Works of Mercy

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Kirsty Sain, aging housekeeper for the newly arrived young priest, assumes that despite this personnel change in her rural parish, her own solitary rounds will proceed as always. She will go to Mass, clean the rectory, go home again. She will keep herself to herself in the safely-hedged present and coexist in detente with the past. When a hairless, eyeless kitten is thrust upon her, an unlikely deterrent to the mice invading her house, she declares, "I am not going to love that thing." She has spent a lifetime armoring herself against the risks of affection. But between the hapless Father Schuyler, who teeters on the edge of breakdown, and the crises of the Malkins, a parish family whose cheerful chaos erupts in tragedy, Kirsty finds her own wounds broken open. Drawn against her will into the sufferings of these vulnerable lives, she returns to an old hero, the Elizabethan poet-priest Robert Southwell, whose "Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears" provides a skeleton key to her own locked heart. In Southwell's words, "love is the fire" that renders all things new.