Chapter 72 Holy Arousal

• Sister Divine took her faith very seriously. The Lord God had given everything, His love, His dignity and His life, for His people and it was only right that she should give up everything for Him in return. And so she had chosen sisterhood in the Convent of the Blessed Mary, in the very ascetic order of the Damascene Nuns.
• Here there were no soft options in her dedication to her faith. Her possessions were left behind in the secular world beyond. Her hair was shaved off her head and off her body. And she was bereft of even the venal vanity of clothing. In this way, the Damascene sisters had nothing between themselves and the Love of the Jesus Christ.
• There was no privacy in the convent. She shared her bare cell with a single mattress and Sister Admonition, another nun who had abandoned the temptations of the Godless world beyond, along with her hair and clothes. Her days were spent, as were the days of all the nuns, in prayer and in the service of the convent, which required all its nuns to work so that the convent would be rewarded by the remuneration for their labours otherwise owed to the material world and which permitted the convent to continue to exist buoyed in Godly contemplation amidst the vice and corruption of the world outside.