded the application. Nor does the disappointment instantly settle the marriage crisis. Stella considers living independently, while Gerry’s drinking remains the condition attached to whether the flat must be sold.

At the airport, when Stella says that an all-female religious collective is no longer an option, she tells Gerry that the place may not have to be sold if he keeps his word about giving up drinking. Gerry answers, “All shall be well,” and, when she asks him to say it again, repeats, “And all shall be well.” The words offer neither a new institution nor proof that the problem is solved. They give the couple a shared phrase at a moment when Stella’s imagined vocation has collapsed and another possible future depends on Gerry’s promise. The search has exposed both the limits imposed by age and the possibility that useful, committed life may still have to be made through choices within their relationship.