One of the paradoxes of monastic life is that those who try to leave the world are often pursued by it. Take Thomas Merton, who struggled for years to make a career as a writer in New York, only to become a best-selling author after he joined a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It’s been almost seventy years since Merton detailed his journey to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in “The Seven Storey Mountain”; like Simeon Stylites atop his fifth-century pillar, he sought solitude but attracted followers.
That paradox animates Abbie Reese’s new book “Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns.” For six years, Reese, an independent scholar and artist, visited the twenty women of Corpus Christi Monastery of the Poor Clare Colettine in Rockford, Illinois, recording their oral histories and documenting their routines of labor and prayer, worship and meditation, bell ringing and meal taking. “Dedicated to God” is the fruit of her labor. In the book, thematic chapters and individual oral histories are punctuated by her simple, striking photographs of the nuns in their cloistered community.
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