Our Lady of Grace in the Snow

Peter Manseau, The Maiden of All Our Desires: a Novel

The distant convent at Gaerdegen has a secret. The Benedictine sisters gather to work and pray like mendicants throughout Christendom for centuries. But between their ancient prayers, they possess a more intimate connection with God. Mother Ursula, their chapter’s founder, bequeathed them a substantial trove of mystical insight. In a world still reeling from the Black Death, Mother Ursula’s words hint at secrets hiding behind Christian mortality.

The dust-flap synopsis on Peter Manseau’s eleventh book, and second novel, seems to promise something similar to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A distant abbey, a heretical book, a secret the episcopate will move mountains to keep hidden. But Manseau offers a different book. It’s much more intimate and humane, a portrait of sinners trying, where their limited vision permits, to glimpse the purpose tying their lives together.

Mother John, the convent’s second abbess, has spent twenty years preserving Mother Ursula’s vision of prayer, work, and simplicity. Under pressure from other convents, which increasingly run like businesses, Mother John preserves her abbey’s traditions, and personally sweeps the cloisters daily. But even her sisters don’t know her secret: she joined the convent to flee her family obligations, and didn’t really convert until spending years inside the convent.

Father Francis, the abbey priest, resents his posting. Exiled to Gaerdegen to conceal his indiscretions, he feels slighted, a thinker and craftsman who could’ve brought Christ to the masses. But his solemn words conceal his unwillingness to own his past transgressions. His sins, both of commission and of omission, leave a trail of destruction, which renders him distrustful. He foresees destruction in the plague-ravaged land, with nothing to offer but fear.

On one level, this novel describes one day within Gaerdegen. As the sisters await a vindictive bishop, who promises a church trial to expunge veneration of Mother Ursula, a blizzard descends. Trapped in close proximity, the sisters and their resentful, authoritarian priest begin voicing old resentments, and engaging in political posturing. Nothing less than the future of their honored abbey hangs in the balance.

Peter Manseau

But while this surface story unfolds, the characters travel back along the paths that brought them here. Father Francis remembers the entirely human passions, the capacity for love, that defined his early priesthood. Francis created art from the thickly forested land around them, but also from his personal relationships within the community. When those relationships embarrass the bishop, Francis finds himself exiled, unable to either preach or practice his art.

At Gaerdegen, Francis clashes with Mother Ursula. He finds a woman capable of great holiness, but also great rage. As the plague decimates the cities, leaving many sisters with no earthly family, Francis and Ursula have very different ways of facing this tribulation. Both visions are founded in a mix of Christianity and hard experience. Yet, faced with the same evidence, these two professional holy people reach completely opposite conclusions.

Manseau mostly avoids truth claims about the religious controversies driving his characters. A professional scholar of religion, he’s written extensively about the collision between faith and doubt before, and apparently has few ready-made solutions. Instead, he foregrounds the personalities, the lifetime of influences that steer how people of open hearts and mystical souls can disagree so wholeheartedly. Manseau dares ask: what if nobody is right? Or wrong?

To these characters, words have power. Encouraging homilies written years ago by thoughtful mentors can change the course of lives. Words spoken in anger create clefts not easily mended. Worst of all, words spoken carelessly can have consequences far beyond the moment. Words give true believers courage against a world turned grim and bloody, while powerful people fear the authority words of love can have.

It’s tempting to find contemporary references in Manseau’s heavily symbolic story. Metaphors of money and disease, of walls and doors, seem timely, and that probably isn’t coincidental. But Manseau isn’t talking about us, or not only about us. His characters, like his readers, keep seeking beauty and certainty in a world driven by fear and doubt. They never entirely find it, but maybe the seeking matters more than the finding.

Again, the synopsis implies a political thriller in a time of historic uncertainty. But the actual book is more gripping simply because it’s driven by honesty. Good people of upright character wonder which anointed leader to trust. What happens when two incompatible choices, both supported by God, force us to pick sides? Maybe it’s better to do something, even if it’s wrong, than to get lost in philosophy.