The Scent of God »

The heartrending story of the forbidden love between a nun and a priest-by a writer who illuminates the details of everyday life, from the quiet rhythms of the cloister to the exuberant sensuality of the Amalfi Coast

When her family moves to Puerto Rico in the early 1950s, thirteen-year-old Beryl Bissell enters a milieu heady with sexuality and passion. Uncomfortable in her developing body and yearning for unconditional love, she becomes convinced that only God can satisfy her longing. On the day following her eighteenth birthday, she enters a cloistered convent in New Jersey, believing that God has called her to this way of life.

At first, she is blissfully happy. Within the year, however, she has become anorectic and prey to other obsessive compulsions. Her vocation at risk, she overcomes these disorders and perseveres for another ten years, until she must return home to Puerto Rico to help care for her ailing father.

Thrust once more into the sensual world of Puerto Rico, she discovers that religious garb cannot protect her from her budding sexuality. She is drawn to Padre Vittorio, a handsome Italian priest, and undergoes a belated coming of age. For the next three years, as she travels to and from the island, she struggles to reconcile human desire with spiritual longing. Unable to confide in either her mother or abbess, she tries to find the inner freedom that would allow her to love fully. The events that follow take the reader on a dizzying journey into the heart of desire, both spiritual and human.

In spare but lyric language, Bissell weaves a powerful story of love, death, guilt, and redemption-a pilgrimage that reaches beyond dogma to personal truth and evokesa transformation that changes not only herself, but the lives of those whom she loves most.

Publishers Weekly

In 1957, 18-year-old Bissell entered the monastery of the cloistered order of the Poor Clares in New Jersey. At 33, after falling in love with a priest, she left. The memoir details Bissell's lifelong love affair with God and decade-long love affair with an Italian priest, Vittoria Bosca. The two wed once Bosca received a dispensation from Rome to leave the priesthood and had two children before he, 25 years her senior, died of cancer three years after their marriage. Bissell's intense desire to become a saint drew her to cloistered life, where the constraints of pre-Vatican II monasticism created a spiritual existence comprising prayer, work and self-mortification. Her forbidden attraction to Bosca resulted in several years of smoldering but unconsummated passion (despite lots of lusty kissing). He believed they could maintain a loving but chaste relationship as priest and nun; Bissell wanted more. She was shocked to find the Church willing to excuse their sexual relationship, yet disapproving of their marrying. Her memoir details monastic life, the lure of the protective cloister, the spiritual havoc wrought by Vatican II and the conflicts many Catholics have with tenets of their faith. This is a deeply moving tale of a woman torn between her love for God and her love for one of his emissaries. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.