They have gone to the countryside to suffer, and paid the abbey coin to let them.
I do not understand it. Here is a house of well-fed folk, soft of hand, not one of them lame or starving, and they rise before the bells to twist their bodies into the shapes of beasts. One stands on a mat like a stork in a marsh. Another folds himself as I fold when the plow-ox stumbles and my back gives out, only he holds the fold on purpose, and breathes, and calls it peace. I have made that same shape in the mud at harvest. No one told me it was holy.
They eat only greens and roots. This I know well, for it is what we eat when the grain runs short in the black months of the year. But these have the grain. They have the meat. They have set it aside gladly, and they smile about it, and I think: you have never known Lent to come uninvited and stay till you bury a child.
They go quiet for whole days. No prayer, no confession, only silence, as though God were a thing you catch by sitting still. I have prayed on my knees in the frost begging Him to spare the wheat, and heard nothing back. Perhaps He answers the idle sooner.
At the day's end they lie flat upon the ground, eyes shut, arms open, doing nothing. Nothing at all. My lord, I have wanted that rest my whole life and never bought it.
They have coin enough to purchase weariness. We are given ours for free.