Stone Ground Devotional is desolate and rather devastating. This is not so much a recommendation as a review; it is me needing to talk about it, not you needing to read it.

A middle age divorced atheist joins a remote nunnery in the bleak outback of Australia during the pandemic. She had been an active champion for the environment, and now she feels like she needs to disappear, and no longer participate in the destructive capitalism of the western world. Her compatriots are uninspired, and Catholicism was not flatteringly portrayed. They took in bones of a missing nun that had been discovered murdered because she defended the innocent. Only one neighbor helped them, with his backhoe, with his trunk full of food, with loads of mousetraps; he was the definition of the Christian concept of “love your neighbor,” but it came from him to them, and not from the spiritual professionals towards him.

Mostly this was about a gruesome mouse plague, infesting everything. They ran in streams of thousands across the roads, ate up the piano, the dishwasher, were in your shoes when you put them on in the morning. The chickens ate them. They ceaselessly scrabbled at your screens in the night.  There were shovel fulls– wheelbarrows full of dead ones. They put the legs of the beds in bucketfuls of water to not be sleeping with them, but in chairs they would run up their legs. All this was apparently a true depiction of a factual environmental imbalance caused by humans, now to be endured by them. It was horrible.

And interestingly, the strongest, most functional character had the hardest upbringing, with a single mother who was intermittently locked away in the mental ward, leaving her young daughter to frequently fend for herself. The kids in her Catholic school, the same one our author/narrator went to, were merciless toward her. These kids’ parents helped all sorts of invalids in the community, but did nothing to help this family.

Although there is a suicide shared of a depressed man in town ending his battle with depression, the general message here is about enduring our plagues, however hard. This unflinching version of life was very grim and soberly affecting. These nuns seem to be waiting it out, resignedly.

Here are some good bits I marked for you:

• Matisse: “All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it certain lines, or colours: if it is not religious, it does not exist. If it is not religious, it is only documentary art, anecdotal art… which is no longer art.”
• Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will… Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”
• “The forgiver may discover meaning in their suffering and understand that there is a freedom in forgiveness. This is serious work, beyond the reach of occasion or rhetoric. And it is not for any individual to urge such rigorous, such dangerous and painful moral work upon another.”
• “It is my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.”

Although this books was well acclaimed in 2024, the reviews since swing like a pendulum from 5 stars to one and back again. I’ll give it four stars. I’d tell you, regardless of its remarkable and memorable atmospheric starkness, to skip this one because of all those MICE! Argh!