Please check out the discussion of Exiles over at Inside Catholic. There’s some good stuff over there on all sides. In particular, I want to point you to the comments of Bishop Daniel Flores, Auxiliary in the Detroit Archdiocese, here and here.  All those involved in the conversation are smart – far smarter than I – but Bishop Flores’ remarks might interest you particularly, because of the combination of deep interest in and facility with the literary aspect of it, as well as his spiritual insights.

Upon reading the death scenes a number of times (and they merit innumerable readings), the convenience is there, only it comes much more subtly than my Atticus-trained eyes expected: not in the manner of Atticus at peace with his sons, not in the arc of convergent lines made nicely, in the end, to touch. It is rather the convenience of an un-converging convergence, a glimpse of the grace that makes no sense to observers, but which a man who knows “of his going in Galilee” can nonetheless embrace in hope and love. His coming, when at last He comes, is a coming that to our soft eyes often seems so heartless. But if it so seems to us, the problem, Hopkins would say, is with our eyes, not His coming.

To die as the sisters do is an ugly thing. It is an aesthetic that must traverse the forbidden lands of the death that seems so meaningless; it must confront in particularity the fact that “His ways are not our ways,” and this conjures the questioning of Job. Sister Norberta poses it well when she asks the kindly Brigitta: “Why do you think God is doing this to us of all people? His devoted and adoring daughters?” (185). No doubt my first read was influenced by an unconscious kinship with Norberta, for I thought they deserved better than a death depicted so harshly. Not even an act of contrition for Norberta…

There is nothing poetic about the circumstance of Norberta’s or anyone’s death (the Tower of Siloam comes to mind). There is grace, though, in the surrender to the One who comes in it: “And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss.”Hopkins wrote to his mother that “it is our pride to be ready for instant dispatch”(172), and though speaking of the Jesuit vocation, and his own frequent transferrals, he doubtless intended also the transitus toward which all changes of address tend, and which they all foreshadow. We can hope that Norberta knew this as well, and could silently offer it to the “Father and fondler of heart thou has wrung.“

If hope is not enough for us in reading this end — I speak for myself, at any rate — then we are like those whom Hopkins describes as “trenched with tears, carved with cares.”And we are thus shown to be in further need of the Master’s particular touch, coming as of “an anvil-ding.“