The Abbess of Crewe Read Online Free

destiny?’
    ‘It’s your calling,’ says Gertrude, philosophically.
    ‘Gertrude, my excellent nun, my learned Hun, we have a problem and we don’t
     know what to do with it.’
    ‘A problem you solve,’ says Gertrude.
    ‘Gertrude,’ wheedles the Abbess, ‘we’re in trouble with Rome. The
     Congregation of Religious has started to probe. They have written delicately to inquire
     how we reconcile our adherence to the Ancient Rule, which as you know they find suspect,
     with the laboratory and the courses we are giving the nuns in modern electronics, which,
     as you know, they find suspect.’
    ‘That isn’t a problem,’ says Gertrude. ‘It’s a
     paradox.’
    ‘Have you time for a very short seminar, Gertrude, on how one treats of a
     paradox?’
    ‘A paradox you live with,’ says Gertrude, and hangs up.
    The Abbess leads the way from this room of many shining square boxes, many lights and
     levers, many activating knobs, press-buttons and slide-buttons and devices fearfully and
     wonderfully beyond the reach of a humane vocabulary. She leads the way back to the
     Infant of Prague, decked as it is with the glistening fruits of the nuns’ dowries.
     The Abbess sits at her little desk with the Sisters Walburga and Mildred silently
     composed beside her. She takes the grand writing-paper of the Abbey of Crewe and places
     it before her. She takes her pen from its gleaming holder and writes:
    ‘Your Very Reverend Eminence,
    Your Eminence does me the honour to address me, and I humbly thank Your Eminence.
    I have the honour to reply to Your Eminence, to submit that his sources of information
     are poisoned, his wells are impure. From there arise the rumours concerning my House,
     and I beg to write no more on that subject.
    Your Eminence does me the honour to inquire of our activities, how we confront what Your
     Eminence does us the honour to call the problem of reconciling our activities in the
     field of technological surveillance with the principles of the traditional life and
     devotions to which we adhere.
    I have the honour to reply to Your Eminence. I will humbly divide Your Eminence’s
     question into two parts. That we practise the activities described by Your Eminence I
     agree; that they present a problem I deny, and I will take the liberty to explain my
     distinction, and I hold:
    That Religion is founded on principles of Paradox.
    That Paradox is to be accepted and presents no Problem.
    That electronic surveillance (even if a convent were one day to practise it) does not
     differ from any other type of watchfulness, the which is a necessity of a Religious
     Community; we are told in the Scriptures “to watch and to pray”, which is
     itself a paradox since the two activities cannot effectively be practised together
     except in the paradoxical sense.’
    ‘You may see what I have written so far,’ says the
     Abbess to her nuns. ‘How does it strike you? Will it succeed in getting them
     muddled up for a while?’
    The black bodies lean over her, the white coifs meet above the pages of the letter.
    ‘I see a difficulty,’ says Walburga. ‘They could object that
     telephone-tapping and bugging are not simply an extension of listening to hearsay and
     inviting confidences, the steaming open of letters and the regulation search of the
     novices’ closets. They might well say that we have entered a state where a
     difference of degree implies a difference in kind.’
    ‘I thought of that,’ says the Abbess. ‘But the fact that we have
     thought of it rather tends to exclude than presume that they in Rome will think of it.
     Their minds are set to liquidate the convent, not to maintain a courtly correspondence
     with us.’ The Abbess lifts her pen and continues:
    ‘Finally, Your Eminence, I take upon myself the honour to
     indicate to Your Eminence the fine flower and consummation of our holy and paradoxical
     establishment, our beloved and renowned Sister Gertrude whom we have sent out