“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

What does it mean to keep from being polluted by the world? This verse popped up while I was already thinking about life’s turbid distractions and about Christina Carpenter.

Christina Carpenter wanted to be an Anchoress. She said, ‘brick me up’. Seal me in a cell from which I may never escape. The world is distracting and corrupting. She wanted imprisonment as a form of freedom. Free from life admin. Free from fleshly lusts. Free from the obligations of work and conversation and relationships and worry and understanding and human emotion. She wanted life without all the life.

That’s something I think about a lot. Being trapped and limited, to be free. If you get a hundred-year prison sentence, it ruins anything you have going on in your life, but it also frees you from pretty much every obligation. No more bills to pay . In reality, solitary confinement is a monstrous abuse, and a source of despair, but I can imagine, like Christina Carpenter, desiring that imprisonment. Desiring that complete divorce from humanity.

The Anchoress of Shere - as she’s known - is one of quite a few anchorites, stylites and other hermits who sought to live lives of prayer, detached from the practical realities of life. Some did it to keep themselves from the temptations of sin. I wonder if any did it because of executive dysfunction, or because everyday life was overwhelming. It’s easy to find you’re surrounded by obligations - to get up in the morning, to clean and tidy, to remember people’s names and faces and birthdays, to get the roof fixed, to bake bread, to help and be helped, to love and be loved, to learn and to improve, to return a parcel to its sender, to account for entropy and repair and replace everything in its right time. Thousands of tiny things which make up the awful admin of life. If you forget any of them, it can build up to stressful and then to disastrous levels. Isn’t there a temptation to be sealed away? Not that you want it, but that if it was enforced on you that you could not attend to all of those things and you were free from them, it would be, on some level, a relief. Perhaps that’s wishing for ill health. But in solitary confinement there is no morality. Bricked behind a wall, you can scarcely sin, because you have no more choices and no more actions. Keeping yourself from sin and temptation, neglect and distraction is nigh impossible in the real world, even with excellent discipline. Being an anchoress, discipline is enforced on you. You no longer have a will worth mentioning.

If you experienced that and you didn’t choose to, it’s a horror story. It’s a trap, an affront to human dignity, it’s bondage or pain. The Anchoress of Shere had to really fight to get the imprisonment she wanted. If you ask your vicar to wall you up alive, inside the church, slip you some food every day and communion on Sundays, but otherwise not speak to you or acknowledge your existence, nine times out of ten they will say no. She fought to become an anchoress. She was sealed up and dwelt there in silence.

And then one day, she escaped! I’m not sure if that tells us something about the flaws of human architecture, the realities of tedium, the temptations of the world, or the brilliant possibilities of being alive and not dead. I think the story would be more enjoyable if she remained escaped, but in time she had to fight a second time to be allowed to return to her cell, petitioning her priest, her bishop, her cardinal, all the way up to the Pope to beseech permission to be bricked up a second time. Like a cat at the door, she wanted in, she wanted out, and she wanted to be inside once again. A holy hokey-cokey, and she dwelt in her cell for the rest of her days, and now at last she is free.