Not denounced, not forgiven

 From NYT review of Stone Yard Devotional:

The wrestling in this novel is with the nature and meaning of penance, atonement. Upon learning that Helen will be the one to transport Sister Jenny’s bones back to Australia, the narrator recalls their last encounter, decades ago, at a protest against logging. It’s an excruciating scene of absolution sought and denied, of quiet humiliation: “I told her that I was to this day ashamed of what we had done, and that I was deeply sorry for my part in it,” she says, but it takes Helen a minute to even remember her. “I can see why that might have been a big … incident … for you,” she finally replies, as intimidatingly self-assured now as she was as a child. “But for me, that day was nothing.”

Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of these paths is holier than another; Wood is more invested in noticing the human pursuit of holiness itself. “Not denounced, not forgiven,” the narrator and her sins swing in the uncomfortable uncertainty of the living. Nothing can exempt a person from this moral stain, from mortality — not even being a nun on the edge of the earth.