BOOK REVIEWS: HOUSE OF HERMITS

Pinions. Wind on the Sand: the Hidden Life of an Anchoress. London: SPCK, 1980; New York: Paulist Press, 1981.

This modest 80-page book is the autobiography of an Englishwoman who became an anchoress in the Anglican tradition.

 Pinions (her pseudonym) worked for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force of the UK during World War II and afterwards, visiting many countries and seeing may cultures and peoples. During a stint in Algeria, she experienced an insightful moment viewing the Atlas mountains through a haze, a moment when her hatred of God (she had just lost a favorite brother over Germany) melted into a sense of a transcendent God found in nature, and , later, she says, in people and circumstances.

For Pinions was not brought up religious, and her progress was worthily her own. She read the Christian spiritual classics (Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Corss, Ruysbroeck) and, returning to England, sought out a spiritual director. After a couple of meeting he surprised her by suggesting she become a nun. Pinions entered a contemplative community but found the minimum of prayer and the maximum of busywork unsuitable, and left the order after five-plus years.

"It could be that you have a higher vocation, " a new director suggested, and he trained her to become an anchoress. And it worked. Pinions followed a version of the Ancrene Wisse and Rule of St. Benedict, and with the approbation of the local bishop moved to a small cottage or hut. Her life of prayer and solitude blossomed.

Pinions offers a clear and unpretentious description of prayer based on her experience, ascending from meditation and "prayer of quiet" to recollection, contemplation, and intercession. She offers examples from her daily life and sufferings, and several of her own prayers. Her daily life records her reluctant departure from the cottage after nearly ten years due to a serious kidney ailment, finally residing in the separate quarters of a benefactor after long and unhappy stays in the hospital.

Later, largely bedridden, came a chance interview in a religious newspaper, followed by a BBC interview. Correspondence came, from a trickle to thousands of letters from around the world. Pinions happily answers each. Correspondents usually seek a bit of counsel, which, she offers in a spirit of joy, kindness, simplicity, and courage. She would never seek to convert anyone, she writes, and sees the oneness of humanity as the key to understanding Christian virtues.

The life of Pinions reflects a friendlier concept of the anchoress than the austere medieval image of enclosure or cloister. Though she kept her temporary vows as a nun and during her hospital stays would reply to enquiries about what she did that she was a nun, Pinions crafted a new lay (female) religious function in the church, sustaining the anchoritic tradition while offering the spiritually-minded solitary a viable model of life adaptable by her own recommendation to anyone so disposed.

The title comes from a glimpse of a whirling sandstorm during the period when she was to experience a kind of epiphany in Algeria. The cover subtitle to the New York edition is "The Story of a 20th Century Anchoress" and contains a foreword by Annie Dillard, an American writer.