“I think I should be a nun,“ she says.
Unapologetic. Not a whiff of irony. Nathalie Roy lets those words tumble out of her mouth like pebbles from a hand.
She is the backbone of this operation, the midwife of it, the reason we are on the road now. She does a thousand things I can see and a thousand more that I don’t get to know about. In the van on the road, I do most of the driving, my eyes forward. But I can feel her over my right shoulder, occupying the rear passenger seat (Note: I’m not sure why, but everyone silently lays claim to their place in the seating arrangement in the van on the first day out and it never changes. Your place in the van becomes one of the few things you can count on, a small comfort maybe.) and she is hunched over her laptop, giving herself to the task of communicating with venues, hotels, insurance companies, people in the places we are headed to or have just been. I can hear her inhale and then exhale in a long breath, a bid to calm herself or ground herself in the face of doing a task she is good at, but not born to do.
“I missed my chance,“ she says. “I went away to Germany and when I returned my Mother said I was too old for the convent.”
“I didn’t peg you as the nun type, “ I say.
She shrugs. “I think I would have been a good nun.”
Then I remember a picture I took of her earlier this year in Old Jerusalem, deep underground in the tomb of Mary. Her clear capacity for devotion made me lift my phone to my eye.
Maybe this is what she means, that she has a strong sense of devotion and the understanding that such a devotion needs a home. For a while, that home has been the Nights of Grief and Mystery. She digs in at least as deep as Stephen and I do.
This tour is her love letter to the love letter that Jenkinson and I try to write every Night. And this is my love letter to her devotional act.
I thought you should know.
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Gregory Hoskins 