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for losing your place in the prayers, but I suspect that learning a quiet-hearted acceptance of others ‘flaws’ will serve best as both your penance and your cure together.” She had smiled. “I would tell you, as our Lord told the adulteress, to go and do no more sin, as if that would settle your trouble, but I know, as surely our Lord knew, that it isn’t as simple as that.”
    Unable to keep her dismay to herself, Frevisse had exclaimed, “No, it isn’t!” She had wanted Domina Edith to somehow make things better, not lay a task on her that she had instantly and deeply doubted she could do.
    But very quietly Domina Edith had said, “Child, it’s not in having our own way in everything that we come to God. It’s in giving up ourselves that we free our souls to grow.”
    “I’ve never understood…” Frevisse had started but found herself already discouraged enough that she had been unable even to finish the sentence.
    Gently, Domina Edith had said, “It’s among the hardest of things to understand. We’re too wrapped and led by our bodies and our thoughts to understand easily the freedom there is in going free of both our body’s and our mind’s demands. Nor is it an effort you will succeed at once and be done with.” She had smiled. “Not unless you become a saint. Although I gather holiness doesn’t always sit easily on even a saint. No, child, you will not find this quest an easy one, unless by God’s mercy you are particularly blessed.”
    Frevisse had not been particularly blessed. With more failures than a few in her long struggle toward quiet-hearted acceptance, there were times when she did not feel blessed at all; but in those times what helped the most was the last thing Domina Edith had said that day. After bidding her to rise and making a small, dismissing movement of one hand, she had said while Frevisse curtsied to her, “Remember, too, when next your impatience rises, that you don’t know how well or ill your own voice accords among your sisters. You may be as much a trial to someone of them as Dame Emma is to you.”
    These years later, Frevisse could laugh at how that thought had startled her young self, but then it had discomforted her enough to let her begin the long work of learning that Domina Edith had set her. And a long learning it was, nor yet completed, she feared. One thing she had come to understand, though, was that holiness need not include outward loveliness at prayer. For an instance, Dame Thomasine was more removed from the world and probably closer to God than anyone Frevisse had ever known; it had not made difference to her thin and reedy voice in the Offices. But with her wider understanding, Frevisse had come to accept—which was a step further than merely knowing—that all the nuns’ voices were part of the pattern of prayer that was the heart of the priory’s reason to be at all, and it had been with an unexpected ache this Lent that Frevisse found she missed the part that had been Dame Emma’s, now that Dame Emma was no longer with them but buried in a quiet grave in the nunnery’s orchard.
    Domina Edith had been right—she was larger souled for being less wedded to demanding how the world should be for her.
    At least she hoped she was larger souled.
    But if nothing else, she was able now, most of the time, to give herself up fully to the Offices’ prayers and psalms, to the heart-easing, mind-lifting pleasure of letting go the world’s weight and going into mindfulness of all there was beyond the passing matters of every day. As she and the others were now saying, “ Domine, non superbit cor meum…Immo composui et pacavi animam meam. Sicut parvulus in gremio matris suae; ita in me est anima mea.” Lord, my heart is not prideful…Rather I have settled and quieted my soul. As a little child on the lap of his mother, so in me is my soul.
    Here was the reason for all else. All the duties and rules and limits of her life were for this—these times of