Stone Yard Devotional

“During Lauds I found I was thinking, But how do they get anything done? All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.”

Throughout the novel, the protagonist undergoes a transformation in which she becomes more accustomed to and comfortable with life at the abbey. This scene is one of the earliest in which that transformation in her character takes place. She begins to see life at the abbey not as filled with distraction but full of purpose. She finds purpose in the work there, abandoning the distractions from her previous life.

“I find it hard to stop tears pricking my eyes, which alarms me. It is to do with being greeted warmly by a stranger, offered peace for no reason, without question. They have kind faces; warmth radiates from them.”

When the protagonist first arrives at the abbey, she is at the end of her marriage and bogged down by the misery in the world around her. She feels alienated from her life and is caught off guard by the warmth the sisters offer her. She begins to see that the community at the abbey is very different from the society she lives in.

“It returned me to my childhood, to the sense of secret authority, imprinting one’s presence into a place with those clear, sharp prints. I exist. The private, pleasurable sound of the finest layer of ice breaking beneath the weight of each step.”

One of the aspects of life at the abbey that the protagonist appreciates is the fact that her work is physical and leaves an impression. The footprints she describes here act as a metaphor for the idea of “leaving a mark” in a larger sense. Rather than working toward goals she will never see fulfilled, she relishes doing things that prove her existence. Even just making a footprint fills her with a purpose and sense of belonging. As she strips the complications of her life away, she finds meaning in what she can see and do directly around her.

“What I had meant was that it is peaceful there, between four thick stone walls, allowing yourself to rest in the coloured light.”

For the protagonist, the church on the grounds of the abbey represents what she needs most in her life: a quiet space to reflect. When she expresses this to Simone, Simone does not agree, but the protagonist knows that the church serves a great purpose. She can stay in the church, secluded from the rest of the world, and find joy in the light streaming in from the stained glass windows, which symbolizes her own experience of closing herself off from the outside world and focusing on what is in front of and around her.

“And he would drop in details of his projects—the Guinea mangroves, biodiversity financing, the rest; ‘actually making a difference’—to underline his faith, his commitment, my abdication.”

When the protagonist leaves her life for the abbey, she not only leaves her husband, but her career in environmental work as well. Her husband, however, haunts her as a ghost from both of these past lives, his limited messages seemingly written to trigger guilt. He claims that his work makes a difference, not understanding that as the protagonist changes, what she considers to be real work changes as well. She does not work to make a change in the world any longer, but rather to change herself.

“I’m used to it now, the waiting. An incomplete, unhurried emergence of understanding, sitting with questions that are sometimes never answered.”

Of the many changes that occur within the protagonist, one of the most profound is her newfound sense of patience. Before coming to the abbey, she could not handle not having answers. Now, however, as she lets that life go, her character changes to adapt to life at the abbey. Her patience with getting answers reflects a growing sense of faith, even if not religious, in her life.

“But then I knew that we were all awake, listening to the plinking of those discordant, arrhythmic piano notes in the still, dark night. It was wrong and menacing sounds, like someone drunk or ill collapsing over the keys.”

The sounds of the piano at night act as an omen to the protagonist, haunting her and warning her of something coming. It foreshadows the horror of the mouse plague as well as the uneasiness of having Sister Jenny’s remains in the good room. Most of all, however, it foreshadows the arrival of her past, in the form of Helen Parry.

“In the car this recollection came, the first time I’d thought of it since childhood. It must have been from seeing the piano lid opened yesterday, all that filth exposed, the stench released into the open at last.”

When the protagonist remembers how a predatory piano teacher was run out of town, she wonders why this incident possesses her thoughts after so many decades. The literal filth and stench from the mice inside the piano serve as a metaphor for the moral stench of this teacher’s sexually predatory behavior. This memory triggers further reflection on the prevalence of sexual violence in the world, as the protagonist considers how many female saints were killed for resisting such violence.

“I have sometimes thought it wrong of me to be so preoccupied with my mother and not my father. But at the same time I understand why: my father and I knew each other, absolutely. And I am convinced that had he lived a long life, I would never have known him more completely than I did as a child. I don’t know why that should make a difference, but it does.”

Though the protagonist loses both parents, she rarely thinks of her father. Instead, her mind wanders almost constantly to her mother, concentrating on all she did not know about the woman. The protagonist realizes that she did not know her mother, and she craves to learn more about her, recognizing The Importance of Empathy in Parent-Child Relationships.

“There’s an emerging, though unspoken, feeling that Helen Parry herself is to blame for the tension beginning to rise up here—about the bones, even about the mice—for she is a woman known to cause trouble wherever she goes.”

Helen Parry is often associated with the remains of Sister Jenny and the plague of mice. The anxiety and foreboding the sisters and protagonist feel for these different arrivals merge and become one. The result is that the protagonist feels as though she is back in her teenage years, with Helen Parry being cast aside and criticized for something out of her control. It complicates The Pursuit of Redemption for the protagonist, as she tries not to make her guilt worse with new, self-critical thoughts.

“They stood with their backs to us, erect and calm. I had a vision of the two of them poised at the edge of a vast, flat stretch of water, like a sea or a lake, that they must now find a way to cross. I hoped one would reach for the other’s hand, but they did not do that.”

The use of imagery and descriptive language in this excerpt highlights not only the protagonist’s thoughts but also the situation in which Sisters Simone and Bonaventure find themselves. The image of a large body of water symbolizes the unknown or a long journey, something each of these characters faces. For the protagonist, it is the appearance of Helen Parry, and whether she will be able to earn forgiveness. For Sister Bonaventure, it is the return of a friend and the beginning of true mourning for her. For Sister Simone, it is the unprecedented nature of this situation, and the coming fight to have Sister Jenny buried.

“I drove home in a state of gratitude and release, turning in at the gate and noticing every tree, every bend in the road, as if these things had been polished somehow in my absence, or as if a mirror, previously fogged, was now clear.”

After seeing Annette in town, the protagonist views her home in a new light, realizing how much happier she is at the abbey than she was before. The use of a simile to describe her arrival illuminates exactly how the protagonist feels. She feels as though she sees every detail of the abbey anew, as though the fog from a mirror faded. The deeper meaning of this is that she now has a better understanding of herself, seeing herself more clearly while at the abbey.

“The mice continue to worsen and Helen Parry is still here, like a trapped animal. She stalks the hallways now as well as the paddocks, almost always with earbuds dangling and a phone in her hand. There is more and more a feeling that she thinks we’re goofing off here—unlike her, ‘doing the work’ in the real world.”

Helen Parry is viewed as an antagonist for much of Stone Yard Devotional, seen from a distance and avoided. This characterization is solidified through the use of a simile to dehumanize her and describe her as a trapped animal. She “stalks” and judges the sisters, making them self-conscious of what they do at the abbey. By describing her in this way, the protagonist shows how she is kept at a distance, mysterious, as though she represents a vague threat.

“I read somewhere that Catholics think despair is the unforgiveable sin. I think they are right; it’s malign, it bleeds and spreads. Once gone, I don’t know that real hope or faith—are they the same?—can ever return.”

The protagonist describes despair as though it is a fatal injury. It is not merely a feeling, but rather something that wounds the character of a person. It bleeds out hope and spreads to all aspects of life. The protagonist felt despair in her own life, and only by coming to the abbey can she begin to heal and find forgiveness, not only for her misdeeds against Helen Parry but also for her despair.

“She was breathless with admiration for Carmel, for the sacrifice she had made. But I felt myself rear upwards when she told me this, my body rejecting the entire notion of a parent voluntarily leaving her children.”

When the protagonist learns that Sister Carmel abandoned her children to come to the abbey, her reaction is the opposite of Sister Sissy’s. Sister Sissy and many of the other sisters act as foils to the protagonist, particularly when it comes to faith. While Sissy views Carmel’s actions with admiration, as an example of extreme religious devotion, the protagonist can only react in horror. For the protagonist, the thought of losing a mother is one wrapped in pain, and she cannot imagine a mother willingly leaving her children as Carmel does.

“We dug a deep hole on the other side of the chook shed and buried poor Violet in it. For a year afterwards the patch of ground was wild with green growth.”

Violet the lamb is a symbol that represents growth and transformation, particularly through pain and tragedy. Her symbolism is strongly connected to that of compost, but her burial in this instance puts the image of growth front and center. The Monaro Plains are described as desolate, and the palette of the landscape dull. The ground above Violet’s remains, however, is green. Her death leads to new growth, and new life, demonstrating how a tragic and painful moment need not be the end of a story.

“She seemed confused, as if she had not anticipated those old women would leave this earth. Perhaps there is new understanding that the generation before her, her group of elders, has now vanished. Knowing that she has taken their place.”

For the protagonist and other characters, aging is a relevant theme in their lives. While the protagonist looks back on her relationship with her mother from a new perspective at an older age, other characters feel the passing of time differently. For Sister Simone, the deaths of the oldest sisters signify that she is now becoming one of the elders, forcing her into a new stage of her life. Simone must confront this development, which will change her relationships with the other sisters.

“I felt a kind of reverence for what had gone on. The young men and their yearning, the thrusting of the self into some new vulnerability, the willingness to be opened up—all of this seemed beautiful to me.”

Though the protagonist remembers her parents as open and accepting people, there was a time when they looked down on a religious movement sweeping through their town. When she secretly attended a meeting, she saw beauty in the group’s faith. Though the protagonist is not religious, she appreciates what religion and faith can mean to a person. In this instance, she sees the practice of faith as being vulnerable and ready to experience new things. In many ways, this is exactly what she does decades later by living at the abbey.

“I am filled with mourning for those butterflies, for all the extinctions and threats, flooded once again with the knowledge that nothing outside these abbey walls is well, and no manner of things shall be well.”

At the abbey, the protagonist finds that she can hide and forget the horrors of the world outside its walls. These butterflies, however, symbolize her anxiety for the environment and state of the world. The corpses of the butterflies evoke an image of endangered and extinct species killed for display. They represent decaying environments and climate change, and for a brief moment, they invade the relative peace the protagonist feels at the abbey.

“I think about his living out the rest of his life knowing she died without accepting his apology or granting forgiveness, and I think how that kind of regret might never leave a person.”

The protagonist often finds herself preoccupied with how people deal with regret and try to find forgiveness. When her dying friend refuses to even talk to a man seeking her forgiveness, she wonders what that man will do once she dies. He is in the midst of a 12-step program, and her forgiveness is essential to his progress. While she is alive, he always has a chance to earn her forgiveness, even if slim, but once she dies that chance will be gone. The protagonist is curious about how he will manage that.

“I drove, thinking about her words and that decision I seem to have made, in the middle of my life. Choosing disappearance, while Helen has chosen the opposite. I thought about the costs of those decisions, for each of us.”

There are many instances in the novel in which the protagonist sees herself as the opposite of Helen Parry. When Helen remarks that the protagonist wanted to disappear, the protagonist thinks of their differences in a new light. Despite both having similar interests and goals, working for environmental protection, the protagonist became overwhelmed and retreated to the abbey. Meanwhile, Helen confronts the issues she cares about head-on. Their differences place further distance between them as the protagonist still hopes to find forgiveness from her.

“As I swept it came to me that my inability to get over my parents’ deaths has been a source of lifelong shame to me. I used to think that time, adulthood, would clean it away, but no. It recedes sometimes but then it returns and I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child. The fact of grief quickly making itself known, again and again.”

The protagonist reflects on the deaths of her parents and believes that the persistence of her grief reverts her to the emotional state of a child. No matter how much growth she undergoes, and how hard she works to know her mother better, she is still the same girl inside. Her parents’ deaths teach her a lesson, showing her that time and adulthood are not enough to heal grief.

“I heard other people call them ‘angels’ and I can see why that grated, too, not miraculous but medical, intellectual, hard earned.”

At multiple points in Stone Yard Devotional, religious faith and science confront each other. At first, it is the protagonist’s discovery that epilepsy is often confused for religious fervor, and then later it is her observation that many people think of medical professionals as angels or saints. She believes that nurses and doctors do not like being described in mystical terms because it diminishes their preparation and skill, attributing their life-saving power not to hard work but to divine intervention.