Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, constrained by a sentence limit (high and low) of six, there are worse ways to spend the remaining time you have on earth.

…previously

Prompt word:

PILOT

Despite Shirley Jackson’s Hill House being more than thirty-six hundred miles to the west, a first-time visitor to the Eibigen Abbey could be forgiven for paraphrasing the author’s opening description,  ‘Whoever walked the halls of Eibigen Abby, walked alone’.

Founding the monastery in 1165, Hildegard of Bingen was something of what our modern first-time tourist might call an ‘Influencer’ albeit producing content in the medium of illuminated scrolls and letters to the powerful; that said, should anyone harbor any doubt that ‘what’s old is new again’, all her works and teachings were nearly undone by a young man. And, as often the case with ‘origin stories’, it all came down to something as prosaic as a grave of a young man who had been excommunicated that lead to Hildegard being shunned by the Church for most of the remainder of her days.

Should our first-time tourists be fortunate enough to have the wherewithal to book the top-tier guided Rhine River Valley tour, their itinerary would certainly have included a break-of-dawn visit to the monastery, if for no other reason than to hear the voices of the nuns at morning vesper, seeking protection from…well, some agency other than the local church officials.

Sister Aclima awoke with the rising of the sun, her reluctantly open eyes staring at the needlework homily that cleverly condensed James 3:4  “…they are guided by a very small rudder where the pilot wants to go.”

To say her heart soared at the distant sounds of the resident nuns celebrating their faith would be to misunderstand, by an order of magnitude, the life she found herself living; better one should try to comprehend the mind of the death row prisoner hearing their last visitor approaching in the wake of incomprehensible Latin invocations.