On my desk is a mix of mid-century practical theology paperbacks with unattractive covers, along with statelier hardcover translations with the names of famous medieval theologians stamped in gilt letters down the spine. They are all works of a writer using the nom de plume “A Religious of CSMV.” I have scraped this pile together from corners of the internet, used bookstores, and the collection of a deceased country vicar. None of the author’s original works, and only a few of the translations, remain in print.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, “A Religious of CSMV” translated over twenty-five works of classical theology, specializing in monastic figures from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She wrote more than fifty book reviews for various publications, in conversation with Karl Rahner, Étienne Gilson, Joseph Ratzinger, and many others. She wrote poetry and plays. And she wrote over thirty books and pamphlets of her own. She was also – and it is for this that she is best known in our time – one of C. S. Lewis’s main correspondents.

You may have encountered one of her translations before without knowing it.

Stephen Zhang, Sister Penelope, watercolor on paper, 2024.

In 1944, a new translation of Saint Athanasius’s De Incarnatione Verbi Dei came out. It carried a delightful introduction by Lewis himself, “On Reading Old Books,” which was republished frequently as a freestanding essay. “The only palliative” to the blindness of one’s own time – whichever time it is that we are in – “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” says Lewis. This particular clean breeze, from Saint Athanasius, was accessibly translated into English by none other than “A Religious of CSMV” – Sister Penelope.

Sister Penelope preferred another metaphor: she often returned to the old cliché that we can struggle to “see the wood for the trees.” The trees of our present-day Christianity, for Sister Penelope, include our attempts to read and understand confusing scriptural passages in isolation, and our cultural and political quarrels – sometimes silly and sometimes, when they ferment into hatred, devastating.

It’s not that these things are unimportant. But as Sister Penelope reminds readers, they are at most groves in an ancient wood stretching thousands of years back, and into an infinite glory ahead. One can only get the bird’s-eye view of the great wood – of its vast and ancient splendor, its growing saplings in the burned-out places, hidden valleys sheltering small creatures, and aerie-laden peaks – by getting above the trees themselves, and then returning to the place we have been called to live and work within that forest. Sister Penelope gets her expansive vision through reading scripture within the context of history, theology, and scientific discovery. She teaches us the practice of Christian expectation: learning how to recognize the ever-evolving encounter between the people of God and the Spirit-filled word of God that extends beyond death itself.

Letters from Sister Penelope, 1965. Image supplied by Dr. Paul M Pearson, Director and Archivist, Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University. Used by permission.

In The Coming of the Lord, Sister Penelope writes, “Expectation is a Christian duty, never more urgent than at the present day, and never more neglected.” This slim volume was published in the dark days of 1953: a frightening year that witnessed the Soviet Union’s development of its first hydrogen bomb, following the United States by nine months. But Sister Penelope’s call to Christian expectation is no doomsday warning. She draws instead upon Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090–1153), who muses that the human body is created upright in the image of the soul. Because we human creatures stand on two feet instead of four, we are able to look out over the world. Inspired by Bernard’s observations, Sister Penelope breaks down the word expectation. Ex in its ancient Latin sense means out of, out from, while spectare means to watch or look at. “Ex-spectation, therefore, in its literal sense, is a specifically human exercise, something as proper and peculiar to man as are the faculty of speech and the creative use of his hands,” she contends. The human vocation of ex-spectation entails looking outside of oneself to see. To observe, investigate, foresee, or imagine. To witness and recognize.

We are familiar with the forward-looking aspect of expectation – we await the coming of Christ, and the general resurrection. But to ex-spect also means to turn and look back, into the patterns of history and scripture that help us interpret our present moment. This illuminates our forward-looking, as we recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit and calls to action in our time and place. The Christian art of expectation is best served by recognizing the big sweep of Christian history.

This desire to see and be seen beyond the trees of present circumstance began very early for Sister Penelope. Ruth Penelope Lawson was born on March 20, 1890, to Frederick and Laura Lawson. In her Meditations of a Caterpillar, she describes going into town with her nurse, at the age of two, from the vicarage where her father served. Penelope, in the pram, hoped desperately that her nurse would take a right at the crossroads, toward the shop of Mrs. Skelding, who often gave the child a biscuit. More importantly, Mrs. Skelding always looked with joy upon Penelope.

As a child, Penelope was considered naughty. But to Mrs. Skelding, she “was nice, always and all through, and by showing that she thought me so, she showed me God.” For Sister Penelope, Mrs. Skelding’s beaming, aged face was a portrait of justification in faith. God sees us in Christ, and “sees us as though we were already as Christ is.… And that faith of God in us is the creative force that actualizes in us by degrees the goodness he intends and – in a sense – imputes.”

As a young woman, she followed a beloved teacher, Alice Ottley, into Anglo-Catholicism. Penelope herself entered the first Anglican religious order to be formed since Henry VIII’s reformations, the Convent of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage (hence the CSMV). She was professed there in early 1915, and soon after was sent to Oxford to receive certification as a teacher of theology. While there, her love of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin blossomed. Her Latin translations, meant for laypeople and academics alike, read clear and lovely still.

This study led to Sister Penelope’s most important work: the invitation to enjoy the Bible. In this enjoyment, as she notes in The Wood, one must draw on all available resources: “To study the Bible at all in isolation from other branches of human knowledge, such as history and science, is like studying a plant apart from its environment … and so to miss the cosmic significance of Christianity.” This is a well-worn path of attention that Sister Penelope treads in nearly all her writings. She usually starts with brief instructions on reading the Bible, proceeds to the Old Testament, meanders to the New Testament, and looks ahead to the life of the world to come, incorporating her extensive knowledge of languages and the relevant historical, scientific, and archaeological discoveries of her own day.

The convent of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage. Photograph courtesy of CSMV.

The Wood, her most commercially successful book, was first published in 1935 and revised and reissued into the 1970s. It follows this path as it meditates on the overarching shape of Christian history. As with the woman at the well in John 4, discovering who Christ is by a process – from stranger, to Jewish prophet, to Messiah, to Savior of the world – revelation of truth expands slowly and with much labor, conversation, and human error. We are still in this living church, so we must pay attention to the ongoing work of the Spirit: “The needs of men vary with place and race and time, and the store whence God brings out his treasures, new and old, is inexhaustible.”

These treasures are so often humans themselves. In her own introduction to On the Incarnation, by Saint Athanasius, Sister Penelope writes that the treatise is “not speculative, it is not original … not even controversial.” It is just a “statement of the traditional faith” of the church. “There is, in a sense, nothing of Athanasius in it, for the wonder of the mystery fills all the picture and leaves no room for the author to obtrude himself. Yet by a true Christian paradox his whole self is in it, and it is through his personality that the dynamic truth is mediated to us.”

One could describe Sister Penelope’s own work in a similar way. Her hidden self, concealed in the convent and behind her pen name, is the medium she uses to insistently direct readers back to scripture and the vision of the wood, the big picture.

In her hiddenness, none of Sister Penelope’s works are flashy, though they are cleanly written. Her metaphors are insightful but simple. In their correspondence, C. S. Lewis gave her tips on style, and she advised him on theology. There are few bons mots suitable for plucking out of a paragraph: the kind I instinctively look for when writing an essay like this, the kind Lewis himself excelled at. Instead, Sister Penelope builds. It is in the accumulation, the connections that one begins to ex-spect and recognize. Her books can, because of this, be somewhat repetitive.

Yet as Sister Penelope’s beloved medieval writers knew well, one repeats because the message is so crucial that it bears repeating, so deep it bears plumbing. To reject repetition in favor of sheer novelty is perilous to the process of learning who we are and who God is.

Within this habit of repetition – stating, returning, expanding, strengthening, and looking again – Sister Penelope resembles a medieval craftswoman. One returns to the special project – tiling or woodwork – within the greater project of cathedral-building. The work is always directed toward a purpose, even if never completed in one’s lifetime. Making stained glass requires the tools of the earthly city to express the end of all things: the reality of the city of God.

For all that, it is their unique work that craftsmen lovingly give to cathedral-building. Saint Athanasius hides himself, and, in hiding himself, paradoxically gives his whole self. Few parts of Sister Penelope’s project feel more foreign, in this age of social media and Christian celebrity, than her hidden craftsmanship. She has no public self to aggrandize. She simply does the work given to her.

At times, this plainness gives a special grace to Sister Penelope’s project. It is very hard to write about the mysteries of the end times. Speculation on the second coming is so often flavored with ego – fantasies of raptures and the agonies of one’s enemies, or simply the delicious idea that we were right all along, and now everyone knows it. But as Christians we are called to expect Christ’s return and let that hope and longing shape our discernment of what the present moment requires.

Sister Penelope is one of the clearest writers on the last judgment that I have read. She dwells on the inexorable insistence that we are recognizable as followers of Jesus by our love. The last judgment is “the manifestation of reality in regard to every individual soul,” she writes. In this “floodlighting of the world,” Jesus the Judge is both “the light that floods and the standard in relation to which all values are henceforth seen.” And then again, “the thing which settles it is love and that the light which makes it manifest is love. It is no less terrible for that.”

In her seventies, Sister Penelope was asked to write Meditations of a Caterpillar, the closest glimpse we have into her anticipatory joy of the butterfly life of resurrection. Joy was already familiar to her: an elderly sister told Walter Hooper, a C. S. Lewis scholar, that Sister Penelope had always been a young girl at heart. Sister Penelope herself insisted that developing a sense of humor is essential to being a Christian. In her final years she took care of the ducks at Wantage, whom she cheekily named after saints. Anselm and Polycarp and others swam around the pond under her care. She faced her own impending death with that same joy and good humor. Sister Penelope Lawson died at Wantage on May 15, 1977.

Sister Penelope’s work of expectation became more poignant in her aging. Every individual lives “in a box, shut away from its fellows.” These words feel nearly prophetic in the age of internet communion and extreme partisanship. “Real fellowship and mutual understanding,” she writes, “are come by only partially.… Even practising Christians can live cheek by jowl with each other for years, yet never get really close. We all put up defences against one another, more or less; and there are very few with whom we dare to wear our soul, as it were, on our sleeve.”

But what we look forward to is quite different: a shimmering transparency of our formerly opaque selves, a togetherness with apostles, fathers, mothers, friends, saints, and strangers. She writes, “When the three apostles saw Moses and Elijah transfigured with our Lord, they knew spontaneously who they were, though they had never seen them in the flesh. If God in his mercy should ever allow me to see Saint Athanasius or Saint Bernard, or any others among those whom I have come to venerate and love through trying to translate their works, should I know them in the same sort of way?”

“[All] the baffling unknownness of the life beyond the grave,” she writes, “is fast enclosed within the one supreme, transcendent certainty: for the member of Christ, to die is to be with Christ, and to know as he is known.”

From the love-filled gaze of Mrs. Skelding to Sister Penelope’s own gaze of love upon her beloved brothers whom she translated, we come to the ends of expecting. To know and be known in Christ is the ongoing labor of Sister Penelope.

I like to think of meeting her myself in this way, in the miraculous familiarity of the Transfiguration.

As we face the darkness of our present day, we should heed Sister Penelope’s call. Ex-spect: enjoy the Bible, map the great wood, discern what the present time calls for in the candlelight of the ongoing witness of the past and glimmering hope for the future. It is not the famous and powerful who best do this work. All are called to know and be known, to see and be seen, in one’s body that dies and lives again, within the one body that first died and rose again. To anticipate and witness to this body again and again, to recognize it for what it is, is the work of a lifetime.