Stella's search for a religious vocation

Stella's search for a religious vocation is both a spiritual inquiry and a practical attempt to imagine a different life. Drawn to the Begijnhof in Amsterdam, she asks about a women’s community where she might live with purpose and independence; the age limit and waiting list close that particular path. Yet the search does not end with admission denied: it brings into focus her commitment to prayer and charity, her dissatisfaction with life as it is, and the possibility that her marriage to Gerry might continue only on changed terms.

The life she wants to change

Stella has spent much of her life organising the needs of other people. She chairs the residents’ association in her tenement, serves as a Eucharistic minister in her parish, arranges jumble sales and sales of work, and has bought and sold flats for her son, Michael Gilmore. Gerry calls her his “transport captain”: she can plan a complicated journey, book hotels, contact the people they will meet, and picture the whole route before they leave home. Her university degrees and record of taking on responsibilities sharpen, rather than resolve, her question about whether she can stand up for herself. In the privacy of a hotel bath, she rehearses different ways of telling Gerry what she wants. The possibility of leaving seems almost impossible, but it is no longer unthinkable.

Her desire is not prompted by another romantic attachment. With both sets of parents dead and Michael Gilmore making a life with his family in Canada, she sees fewer people who would need to be told or cared for directly. What troubles her is Gerry’s continuing drinking: if he intends to go on living in that fashion, she would rather live elsewhere. She imagines the Begijnhof as a possible sanctuary, but the question beneath the plan is broader: how should the remaining time of her life be used? She tells Gerry that she is tired of their way of living, feels aimless, and wants to do something better with the time left to her. The absence of a role for her, as she sees it, is intensified by the distance from her only grandchild and the prospect that there may not be more grandchildren.

Finding the Begijnhof

On a cold, wet morning in Amsterdam, Stella follows the marked route in her guide but struggles to make sense of the canals and distances. She passes the entrance more than once before finding the brick archway. Its dark passage leads into a quiet enclosed court, and the transition from street noise to the stillness inside feels to her like entering the world anew. The ring of old houses turns inward around the green, making the place seem sheltered from the city. Sparrows call in the enclosure. The physical passage into the court gives her search a vivid threshold: she has come to a place that feels set apart from ordinary life, and she experiences it as an opening into a possible new self.

She makes enquiries at a doorway near the passage. When Gerry asks what they concern, she describes them as matters of life and death, then explains that the person she wants to speak with is away until Monday. The answer commits them to remaining in Amsterdam long enough for her to return. Later, when Gerry asks what she wants from the woman, Stella does not claim that the Begijnhof holds ready-made answers. She says the important questions are how to live well and how best to live their lives; those are questions each person must answer for themselves. She wants to recover a word from her childhood, “devout,” and to live more devoutly. For her, that means charity and prayer. She is exploring rather than announcing a settled decision, and recognises that an answer might lead to harder questions.

Religious practice and vocation

Stella’s search grows out of religious practices already woven into her life. Gerry glimpses her praying at the hotel: kneeling beside her side of the bed in a white nightdress, hands joined, she is so absorbed that he initially thinks she has dropped something. He stops himself from making a joke. They usually go to bed at different times, and he had not realised that she still prayed in this way. Her nightly prayer follows a framework that keeps her from drifting: she remembers her loved ones across the family, gives thanks for her life and survival, and asks to be held in God’s care. Prayer also includes her parents and siblings, and has widened to embrace refugees, the oppressed, and people fleeing war. She regards these repeated prayers as spiritual tidying, a morning-and-night practice through which she puts the world to rites.

Her service at Christmas Mass offers another view of that vocation as something practised rather than merely contemplated. Gerry remembers her telling him that she and Sister Francis were Eucharistic ministers that night. Stella leaves his side, joins the nun at the altar, and helps distribute communion from a gold chalice. Afterward she returns to her seat, kneels, and covers her face with her hands. Gerry sees her as someone he does not fully know, and wonders whether she is upset about being separated from Michael Gilmore and her grandchild at Christmas. The scene links public religious service with private distress: Stella can minister to others and still carry sorrow that Gerry does not know how to approach.

These established forms of devotion do not settle what she is seeking. The community at the Begijnhof represents, for Stella, a way of combining a place of her own with religious purpose. She is careful to distinguish it from a convent: women can live there without seclusion and without taking a vow of poverty. Her appointment is with the Spiritual Director, whose title she herself offers uncertainly. The uncertainty matters. Stella is not claiming to have discovered a fixed calling; she is testing whether a communal form of life might answer her questions about prayer, charity, and usefulness.

The closed door and the changed prospect

The answer she receives is that the sisterhood remains real, but its religious character has largely disappeared. Women may still live at the Begijnhof, yet the waiting list is very long—perhaps five years or more. Eligibility requires a woman to live alone, to be between thirty and sixty-five, and to be able to afford the residence. Stella sits with the information, her face sagging, then concludes that she is too old. The obstacle is not simply a spiritual refusal: a residence with formal practical criteria cannot accommodate her because of her age and the delay. The place that seemed to offer sanctuary thus reveals the limits of the life she had imagined there.

The disappointment makes the question of separation more concrete, not less. Stella begins to imagine selling the tenement flat and buying two small flats, one for herself with a garden. She also catches herself organising Gerry’s future—thinking about his books and CDs, his cooking, and where he might find a convenient home—and recognises that the habit of looking after him persists even as she considers leaving. Her fears about age and memory add urgency to the search. Red marks on her thighs turn out to be the prints of her elbows from weeping; the small physical trace leads her from the immediate disappointment into memories of childhood, school distinctions, and her son’s birth. She worries about the loss of memory she has seen in her mother and grandmother, and keeps up crosswords as a form of mental exercise. A religious community was one possible answer to the pressure of time, but the underlying need to choose how to live remains.

At the airport, after Stella has abandoned the prospect of joining an all-female religious collective, she and Gerry face the question of their shared home instead. She tells him that if he is as good as his word about giving up drinking, they may not have to sell the flat. Her statement makes the future conditional: the marriage may continue, but not unchanged and not without Gerry’s commitment to sobriety. He answers, “All shall be well,” and repeats, “And all shall be well.” Stella prompts him with a small pedalling gesture, suggesting that the phrase has not yet reached its end. The exchange does not grant her the community she sought or resolve every difficulty. It does show how the search has altered the terms of possibility: her vocation is no longer confined to entering the Begijnhof, and the life ahead depends on whether devotion, independence, and mutual obligation can be practised at home.