And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  Rabbi? Rabbi! I shook my head slowly and heaved a quiet sigh of resignation: like I needed further proof that I was weird. Besides, even I knew that female rabbis were not yet a kosher concept. I scanned the rows of classmates and overheard them discussing their results, the more sensible occupations: doctor, lawyer, engineer, nurse, teacher.

  “What did you get, Jane?” a pal whispered across the classroom aisle.

  “Teacher,” I replied with a who-knew shrug and stashed the results in the back of a textbook.

  I never mentioned my attraction to religious life to anyone. Who would understand? How could I explain my feelings without sounding like a Jesus freak? Some would have laughed or thought my desire was eccentric—positively medieval. Others might have been happy for me, but I worried that even the approving comments might jinx my convictions. I wanted to do things under my own steam without anyone’s approval or disapproval.

  Another reason for playing my cards close to my vest was that religion wasn’t having an easy time in the seventies. What was once a cornerstone of society, even a grudgingly admitted one, was now openly mocked and scorned. This cataclysmic cultural shift occurred right before my eyes: one moment you were regarded with suspicion if you did not attend church or synagogue; the next, you were regarded with suspicion if you did. Religion had lost all authority and almost all respectability. People did not even bother to pretend to tolerate it any- more. When they turned their eyes toward heaven, it was for moon walks and space missions.

  This downgrading stung, for even during my nihilistic God-is-flimsy periods, I had felt protective of God or at least the idea of God. Now, expressing an affinity for anything religious left you open to mockery.

  One Christmas Eve, a friend and I joined the happy throngs of fans leaving Maple Leaf Gardens after a hockey game. I think the Toronto Maple Leafs actually won the game but I’m not sure. (The Maple Leafs have always been better as a theory than they were on the ice.) Not that it mattered: my friend and I were excitedly reliving the moment a few hours earlier when we had found ourselves walking alongside our heartthrob, the defenseman Jim McKenny, as he strode into Maple Leaf Gardens for the night’s game. (There was a time, boys and girls, when professional sports players arrived at a venue under their own steam and not in a chauffeured limousine with tinted windows.) My friend and I were swooning about this thrill as we climbed into the car of the boyfriend of my friend’s sister, who had arrived to pick us up and drive us home. As we neared my home, I asked the boyfriend to drop me off at church because I was meeting my parents at the midnight service.

  “Church? Church?” he exclaimed loudly, as if it were a ridiculous concept.

  When he stopped the car in front of St. Timothy’s Anglican Church, he turned his head and stared at me with a smirk that dripped contempt. My hand was already groping for the door handle.

  “Hey, make sure you say hi to God for me,” he sneered, putting sarcastic emphasis on “God.” He might as well have said “the Lucky Charms guy.”

  My face burned with shame. I would have told him to go fuck himself, but it would be another decade before I developed that kind of courage. Instead, I offered a cheerful “Merry Christmas,” got out of the car, and watched it squeal off into the night.

  I had pretended not to care what he had said, but in truth the remark cut deeply. Beneath the beam of a streetlight dappled with falling snow I walked slowly toward the church and let the frigid night air shock my tears into submission.

  ( 1:iv )

  I MANAGED to hang on to my faith through the vicissitudes of religious attitudes and societal upheavals, but I never did become a nun: I finished high school, graduated from university, and merged into a journalism career, along with marriage, home ownership, motherhood, divorce, remarriage, divorce, and single parenthood.

  I was blessed with mostly exhilarating jobs, and I loved the caffeinated rush of working to heart-stopping deadlines amid a cacophony of shouts across the newsrooms, phones ringing, computer keys clacking, and underlying it all the seismic rumble of a printing press from the basement. Nowadays, of course, newsrooms are preternaturally quiet. Like convents. I left journalism just before it got uninteresting, and moved into the gulag to where all ex-journalists migrate—communications and public relations.

  By my mid-fifties, the daily grind had turned into a murky decaf slop of office politics that was sucking out my soul and turning me into the worst version of myself. My boss had taken a sudden dislike to me, and lacking the courage to fire me, embarked on a silent campaign of humiliation and bullying. I could no longer smell the coffee; I could only smell change. That’s when the Voice Within perked up: You could be a nun now. The very idea made me gasp in a thrilling sort of way.

  One cold January night, as wreaths of snow swirled outside my window, I tapped a few words into a search engine and was brought to the website for the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine (SSJD), an order of Anglican nuns in Canada. I hadn’t expected to find Anglican nuns in Canada, but, well, there is no end to the surprises found on the Internet.

  The sisters were running a month-long program that summer with the tantalizing title of Women at a Crossroads, “for women who are seeking direction in their lives.”

  That’s me! I practically yelled out.

  I scrambled together the required documents and called on a couple of friends to provide character references; I filled out the necessary forms, wrote a letter begging to be accepted, and mailed everything off to the reverend mother. I had four weeks remaining of vacation time at work, and I promptly booked it off. (Unaware of my disengagement, my colleagues assumed I was getting married.) Then I prayed like I had never prayed before and anxiously waited out the next two months for a reply from the convent.

  In the meantime, I told my minister what I had done.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “You’re the third woman in two weeks to ask me about entering the sisterhood. What’s going on?”

  ( 1:v )

  IN 2010, there were 2,154 celibate religious in more than 80 Anglican communities around the world and another 3,500 in acknowledged religious communities (as opposed to holy orders). Of the celibates, 1,231 were women and 923 were men, with the majority residing in the Australian and Pacific regions (865), followed by Europe (566) and Africa (343). It was a paltry cohort when juxtaposed with the nearly 60,000 Roman Catholic nuns in the U.S. alone.

  Although media reports would have us believe that these are grim times for nuns—what with convents being shuttered and aging nuns being decanted into nursing homes—there are shoots of regeneration. The biggest growth is in Roman Catholic ranks—an order of Dominican nuns in Tennessee had 90 sisters join between 2007 and 2012—but new monastic orders, both Anglican and Catholic, have cropped up in Britain and North America. Some are dispersed communities; others are cloistered. Some are single sex; others are mixed. Some are urban; some are rural.

  Interestingly, a religious vocation is not an uncommon second career for women. There are two stages in life when women are drawn to spiritual change—in their teens and twenties, and again in their late forties and fifties.

  You do not hear much about nuns these days unless they are being parodied, singled out for their cruelty, or scolded by the Vatican for espousing feminist ideals. For too long, a veil has been drawn over their remarkable contributions.

  Eons ago, convents were Christian hubs of classical culture and education, the places where the clever girls could be found writing theological treatises and historical tomes, composing hymns and prayers, painstakingly illuminating manuscripts, and devising new applications for everything from health care to education. Nuns cut their hair short and dressed like men to infiltrate the realms of medicine and law. Their natural acumen earned them high praise from Jerome, the avuncular theologian and historian, who wrote in his commentaries on St. Paul’s epistles that the nuns “were more capable of forming a judgment [on the epistles] than most men.”

  Nuns were envied by their se
cular sisters. They were well read, often spoke at least two languages, and had unparalleled freedom; their living conditions were usually better and safer than those of women who lived outside the convent.

  Throughout history, a few nuns have risen to prominence: Hildegard von Bingen for polyphonic music and chant and for her Liber simplicis medicinae (Simple Book of Medicine), written in 1160 and considered a seminal book on herbal remedies; Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux for their visions; Mother Teresa for her orphanages and homes for the dying; Sister Helen Prejean for her crusade against capital punishment; Sister Wendy Beckett for her fresh interpretation of art history; and Sister Joan Chittister for her vision and courage in standing up to the Vatican. One of my favorites is Ani Pachen, a Tibetan nun who, in 1959, led six hundred guerrillas on horseback against the Chinese Communists. She was captured and imprisoned, and upon her release in 1981, she walked for nearly a month to Nepal to meet the Dalai Lama. I also admired Princess Alice, the profoundly deaf mother of the Duke of Edinburgh, who established a small and short-lived nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns.

  More prevalent and less known is the heroic legion of nuns who run urban drop-in centers, clinics, food banks, soup kitchens, orphanages, and schools, and whose contribution to the poor, the elderly, and the marginalized goes unacknowledged by governments and churches.

  Monks, on the other hand, are seen as the nice guys. You always hear about how they invented accounting and developed aqueducts and other marvels of engineering during medieval times. It was a Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon, who made advancements in viniculture in the Champagne region of France. Francis of Assisi sang in the hills with his friar buddies, and today the Dalai Lama enjoys global influence and respect. In return, Hollywood has given us cool, somewhat goofy, kid-friendly monks (Jackie Chan in The Karate Kid, Jack Black in Nacho Libre, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).

  When it comes to nuns, however, you’ll find them in popular culture’s cliché pile. It’s either spring-loaded Streep in Doubt or Whoopi in a wimple or the aforementioned Sister Wendy, a bona fide nun in the socially awkward vein. At the far end of the scale is the nun as temptress or rubber-clad bondage dominatrix.

  Nuns are singled out in the scandals—the atrocities involving nuns and priests against many First Nations children in Canadian residential schools, at the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, in an abundant succession of pedophilia cases in the United States. All these reveal religious life’s evil, cancerous side and deserve the strongest punishment possible.

  And while the scandals reinforce the myth of nun as ruler-wielding crone, they completely discount the huge contribution made by many whose self-discipline, kindness, and unsung good works have been eclipsed by the despicable deeds of a very small percentage. Some former residential school students have insisted that without the care and encouragement of the many good nuns, they might never have escaped the cycle of poverty and alcohol abuse that pervaded their home communities.

  As I continued my own preliminary research into religious life, I sought out nuns and former nuns. I did not gain much practical advice. The opposite, in fact. Most were still spilling their pent-up rage against both the church and cloistered life despite having left religious life forty years earlier. They spoke angrily about the stuffiness of the convent, how the surrender of self had shorn away their confidence, how the lockstep, muzzled routine had felt like prison. One admitted that she had only joined a religious order to escape her domineering mother.

  Another former nun, a friend of mine, was more measured. Mary Lou, who readers may recall from my book about Pelee Island, had been kicked out of the convent in her late twenties by a mother superior who felt she was too spirited for religious life. Although Mary Lou has gone on to have a full and creative life as a wife, mother, and grandmother, she admitted to still feeling a tinge of sadness about the experience. “I still consider myself a nun,” she said. “A nun of the world.” I liked that sentiment.

  Sister Eileen Schuller seemed to embody that paradigm. A member of the Ursulines, she had more freedom than most nuns I had met. She was a university professor and traveled extensively as an expert in Dead Sea Scrolls research. The Ursulines are a radical bunch in this regard. The order was founded in Italy in 1535 by St. Angela Merici, who believed that women could live holy lives without living in convents and could stay connected to their sisterly community through regular gatherings. This approach was revolutionary and practical, and it blended the spiritual with the secular while fashioning a countercultural lifestyle within a conventional framework.

  The few people in whom I confided my monastic intentions sputtered alarm that I would waste my time with an entity as corrupt and murderous as the church. Even a few of the former nuns were repelled by the idea that I would consider religious life when I should be working instead to eradicate a “repressive” system. They obviously had not inhabited my convent fantasy.

  Truth be told, I had a lot of issues with organized religion myself. I had to keep reminding myself that churches, like any institution and human construct, are prone to moral failings and dysfunction. Just as the prettiest vineyard doesn’t produce the best wine, neither does the grandest cathedral or the most respected theology think tank produce the holiest specimens.

  And yes, the church itself has a cathedral-sized closet’s worth of skeletons, but convents and monasteries have often been the antidote to organized religion’s seedier side. Indeed, many men and women have fled the oppressive hierarchical structure of organized religion for the relatively less politically charged atmosphere of religious communities.

  Yet, the reality can be crushing. We heap considerable trust on religious institutions and clergy, and feel utterly betrayed when they fail to deliver on their promise of caring for our spiritual health.

  A few years ago, I put my own church to the test. I had been a relatively active member for about 20 years; gave of my purse regularly and of my time in the Sunday school and in the day-care center, provided baked goods and professional advice—whatever was asked. One day I stopped going to church to see how long it would take before my absence was noticed. Two years went by, and there was not a peep from them, not a phone call or an email, though I did receive a letter asking if I would please increase my weekly donation. That stung.

  It should have been my cue to change churches, but I returned to the same one for sentimental reasons until I eventually moved to another city. It says a lot when you can keep your faith in spite of the unholy thoughts you harbor about your church.

  That’s what faith is to me, a grand adventure of the soul, at times exhilarating, at times disappointing. Sort of what Chesterton was saying. Faith is not the surrender of the mind, as some have characterized it, but the expansion of it, and of the heart and spirit as well. It is head-scratching, yes, weird at times, nonsensical, but also brilliant and moving in its simplicity and in the good it succeeds in doing.

  Maybe part of my journey into religious life was subconsciously about seeking a new spiritual home. Or maybe it really was about simply wanting to be a nun. I had to find out.

  And if I believed that God indeed inhabits each of us, then perhaps those “calls” were invitations to grow and to live a more purposeful life. It is more socially acceptable to put on our secular hats and call it “wanderlust” or “itchy feet” or “midlife/later midlife crisis,” but at the heart of these intuitive prompts is the pulsating desire to enter the soul, the God zone.

  A call to be a nun. Really? Even though I had gone over this a million times, the idea had a frisson of lunacy to it; at other times it seemed like the most logical of actions. Yes, be a nun. Why not? And then the other side of my brain would kick in with Oh, c’mon! Are you really going to trade a condo for a convent? Colin for Christ?

  At a Crossroads

  ················

  The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine

  Toronto, Canada

  WHEN I STOOD at the door of th
e Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, a tremulous finger poised at the doorbell, I got a sudden case of the willies. What the hell am I doing here?

  During the previous months I had been a veritable religion sponge. When I wasn’t attending church and reading the Bible, I was gobbling up stories in the media about faith and religion, poring over research and studies of a religious or quasi-religious nature, googling religious communities, dipping into religious blogs, scouring the religion section of bookstores, and joining discussions about religion at every opportunity. I visited churches that were experimenting with new forms of worship, such as Contemplative Fire, that were trying to steer religion back to its monastic roots. It was terrifically exciting. I could not have been more enthusiastic had I stumbled upon a new series of cave drawings.

  But if you nose around something long enough, you may discover that what appears on the surface to be decent has pale squirmy stuff writhing just beneath.

  And what I realized was this: organized religion was bitchy territory. Never have I encountered more malcontents in a sector that was meant to uplift people while they searched for answers about the existence of God.

  There were complaints about leadership, hypocrisy, the pomposity of the priests, the masonic-like cliques that ran the church, the incessant rearrangement of the pews being done in the name of pulling in more (and younger) worshippers. And this was just from the churchgoers. Internally, the church was in trouble, too. Priests were overworked and stressed out. Two priests separately confided that they doubted the existence of God; another had been practically run out of town under suspicions that he was gay; and still another was forced to step down over allegations that he had seduced a female parishioner.

  All that was only the tip of the iceberg. Christianity was in a state of rope-a-dope as it careened from one smackdown to another by a brigade of New Atheists. These wise guys had the easy charm, glib wit, and condescending smirks of stand-up comedians, mocking the faithful as being delusional and possessed of infantilized minds. Persecution dressed up as intellectual snobbery.