A devotional life
- eduplus1
- Dec 12, 2025
- 5 min read
I’m reminded of my Tante Riet by a review of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional on Radio NZ. The Howick Library has a copy. It's a work of fiction. The book is set in a nunnery; it's blurb promises a woman who "holes up" almost by accident in a small religious community hidden away in the backblocks of Australia. Her personal disquiet is set against backdrops of the pandemic, a mice plague, invasions of personal space and bullying relationships.
What motivates women who choose a devotional life? The question is personal. During the din of the second world war, my father’s sister Riet chose seclusion as a Trappist (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance). She was 24 years old.
The seeds for a cloistered life must begin somewhere. War-forced austerity for a start, of the kind that contemporary lives can barely envisage. While I might be prepared to toss out a kiwi government over the price of butter, I should be grateful there is any butter at all! The war is context. Riet believes, as indeed most in the Netherlands do, that the German occupation of 1940 is outrageous. The bombing flat of Rotterdam is awful enough. Now the occupiers hope to have a free run on shaping Dutch social life and public opinion by keeping the churches in their place - that is, passive. These occupiers, to most ordinary Dutchmen, are cheats and bullies. Propaganda is insidious. Youth groups (like Scouts, or Boys' Brigade) are banned unless they affiliate to Hitler Youth; street gatherings such as celebrations of the Queen's birthday are banned; student associations at the university are banned; public collections are banned (unless authorised, for example, for Nazi-led "Winter Relief" services); school books and curricula are re-written. Even religious broadcasts and the church press must be 'licensed' under the Nazi umbrella and support National Socialist policies. All outrageous, yes.
I would guess that Riet and the women in her family actively engaged in the debates in the church at this time. Is it better to stand silently by - but prudently and safely, with minimal loss of life - as Jews are denied, denounced and deported? Is it a church matter at all? Or, despite the official danger, is it more important to defend church values, to be outspoken about Christ's messages of shared humanity in the eyes of God?
Riet will have heard the sermons of denouncement. Riet is there when the famous law professor Cleveringa at the university's law faculty is arrested for speaking out against Nazi policy towards his Jewish colleague. Riet cannot stand by when a parent at school doesn't want her child to be in the same class as the little Jewish girl. Riet is quietly triumphant when the priest backs her refusal; and distressed when only days later the Jewish child and parents are arrested and sent away. Riet is still
there when her sister's husband Jan Witte is taken away for sheltering a Christian Jew. Riet apparently always had a natural inclination to prayer as a tool for introspection (her sisters tease her about it!) Her youthful angst at her present and future options must have been like a hard kick under the table.
The winter of 1941-1942 is brutal - the second coldest recorded since one hundred years earlier; and because it is wartime, tribulations are like stacks on the mill, more on still: there's a shortage of fuel and spare parts, shipping iced into canals like wrecks, and public transport that functions as poorly as
a bicycle with flat tyres. A food and product coupon system is possibly fair and tolerable, if only you are not feeling you are being taken advantage of. The Japanese steal the Dutch East Indies, and it looks like the Germans are holding out against the Allies. Riet is as entitled as any young woman to believe that the world is going to hell in a handcart.
Family is context too. Riet's mother, Bernardina van Bohemen, is deeply religious. Her father is a leading parishioner. Though now impoverished, her parents have ensured a robust catholic boarding-school education for her. It is not surprising, therefore, that Riet ponders a religious life amongst other women of her class and conviction.
She aspires to join the Dutch community of women in the abbey of Koningsoord. Her father is astonished that she should choose this shut-off place; and concerned about how the family might now manage the required dowry. The war has straightened his circumstances, as they say; painfully, he can't gift his daughter this wish. Riet's outrage towards the world shifts inward to her feelings of powerlessness.
Koningsoord, in the south of the Netherlands, is not an ancient place, though the order has an ancient history. Trappists are a specific branch of the Cistercians. They are named after a French abbey in France – but more importantly follow the Rule of St Benedict (strictly). That means a whole book of recommendations about praying and working in a self-governing community. Essentially, a rigorous, simple life. Cistercians of the Strict Observance are a ‘closed order’ – which means Riet may only receive visitors at certain times of the year and the day. It is also a ‘silent’ order – contemplation, reading and prayer every day. Alongside this manual labour; time in the gardens and the fields is also time for contemplation about God’s meaning in the seasons.
How to fund this lifestyle? The young Riet has no resources of her own. My father mentioned that some of his meagre salary from digging in the Nord-Oost Polder went to his sister. Each one of Riet's brothers may have contributed something. But I believe most comes from the parish priest, Riet's confessor.
I went to Koningsoord today. I guess you could call it a pilgrimage. Still a peaceful place on a dreary winter's day, December 2025. I encounter two workers are calculating how they will best position the Christmas tree at the front entrance. Although the nuns are no longer there, it still very clearly has 'community' as its central ethos. An attractive, modern retirement village sits alongside the original abbey building, in what were once, I would guess, the Abbey gardens.
***
Just getting to her convent is Riet’s first test of resolve. Berkel-Enschot (where the abbey is located) is near Tilburg, in the south. Liberation is yet to happen. Holidays approach. German mobile V2 missiles arrive in the dunes of Katwijk in advance of the summer offensive on London and Antwerp; the beaches are out of bounds. The trains are full, though expensive, despite the news of allies approaching from France and Belgium in the south. No trains are express; they will have been timetabled for the convenience of an army. At Arnhem in the east, the Allies are planning a battle. Why would anyone travel at this time? Ambling southwards with her elderly father, whose papers will have exempted him from German work requirements, signs of war are everywhere: German Wehrmacht troops, on confiscated Dutch bikes, appear beside the tracks and at the stations; there are bombed-out buildings. Though they know there are workers hidden on the farms they pass, Riet probably only sees occasional workers beside cows and chickens and intensively-cultivated gardens.
She arrives on 5 August 1944. She leaves behind all her worldly possessions except her Missal (prayer book) and the clothes she is wearing. The abbey is still mourning the loss of five siblings of the Loeb family, forcibly taken on 2 August because of their Jewish heritage. I look for the stolperstein that I know must be there, but cannot immediately find it.
Stone Yard Devotional is fiction. My aunt is fact. I hear the sound of my footsteps on the flagstones in the corridor. In the chapel, now task-divided into performance space and library, I have to imagine the devotional chants from the nuns ringing around these same walls.
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