An Ode to the Fragmented Life

when nothing feels complete

The night before, I set my alarm for 5:15 am, in hopes that adding 15 minutes might mean I actually get some quiet. After one inevitable slamming of the snooze button, I wake, and so does the baby. I change him, get him settled with a bottle as my husband starts the coffee pot. I balance the bottle between my chin and shoulder as I pour a cup of coffee, and hope I get to drink it hot this morning.

As I sit, I hear it—my toddler wakes up and whines. I need to finish feeding the baby, and my husband has to get ready to leave for work. He changes her and settles her back in her bed, bribed to try to get more sleep with a cup of milk. He’s off to get ready, and I’m still on the couch, trying to restart morning prayer for the 5th time.

I get mostly through it before he’s out the door 15 minutes later, and I hear her stir again. I conclude my prayer, blow out the candle. My coffee is half-drunk, and definitely not hot now.

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My book club decided to follow the theme of “Women of the Catholic Imagination” this year, working through essays from

Haley Stewart

and Word on Fire’s compilation. As we read an essay, we read a novel from that author for the month. We kicked it off with Caryll Houselander’s The Dry Wood, her only novel.

The Dry Wood is described as “a story of innocent suffering,” centered around a community in London called Riverside, where a young boy named Willie Jewel is on the brink of death after a young life of ill health. Parishioners’ stories are weaved throughout the book, deeply affected by the death of their beloved priest, Fr. Malone, and pleading with his intercession for Willie.

It’s a lovely novel, shining with Houselander’s simple poeticism. I read it in small parts over the month, hence the theme of this essay. What pierced me was not necessarily the innocent suffering of Willie Jewel, or the complex lives of the parishioners, but the inner workings of Fr. O’Grady, the remaining parish priest who tends to them all.

Fr. O’Grady is spun by the unending duties of his parish after the death of Fr. Malone, yet patiently fulfills them. In his heart, though, he feels the fragments left by the tossing and turning of his everyday.

“Father O’Grady put down his candle on the table, and opened the window on to the night. Another Saturday was passed, it was dark now and still. Riverside slept. All day long he looked forward to this hour from midnight to one o’clock. He thought of it as the time when would gather himself together into one whole, complete act of adoration.

Nothing in the daytime ever seemed complete. Everything that he began was interrupted and cut short. No action, no thought, n o conversation, no prayer, ever seemed to be whole, completed, finished. Everything was broken. Everything was hurried or interrupted, or left with untidy loose ends. Even things that had to be completed were disintegrated by distractions.

The lives of really holy people seemed to be so different. They wrote out neat time-tables, including luxurious hours of solitude, of meditation, half hours before the Blessed Sacrament, prudent recreation, and so on; and when people called on them and made demands on them, they were, as indeed as in these circumstance they might well be, calm and charming and able to give an impression of having unlimited time to give, and no preoccupation in life so absorbing as the trivialities of this individual’s mind.”

I cried reading these words describing the life of a fictional 20th century parish priest—his heart fatigued by the unending interruption, hoping for something whole. The passages following the above detail how Fr. O’Grady, despite his hope, only ends up fighting exhaustion and desolation for that hour. All he can do is offer himself and his effort, again. His head longs for the pillow, to just try again tomorrow.

My daily duties are not near as demanding as a priest, but I know the difficulty of constant interruption. I never understood growing up why my own mom said she was grateful to actually finish a conversation with a friend when they were alone. There’s a pain in leaving after an hour or two at the park, having talked with that friend about nothing particularly real, because your attention was constantly diverted. This child needed to be pushed on the swing, that one needed a snack—and though you perhaps needed some safety and vulnerability, that had to fall to the wayside.

Though it’s not necessarily painful, there’s a fatigue in the stop-start that motherhood naturally creates—the half-folded laundry, the half-washed sink of dishes, the half-spoken sentence to your spouse over dinner. It can be irritating, but it’s mostly just tiring. The hope for something whole, entire, experienced without interruption and relished fades in the day-to-day, when no measures to grasp that wholeness meet their mark. The alarm can be set earlier, the chore list written out, the toys set out to distract—but to no avail.

And yes, then there’s prayer. I appreciate the sentiments that “your laundry is a prayer, your presence to your children is a prayer” because, yes, that’s true—God is present in my daily life and receives the smallest of offerings. But also, I long for contemplation, dammit, and how am I ever going to achieve it if I can never be guaranteed silence and solitude?

Yes, Fr. O’Grady’s thought rings true with mine. The lives of holy people do seem so different. There is solitude, there's a symbiotic connection between work and prayer, and there’s an unending feeling of presence. I’ve looked at people who can spend hours in adoration longingly—whether or not they do, they can. With my half-drunk, lukewarm coffee in hand, it’s tempting to give up on holiness. Too many mornings of prayer feel like Fr. O’Grady’s midnight hour, full of exhaustion and desolation instead of the wholeness and rest I crave. Those moments come occasionally, but they seem to quickly dissipate beneath the fragments of the day.

I remember my life in college, when a chapel was just up one flight of stairs, and there were five more accessible on campus. I used to pop in, just to say “hello.” On Saturdays, I would take my cup of coffee with me and certainly drink it hot, spending however much time I wanted in quiet prayer. Post-grad, there wasn’t a chapel everywhere—but there was quiet, and space, and time.

I said “yes” to the fragmented life when I got married, and when I opened my heart and body to the little lives God wanted to give us. I knew this in theory, but living it in concept has proved to be a crucible I never expected. I, too, long to gather myself back in after a day of interruptions and incomplete works, boxes unchecked and conversations unfinished—or never even attempted to begin with. I want to feel that young, idyllic repose I felt in that front right side of that dorm chapel each Saturday morning—the knowledge that yes, I am His…and He is mine.

Fr. O’Grady wants that knowledge too. He longs for the simple, deep communion that Fr. Malone had with Christ; the radiating, undeniable simplicity of true holiness. It’s not until the end of the book that he begins to hear an invitation beneath his day of fragments. As he vests for Mass and awaits a tardy young altar server, checking his impatience, he reflects on what actually was at the center of his late friend’s holiness.

“Yes, Father O’Grady knew it now; that was the secret of Fr. Malone’s sanctity, Christ’s presence. He was a saint to his people because he was a Christ to his people; in the end he had worn his humanity, worn himself, like an old coat, so threadbare that his bones showed through it almost visibly, but it was not his bones that showed at all, it was the shape of Christ, WHo had hallowed the name of God in his old bones.

[...]Was sanctity within his reach after all, he asked; could his great hands lay hold of it after all, he who never knew the sweetness of the complete act of love, the unbroken prayer, the whole hour of meditation, the work accomplished, the sensible sweetness of the sacramental word spoken, even one hour out of the twenty-four, unbroken, for his personal delight!

Could he who never knew that completeness in his soul, that inward closed circle of light, be a saint?”

Just before Mass, Fr. O’Grady touches on something that I feel prodding at my own heart. This Lent, for a plethora of reasons, has left me feeling more fragmented, distracted, diverted than usual. I feel an emptiness, and an inability to fill myself. The emptiness isn’t depressing, don’t read me wrong—but it’s there, a yawning cavity. I feel my poverty. My deep, unending poverty, my inability to achieve anything whole on my own.

When I sit in that poverty, the interruption, distraction, fragmentation only feel like more confirmation of my lack, and more confirmation that the hope for wholeness will float further and further from me, with each passing year. I don’t have to be passive, per se. I will still wake up at the early hour in pursuit of quiet, because I do need it. I will still receive and give support with my spouse to ensure we get solitude. But I know I will hit many more moments of the half-prayer, the half-conversation, the half-chore, and yes, the half-hot coffee. I will get frustrated. I will lose my patience. I will apologize. Some days, I’ll give freely. And I will try again.

But in spite of the emptiness, I feel something different this Triduum. As the mystery starts to unfold, I don’t feel the same contrivance I do at this time each year. “Enter in,” I usually plead with myself. “Think, pray, do.”

This year, the emptiness is enough, the poverty is enough—it feels like the first time I know it. It’s what He wants, this broken, fragmented life full of its tiny incompleteness. It’s what He gave His life for. I said “yes” to this life because I believed that—that He wanted to encounter me here, in the years that will pass.

Maybe the secret to sanctity isn’t actually found in finally experiencing something whole and entire, the completed meditation, the Saturday mornings in the chapel (though those can’t hurt)—but in the breaking of one’s time, presence, and self, trusting that Christ is somehow wholly present in it. I can give Him whole, through my broken, fragmented, interrupted, distracted, incomplete days. Through my broken, fragmented, distracted self. I can wear my humanity, like an old, worn coat.

The fragmented life comes in many forms. I know mine, today. But a life of fragments, in His hands, can be made into something whole, one day. Something that, hopefully, speaks of Him when He puts it together in the end and looks upon it.

I chose the fragmented life, though I didn’t know how it would be…but maybe that’s the new hope. Not for just a moment, an hour of something whole, but a life of it, only realized at the end.

I ask myself, with little fictional Father O’Grady:

“Could this day of fragments be a day in a saint’s life?”