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A review of Lying Awake

by Mark Salzman

A novel about spiritual gifts, illness, faith and the choices of ordinary life in a Carmelite monastery.

Reviewed by: Joan Prefontaine
About Joan Prefontaine

Lying Awake In this elegant and rich story, set in a Carmelite monastery outside Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Sister John of the Cross faces a dilemma. She must decide whether to try to cure her debilitating headaches, even though she knows that the prescribed medical treatment will likely also put an end to her intense mystical revelations--experiences she has come to rely on, and look forward to, as an indicator of her flourishing religious life.

Mark Salzman, a lucid and exacting writer, describes Sister John's visions in language that is vivid but never trite or sentimental. For instance, he uses images of flame and radiance to suggest the power and immediacy of what falls upon her mind (before she is able to record her experience): "More luminous than any sun, transcending visibility, the flare consumed everything, it lit up all of existence. In this radiance she could see forever, and everywhere she looked, she saw God's love. As soon as she could move again, she opened her notebook and began writing."

Sister John's spiritual gifts and writings have helped the other nuns understand the rewards of devotion. Now she wonders. If she loses her ability to transcend ordinary awareness, to enter God's radiant presence with a grateful and full heart, will she lose her faith as well? Will she lose the respect and admiration of her fellow supplicants? Are her visions genuine, a sign of being in God's favor (as she would like to think), or merely a result of having some sort of brain dysfunction? Are her ecstatic moments, in fact, some sort of glorified ego-trip--as her parish priest, Father Aaron, suggests?

Sister John's diagnosis of temporal-lobe epilepsy is not a new one, she discovers, for those with visionary or highly creative temperaments. From the reading materials her doctor gives her, she notes that Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Proust, Socrates, Saint Paul and Saint Teresa of Avila all may have had similar ailments and concerns. (Teresa had warned against seeking holiness through illness, and yet she also called illness her greatest teacher.) By putting Sister John's situation into a much larger context, Salzman causes his readers to speculate about the nature of creative and religious experience, as well as about the meaning of infirmity and dis-ease.

As Sister John makes up her mind what to do, Salzman moves gracefully through the daily prayers, liturgies and routine gatherings of the monastery, stepping mindfully across the shadowy, meditative spaces with their century-old traditions and close, often psychologically charged atmospheres. He brings alive a tangible longing for the Divine that inhabits such a place ("As the deer longs for running streams, so my soul longs for you, O God"). It's enough to make readers want to stop for a moment, to listen to the ringing of the Carmelite bell, summoning people to mid-day or evening prayer, and wonder about the state of their own souls.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Lying Awake

Copyright © by Joan Prefontaine, 2003

Reviewed by Joan Prefontaine:
-- The Secret Life of Dust - by Hannah Holmes
-- Lying Awake: - by Mark Salzman
-- The Art & Craft of Playwriting - by Jeffrey Hatcher
-- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - by Stephen King
-- Earth Prayers From Around the World - Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
-- The Beauty of the Beast - Selected by Jack Prelutsky, Illustrated by Meilo So
-- The Intimate Merton - Edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo
-- Plainsong - by Kent Haruf
-- The Stone Diaries - by Carol Shields
-- City of God - by E. L. Doctorow









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