Sr. Cheryl Frances CHEN, Sr. Hanne-Maria BERENTZEN, Sr. Anne Elizabeth SWEET & Sr. Maria Rafael BARTLETT. Northern Light: The Cistercian Nuns of Tautra Mariakloster. Athens, Ohio: Cistercian Publications, 2020. pp. 201. $24.95 pb. ISBN 978-0-87907-160-8. Reviewed by Gregory STEPHENSON. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

 

Many of us enjoy reading of lives lived on the edge, that is lives lived dangerously, vividly – soldiers, bullfighters, explorers, spies. Extraordinary, exciting lives. But there are, of course, other kinds of brinks and borders: interior verges, frontiers of the mind and spirit. In this sense (and in other ways, as well) the Cistercian nuns of Mariakloster on the island of Tautra in Norway may be seen to be living lives on the edge, lives devoted to an uncompromising endeavor of growing beyond themselves, lives directed toward a silent inward encounter with Mystery.

The island of Tautra is located in the Trondheimsfjord in the west-central part of Norway, far enough north for the northern lights to be seen in winter. Tautra is a place of seasonal extremes of daylight and darkness, warmth and cold. At the winter solstice, the sun rises at 10:02 a.m. and sets at 2:33 p.m. At the summer solstice, the sun rises at 3: 02 a.m. and sets at 11:37 p.m. while the twilight lingers throughout the brief night. In autumn and winter, storms and gales are not infrequent. Sometimes snow falls in May. From the year 1207 to 1532, the island was the site of Tautra Abbey, a Cistercian monastery, which was dissolved during the reformation and its lands seized by the crown. (The ruins of the abbey have since become a popular tourist destination.) The Mariakloster was established on Tautra in 1999, its foundation stone laid by Queen Sonja of Norway. The community of Trappistine nuns (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Obervance) currently occupying the Mariakloster numbers fourteen, drawn from nine different nationalities. The sisters support themselves by manufacturing and marketing soaps, balms and creams. They also tend a vegetable garden and a small orchard, grow greenhouse tomatoes, gather mushrooms and pick and preserve raspberries and red currants which abound on the island.

Northern Light consists of accounts by four nuns resident in the Mariakloster, chronicling the practices, occupations and events of the year (from New Year’s day to Christmas) as experienced on Tautra. Their descriptions include carefully observed details of the island’s changing weathers and skies, its flora and its birdlife. The nuns pursue a rigorous schedule (rising each morning at 4 a.m.) of prayer, the reading of scripture, the singing of antiphons, and manual labor. Through most of the day, they maintain silence among themselves. The austere simplicity of their lives seems to instill in them a joyous openness to natural beauty. Wind, waves, stars, clouds, storms, snowfall, flowers, phases of the moon, tender spring leaves and many-hued autumn leaves are all received by them with gratitude and wonder. The sisters also relish congruences between the turning seasons of the year and the cycle of liturgical seasons that they observe, discovering between the two a reciprocal relationship in which each illuminates the other.

The nuns of Mariakloster live lives on the edge of society, rejecting consumerism, materialism and the ethos of instant-gratification in favor of simplicity and a spiritually engaged life. Their inner lives may be said to be lived on “the razor’s edge” (as the Katha Upanishad phrases it) of a personal search for union with God. (“Sharp like a razor’s edge is the path, the sages say, difficult to traverse.”) Their attention is fixed firmly upon essential things and ultimate concerns, their lives dedicated to an inward transformation, to a relentless re-shaping and refining of consciousness, reaching forward beyond the barriers of self-will and self-centeredness toward self-giving and a deepening sense of the divine presence.

Northern Light will interest any reader whose concerns or curiosity extend to the psychology of monasticism or contemporary spirituality. With its handsome color photographs and rich descriptions of the daily lives of the sisters through the course of a year – “so ordinary on the surface, yet extraordinary in the depths” – Northern Light possesses a quiet capacity to prompt us to reflect seriously upon the quality of our own lives.