In The Name of The Father
A Magdalene Laundry Tale.
In that dim sanctum of enforced divinity, morning comes like an act of aggression, a jarring interruption to the inertia hanging heavily in the dormitory air. The rote and ritualistic words flutter in the air like a battle flag: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” We stir, pupils contracting against the relentless blaze of fluorescent lights, and the wheels of Mount Saint Canice lurch into motion, grinding like ancient machinery.
We drop to our knees in unison.
It is five a.m., and the freezing air gnashes against the skin, a cold that feels almost sentient in its malevolence. Mother Magdalene’s tone, crumbling parchment’s timbre, orchestrates a symphony of prayers. Five decades of Hail Marys are all punctuated by the ‘Glory Be.’
We answer Mother Magdalene’s call to recite the Rosary. “Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death, amen.”
This often-rehearsed ritual has lost all semantic weight, becoming pure form and sound. The litany becomes white noise, a sonic landscape over which Mother Magdalen intones, “God be blessed.” We are done for this morning.
In the hidden confines of Mount Saint Canice, ritual becomes our refuge, a labyrinthine set of movements that signify the depth of our days. We wash our faces, but not to cleanse the soul. The water doesn’t reach that far. We comb our hair, aligning each strand as if order on the surface could subdue the chaos within.
Our nightdresses, folded into neat rectangles, become the linens of a communion we never asked to join. Tucked beneath pillows on well made beds, they rest like offerings to a God whose attention we would rather escape. Here, cleanliness is not next to godliness. It’s a currency, a trade of purity for absolution in a market where both are found wanting.
Each crease in the fabric is a line in the ongoing manuscript of our guilt. Each wrinkle is a lapse in the doctrine that governs this enclosed world. Punishments are not meted out with corporeal severity but through an intricate system of fines — a ledger that itemizes our failings, translated into a fiscal tongue. It’s an economy fueled by shame that profits from our very existence in this sanctified penitentiary.
In this vortex, where the sacred and the profane collide in soap suds and prayer, where the trivial transmutes into the monumental, we are all jailers and jailed. We are the guardians of our solitude, warden, and ward of an institution seeking to redeem us through routine. The world outside remains a foggy abstraction, a distant landscape that no longer holds a place for us.
Here, the very act of breaking silence becomes a transgression, a crack in the façade that we are all complicit in maintaining. Murmured prayers hang heavy in the air, like smoke from a forgotten incense, their sanctity distorted by the mundanity of their repetition. It’s the only acceptable currency, this perpetual invocation, absolution for the sin of existing in a space that denies us our complexities and reduces us to rules and infractions.
The creak of floorboards becomes a language unto itself, each squeak and groan an articulated thought, a private confession. We walk tentatively, as though afraid to disturb the ghosts of our former selves, spectral remnants of who we were before we entered this place of stifling protocol and quietude. The floor does not simply support us; it bears the weight of our complicity in this silence, this careful arrangement of our lives into palatable segments, digestible by the world we find ourselves encaged within.
As Mother Magdalene jangles the keys on her leather belt, the sound reverberates, echoing a prison warden’s authority. We shuffle through dim hallways adorned with stony saints, their eyes vacant yet accusing, until we reach the chapel. Here, Mother Gertrude assumes the mantle of the gatekeeper, ushering us into the labyrinth of pews, where we wait for more bodies to fill the space, one hundred and eighty souls herded like sacrificial lambs.
Mother Anselm takes her pulpit; her eyes surveil us from that elevated perch. We are spectacles, incarcerated muses on a stage set for devotion.
Scarves shroud our heads, veils of compulsory reverence, as Father Greenwood makes his entrance — a weekday service devoid of the Sunday ornamentals, yet no less ceremonial.
He bows to tabernacle and genuflects, and the room inhales, a collective breath held captive.
The sun has barely consented to grace the earth when the ritual begins anew. Light, the first of the day, splinters through the stained glass in a refracted kaleidoscope, a shatter of colors resting on bowed heads and unyielding pews. Here in this room, this sanctum of Mount Saint Canice, we are performers in a well-rehearsed play, each of us neither a sinner nor saint but an actor assuming a role. The lines are familiar, scripted by others, a repetitious drama that unfolds with the rote certainty of a liturgy.
Mass begins as the sky outside hints at morning, and the first light of dawn splinters through the stained glass like arrows through our collective unconscious. It is a fractured spectrum, these pieces of colored light that touch each pew, each bowed head, revealing a tableau not of holiness but of submission. In this kaleidoscope of fervor and what one might call forced fidelity, we find ourselves not as the sinners or saints we are often made out to be but as figures, mere silhouettes, on a stage set for piety. We are prisoners here, not just of these four walls, of this altar and this pulpit, but of a system that has drafted and conscripted us into a lifelong sentence of questioning. A grueling exercise in pondering the uncertainties: the questions of faith, of choice, of our own place and purpose within the iron framework of Mount Saint Canice.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” intones the priest, the words not falling but hovering, suspended as if in aspic. They do not feel like a benediction, a laying on of hands to heal the spirit. Instead, they are a shackle, one more link in an unbroken chain that stretches not merely from this Sunday to the next but backward and forward in time, connecting us to an endless litany of obligation and doubt. We are in a sanctuary, yes, but one might question what it is, strictly, that we are being shielded from.
Mass is not optional here. It is compulsory every day of the week, a ritual designed not to lift the soul but to mold it, to shape it to fit the dogmatic contours of an institution. And so we sit, stand, kneel, and sing hymns whose verses we know by heart but do not feel. We go through the motions on a spiritual autopilot, automated by rote memory and societal expectations. We take communion, the taste of the wafer-like dust, the wine like tin. They say it is the body and blood of Christ, but it is we who feel consumed.
As the priest delivers his homily, his words a predictable cadence of ecclesiastical platitudes, one cannot help but consider the atmosphere of complacency that permeates the room, like incense too thickly laid on. The institution asserts itself here, and we, its humble congregation, find our individuality subsumed, our questions drowned out by the echoing amens.
This is Mount Saint Canice, a sanctuary of contradictions, a theatre where each of us plays our role, knowing or unknowing, in a narrative scripted long before our entrance.
And so it goes:
In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
