title: Encountering the Depths: Prayer, Solitude, and Contemplation
author: Mother Mary Clare
description: "Mother Mary Clare... gifts her readers with common sense, maturity, and traditional wisdom..." -- <i>Book Shelf, Review for Religious, November/December 1995</i>
zlib_text: For Katy Rensten, with whom I spent a lot of time
  
  
  cooped up when we were sixteen, but voluntarily,
  
  
  and listening to ‘Low’ and eating toast.
  
  
  I
  
  
  
  
  
  A good Catholic girl was what they’d said they needed, and, seeing as no one
  knew otherwise, I was trying my hand at being exactly that. And so far – on
  that first, mid-July, swift-sweet day – I was getting away with it, scurrying
  behind the Lady Lieutenant through the Tower of London. We were on our way to
  some lodgings, I thought: somewhere for me to kick off my shoes and lay down
  my head, fasten some shutters against the belting of London’s bells. After two
  long days on the road, that was as far as I could think, it was all I wanted,
  and at seventeen I was naïve enough to think that whatever I wanted, I’d get.
  
  
  Nothing about the unguarded door to which she led me was any different from
  all the others we’d passed in passageways and courtyards. Not that I’d had
  time to see much; she wasn’t hanging around. Tight-lipped and bustling, s