I constantly regretted not considering anything that would have interfered with my love for Mària. I constantly regretted following Mària to the Congo in the quest to serve the least of these, the motto of the Perpetual Cross renunciants.

Friends rarely end up in the same place unless love and sex are involved. I pleaded with her that after wars like the last two inflicted on Belgium, our country was the one in need of our services.

There was enough misery at home that the least of these were presently at the doorsteps of our convent in Liege, and I made the mistake of ironizing that Liege was far from Africa. That got me a stinging slap.

"I didn't go to the Carmelites because I wasn't able to imagine life apart from you," I told her as she laid on the floor after I had hit her back as hard as I could on the shoulder; not on the beautiful face. "But I told you I didn't want to go slogging through Africa; the stories out of that Congo Free State terrify me.

We are going to be absorbed into their brutality and become part of what's practiced over there. "Adamant, she wouldn't hear my plea.

And that was that. She would go without me, she said; she didn't love me as I loved her.

She would miss me, of course, but not being into me the way I was into her, she would manage whereas I wouldn't. Sister Immanuel recounts her life and the life of her great love, Sister Mària, from their childhood in Belgium to their service as Catholic nuns in colonial Belgian Congo in this mesmerizing, psychological drama.

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