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Dark Night of the Soul. The life of contemplation has its occupational diseases. Sisters sometimes suffer shattering doubts about the genuineness of their vocation, or an onslaught of "scrupulosity"—obsession with insignificant imperfections that begin to loom like mortal sins. Most agonizing of all is spiritual dryness, analyzed by St. John of the Cross in his book, The Dark Night of the Soul. Without any apparent cause, all the warm joy and pleasure that the religious normally finds in prayer and the monastic routine suddenly disappears. As one contemporary has described it: "The entire spiritual world seems meaningless and unreal; even one's own most vivid spiritual experiences fade out like half-forgotten dreams. One becomes keenly, sometimes agonizingly aware of everything prosaic: heat, cold, stuffy rooms . . . excessive weariness, the irritation of the heavy, uncomfortable garments . . . other people's maddening 'little ways'; the 'sinking feeling' and depression that are inseparable from fasting: the appalling monotony of the rule-imposed routine . . ."
Infractions of the rule, in letter or spirit, are inevitable, and different orders have different ways of dealing with them. Carmelites have a weekly "Chapter of Faults," at which the monitress is honor-bound to report all lapses observed during the past week: "In charity I accuse Sister—of the fault of doing . . ." This is considered a valued opportunity to practice humility. Sisters may also publicly accuse themselves of their own faults (as they do at Maryknoll) and accept appropriate penances from the Mother Prioress.
Corporeal penances, such as hair shirts or scourging, are practiced today only in the strictest orders, though Carmelites sometimes make and sell both hair shirts and scourges to priests. They themselves still subdue their bodies with whips. Writes Mother Catherine Thomas: "In Carmel, when we are inflicting this penance upon ourselves, we have more than our own bodies and our own souls in mind. It is true that we accompany the flagellation with the chanting of the psalm Miserere for our own sins; but we also recite prayers at this time for the exaltation of the church, for peace and concord on earth, for our benefactors, for the souls in Purgatory, for those in the state of sin, and for those in captivity."
The Walled Town. This is the life of Mary, the cloistered life the world does not see, and it is part of the plan of Maryknoll that its busy Martha body recognizes its dependence on what the sisters call the convent's "hidden heart." For the apparent separation (and even conflict) between activity and adoration that seems to bifurcate Christianity is not real. Many great figures of the church, beginning with St. Paul, have combined both elements without conflict. "Laborare est orare," said St. Benedict (work is prayer). The Maryknoll sister hacking a kitchen garden out of the Bolivian jungle is living a prayer. And prayer is work. The cloistered contemplative rising at midnight to sing the psalms of the Divine Office is working for her fellow men—in Bolivia or The Bronx—whom she may never see. One prayer without the other would fall to the ground.