It is not easy to catch the feminine soul up to its depth; neither is it easy to enter her mysterious and interior circle, the “spiritual” circle, in a strict sense (namely of the Holy Spirit) that moves her to the choice of religious life, even in its radical form. Well, the Romance by Luciano Marigo, La stanza del cuore, (Editor Santi Quaranta, Treviso 22004) succeeds in doing it, and very well. Allow me to add that it is also plausible, in the personages, events, lights and shadows of a hidden life, which is not too much different from the life lived outside.

The actress young aspirant

The plot is easily exposed: a monastery, a saint for the publicity. –How to subtract oneself from the fascination of having nourished at least one saint in one’s own monastery?- and, today, of making a film that circulates the event and the religious life with it, its rhythms, its ideal, its silences, its imperious and very normal modalities, incomprehensible from outside, internally taken for granted and obvious?

If this inventive track –the environment of a film- places us into today’s circle, this happens even more reasonably because of the presumed or foreseen protagonist, Cristiana. She is a young woman that should personify the saint and that for this reason knocks at the door of the monastery to live the life of the nuns closer, and thus to enter the personage. The fact is that this very young woman, who with a tiny trick increases her age, is full of problems.

The romance opens narrating the encounter of Cristiana with Simon, a picturesque psychoanalyst who, if she collaborates, should draw her out of her many problems, above all, out of anorexia.  Yes, our protagonist has a perverse relation with the food and the reason soon emerges, which is the worst relation with her mother and father, obviously separated and in conflict. This fosters her desire of living her life, even erroneously, by following the inspiration of the moment; lastly her passion for recitation (and for the stage director). Summing up, a modern girl should personify the saint, a girl full of unsolved problems and far not only from holiness, but also from any proximity to the religious life.

Her eccentric interior world enters immediately in conflict with the monastic world, especially because on one side –though with some doubt- there is the will of sponsoring Sr. Crucified and her holiness; on the other hand –that of Cristiana- there is only the exigency of understanding the gestures that before the projector may render the personage plausible. Therefore, there is the maternal and wise understanding of the prioress (Cristiana feels her eyes reading within her). She feels also the gazes of the nuns, each in its kind, with the experience of the protagonist, shut up like a hedgehog into her problems, desirous only of hiding them and anyhow committed to see that those strange interlocutors may break her within.  

It is obvious, however, that to give her the consent of acquiring the instruments to personify the saint, compels the community to some dispensations. For instance: to eat in the monastic refectory; to use a monastic cell, instead of a guest room; to have at her side a very young nun, a novice that penetrates her immediately, though rejected beyond the barrier that the actress-aspirant interposes. To the angry and impertinent question, “What is its sense?” –Cristiana refers to religious life- the young nun answers, “The first thing that you must keep in mind is that faith is a great love” (page 81).

The testimony of a drama

The clou of the event is the death of Sr. Benedict, the last nun that could witness to the holiness of Sr. Crucified, but who has been indeed the most passionate witness. Cristiana is unwillingly involved in her agony, with well imaginable reactions: on one side the horror of death to which she assists for the first time; on the other side the jargon, the living it even in its paradoxes show a very different world to her from the one she is used to and that shakes her deeply. For instance, thinking of death as the re-joining of two spouses who celebrated their wedding by proxy and who will meet for the first time, with all the emotion implied in coming finally to know one’s own companion of life, denied for a long time or only imagined.

Sr. Benedict asks and obtains to reach the stable by the wheel chair on which Sr. Crucified, after an accident, had spent her entire life. The drama of which she was the unique witness took place there.

Sr. Crucified had become a nun more because of an elitist reasoning, namely to choose the best part, than because of a true falling in love. She was a young woman who liked study and had committed herself to a university research; in the monastery, she continued her loved studies, editing valuable essays and pretending to be “a saint”, that is, by living the rules of the chosen life with her head more than with her heart. Paradoxically, however, this formal holiness, completely detached from true holiness, led her to a desperate crisis after hardly five years. She wanted to go to the stable to end her days, without succeeding in it, because of the sudden arrival of Sr. Benedict. This picked her up agonising –she had fallen from the loft before hanging herself- and, after effacing every trace of the attempted suicide, she told everybody that she had gone there in search of a hen, which had disappeared from several days.

Actually, in the “experience”  of her infirmity and later on of paralysis, Sr. Crucified encounters the Beloved and enters the “room of the heart” – “The Lord came to seek me at the boundary between life and death; in that awful twilight He seduced me once more (….). The wheel chair on which I spend my days is the sweet and powerful hand of the Lord that supports me” (page 154) -. She lives and experiences, (no longer because of a voluntary assumption of forms, which she had stubbornly observed), the true sense of her choice. From this moment, her holiness becomes real and not only external. In other words, this is the moment of her conversion, of her living openly without nets, without barriers, without set up schemes, in the loving presence of her Spouse.   

The ineffable revealed secret

Sr. Benedict will share this secret, the attempted suicide, with the “two” Sisters Crucified, whom she asks to accompany her during her last hours of life. The two sisters Crucified are the young novice, who received this name when she entered the monastery, and the young actress, that  must personify the saint.

This “secret” unknown to everybody –it will be revealed after the funerals of Sr. Benedict, starting from a letter written by the saint – is sensed by some nuns scarcely inclined to assess, in the sense of holiness, the event of the paralytic nun. These nuns believe that she feigned a false holiness.

This conflict between those who were favourable and those who were not, supported also by ecclesiastical authoritative figures, finishes by giving up the cinematograph project. However, the pressure of events, of atmospheres, of said and not said words, of words rather intuited, despite the spasmodic fight that went on within, will make the young actress aspirant to understand that her life, her problems would find an answer only in that monastery. Thus, we see her freed from anorexia, in prayer without her knowing to be praying, entering the “room of the heart”, in the experience of the Beloved, not without any rebellion of the flesh and finally becoming quiet in Him.   

All this goes on while, in their very oscillations of sympathy and hostility, the nuns sense the situation of her journey. The Prioress and the young novice sense it not less than what Sr. Benedict had intuited, the humble, illiterate and wise cook, who wanted to have her close in her agony and whose intimacy with Cristiana-Crucified she had not succeeded to loose, despite fear and requisition, despite the wonder of the unbelievable death, whose witness she was.

The room of the heart is the title of a booklet written by the saint. «“I am not “I” without you”. This extra-ordinary cry of the soul fallen in love declares how structurally decisive the loving relation is even for the identity of the “I”. This is valid for every great love, provided it has the seal of uniqueness and fidelity. However, those words are of value for no love as much as for the love of the Christian soul that turns the cell of the heart into the secret and inaccessible encounter with the Beloved” (page 165). These, surely not simple, words, which the young Sr. Crucified read for her, revealed to Cristiana the true sense of life and introduced her into the “room of the heart”. Now, she, too, can understand the sense of the sentence “Faith is great love.”

Cettina Militello
Lecturer in the Pontifical faculty of theology «Marianum»
Viale di Villa Pamphili, 20 - int. 13/A - 00152 Roma