And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  Our day looked like this:

  6:00 a.m. Rising and quiet time

  7:45 a.m. Breakfast

  8:30 a.m. Morning prayer

  9:30 a.m. Classes

  12:00 p.m. Eucharist

  12:45 p.m. Dinner

  1:15 p.m. Rest period

  2:30 p.m. Work

  5:00 p.m. Evening prayer

  5:30 p.m. Supper

  6:10 p.m. Chores

  7:00 p.m. Recreation

  8:10 p.m. Compline

  9:00 p.m. Greater Silence

  I hadn’t had a schedule that rigid since I gave birth to my first child. However, I chalked it up as all part of the obedience vow. Besides, after half a lifetime of single parenting and being in the driver’s seat, I was happy to let someone else make decisions.

  ( 2:iii )

  AT FIRST the silence felt extreme. I had forgotten how much chatter filled my day, and if it wasn’t the chatter of my own making, it was the voices of others on the street, on the bus, on the radio, on TV, in hallways, in shops. Noise is the aural wallpaper that decorates modern life. Silence, on the other hand, is the interloper, the disturbing element that can be as torturous in its sensory deprivation as noise can be at its most ear-shattering. I began to appreciate why so many people plug into their headphones or mobile phones to avoid it.

  In the corridors of the convent, silence was expected; indoor conversations were conducted sotto voce in designated areas. You did not chat in the library, and you most certainly did not chat in chapel. This ensured that everyone’s peace was respected and that idle gossip was discouraged (though I was under no illusions that gossip never occurred).

  Where silence was particularly unnatural was at meals. After all, long communal tables filled with forty women and food just beg for conversation.

  “In monastic practice the refectory is an extension of chapel,” explained Sister Elizabeth Ann. “In chapel, your spirit and soul have been fed by God through prayer; in the refectory, it is the body’s turn for nourishment.”

  It didn’t help. The silence made me feel self-conscious and exposed. Without the distraction that talking creates, I didn’t know where to look except in my plate or at others going up for food and returning to their seats. Under so many watchful eyes, I took extra care with how much food I took so that no one would think I was a pig, and with how I handled the serving implements so that they didn’t scrape loudly against a dish or drop and clang on the table. I became hyperaware of my posture, my table manners, how I chewed my food, slurped my water, the speed at which I ate (always too fast), and even the way I held the cutlery. It was unnerving.

  As I acclimatized to the routine and the social nuances, the self-consciousness gradually fell away. We were all awkward beings; get over it. Besides, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about my discomfort; I was supposed to be thinking about God. But all I could think of was how different this was from the workaday world and from everything I had ever known.

  In my secular life, if something pinged, rang, chimed, buzzed, or vibrated, I was all over it. In the convent, however, no one rushed to answer the phone or the doorbell. It was like living in “whatever” world or being on Mexican time.

  While it was a nice change not to worry about grocery shopping and housekeeping, that brought on its own anxiety: I kept thinking that I was forgetting something or that I needed to make a list. I worried how my local grocery store would cope with my absence. Gosh, if I become a nun, I might never have to make another list again. The thought was as delicious as it was panic inducing.

  The toughest challenge was trying to exchange my competitive nature for a contemplative one. A brain accustomed to being in overdrive can’t help fueling itself with critical observations and superior thinking. I was in chapel one day waiting for the Eucharist to begin when I began to scan the rows of sisters, heads bowed submissively in prayer behind their little prie-dieux, their sweet faces aglow with gentle smiles. Passive? For sure. Naïve? Perhaps. Feeble? Many of them. My arrogance shot to the surface like a jackal sensing weak prey in the vicinity: Yeah, I could do this, I could become a nun. And I’ll bet in five years’ time I could make reverend mother. Easy.

  Well, that sort of arrogance wasn’t going to go unnoticed by God. And when God knows, He either lets you off easy or He turns off your dog-poo radar and allows you to step right into it.

  The next morning, having lingered too long over email, I raced down the hall toward chapel, my sandals clattering on the bare floor and echoing disturbingly through the cloister corridor. I practically skidded into my prie-dieu. At least I got there on time. As soon as I sat down, I realized I had forgotten to pick up the numerous handouts needed for the service. I got up, shuffled along the row of sisters who were deep in prayer—“Excuse me, excuse me,” I whispered—and went to the back of the chapel, retrieved the necessary handouts, and returned to my seat, disturbing the still-praying sisters with a second round of “Excuse me, excuse me.” All the sisters were gracious and did not appear the least bit annoyed, but I knew what they were thinking behind those forgiving smiles: “Bimbo.”

  Our Crossroads group was assigned specific seats in the choir stalls among the sisters. Mine was next to Sister Helen Claire, a petite and poised woman who always sat erect with a dignified, graceful bearing. She was immaculately groomed and was always dressed in a pretty skirt and blouse. Beside her, I was a yeti. She bristled at this invasion of her spiritual privacy.

  That morning in my prie-dieu, as my clumsy paws scrunched the haphazard mass of handouts printed on colored sheets of paper, a few fluttered to the ground and landed on Sister Helen Claire’s feet. I glanced at her, embarrassed, but her eyes were closed in prayer. Phew. I edged my foot toward hers to see if I could snag the errant sheets and retrieve them without disturbing her, pivoting my foot so that the toe of my sandal would catch the paper. One sheet was stubbornly caught on the edge of Sister Helen Claire’s sandal, so I shifted out of my seat and surreptitiously lowered myself to the floor in order to grab the paper with my fingers. As I tugged gently on the piece of paper, I glanced up. Her eyes were wide open now, staring down at me with a look of perturbed alarm that could only be interpreted as “What in the name of all that is sacred are you doing with my feet?”

  I smiled sheepishly. Without moving a muscle or changing her expression she closed her eyes, and resumed praying. She was likely praying that the clown beside her would be moved to another part of the chapel.

  ( 2:iv )

  FORGET ABOUT making reverend mother in five years; I wasn’t sure I could make nun in five years. We were only several days into the program, and my unsuitability was glaringly apparent. As streaks of sunlight snuck between the vertical blinds in the classroom, I mentally calculated my sins, large and small, certain I had been grossly deluded about my religious ambitions. What was I thinking? I slumped dejectedly in my seat.

  And then in walked Sister Jessica.

  Toronto had just issued one of its numerous heat advisories—it had to be 140 degrees Fahrenheit outside—but Sister Jessica clearly did not monitor the Weather Network. She was dressed in a long-sleeved turtleneck sweater, a long wool tartan skirt, and black tights. Gray-peppered cropped hair framed a careworn face.

  She sat down with a notebook jammed full of loose papers. A few slipped from her clutches and slid over her tartan skirt to the floor. She cursed softly. We loved her immediately.

  “Dears,” she began in a Scottish brogue that was somewhere between Maggie Smith and Mrs. Doubtfire, “we’re going to talk today about lectio divina, a marvelous form of contemplative prayer. Lectio divina means ‘divine reading’—I’m sure some of you already knew that—and it’s as old as the hills but oh-so effective. Society bombards us with so much information that we speed-read everything and retain nothing. Lectio is the opposite: it is the slow, reflective reading of Scripture.”

  Lectio divina, she said, was practiced by the early monks and nuns not so that they could gain knowled
ge but so that they could directly encounter Christ. They memorized the psalms and read the Bible in small bites, meditating on the passage and whispering it to themselves throughout their day like a mantra so that their bodies were engaged in a continual conversation with God.

  “Prayer,” said Sister Jessica, “deepens your relationship with God, and the only way to get the most out of it is to show up and do it. In time, your life becomes a continuous prayer.”

  Teresa of Avila once said of prayer that it wasn’t merely about spending time with God; it was an opportunity to take off your mask. When you are engaged in deep prayer, you expose to God and to yourself your deepest fears and concerns.

  There are a gazillion prayers out there: some prayers leave you dry, others leave you yawning, but certain prayers resonate so strongly that you can almost feel your chemistry change as you say them. You might not even understand why they resonate; they just do.

  As Sister Jessica spoke, my mind latched onto those prayers that spoke to me. One was the Anglican Collect for Purity:

  Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.

  The words cleanse and secret seemed to speak directly to me.

  Sister Jessica closed her notebook. “Can I give you some advice? Don’t go out and buy a bunch of books about prayer. There are as many ways to pray as there are people, but no one can teach you to pray, dears. It has to come from here.” She knocked softly on her heart. “Find a quiet place, close your eyes, and listen for God. That’s it. Some people will rave about a new book about prayer like it’s a bestseller, but you don’t need that.”

  She paused, looked at the semicircle of women staring at her, and smiled broadly. “Are you having a good time here? We do keep you awfully busy; I’m sorry about that. But life is busy, even here. Let me tell you a few things about what it’s really like in a convent.”

  All nine of us leaned forward in our chairs. You could have heard a pin drop three rooms away.

  “Sometimes the pace of life here is a bit more hectic than people think. We nuns get stressed out—oh yes!—and we need to take retreats. Oh, don’t be surprised. We’re not all floating around in a state of serenity with shimmering halos—you might have already figured that out. Life in a convent is much the same as life outside a convent. We drift off during chapel, just like you drift off in meetings; we get bummed out about not concentrating on prayer, just like you might have difficulty concentrating on writing a report or not paying attention to the sermon or the liturgy. We’re human. And we have to be reminded to go easy on ourselves and try not to be super-whatevers. Nuns have the same crises of mind and soul as you workaday dears.”

  Sister Jessica was born and raised in Glasgow, she told us, and had trained as a nurse. She never planned on becoming a nun, but when she reached her early forties, she found herself edging closer toward the sisterhood. “Me, called to religious life? I thought it was a joke!”

  She was now in her mid-seventies, plucky and fun, with a deep rolling laugh. The way she humanized religious life captivated us. Convent life was not the romantic bubble some of us had envisioned, but neither was it austere or humorless. Not with people like Sister Jessica around. What’s more, nuns were not the saintly, virginal beings we assumed they were. Any one of us could be nun material. Even me.

  ( 2:v )

  “AT LEAST we’re getting a cardio and strength-training workout,” said Lorraine, our feet shuffling along a dusty concrete floor as we lugged a six-foot wooden altar from one end of the basement to the other.

  As part of our daily labor—Laborare est orare (to work is to pray) was St. Benedict’s ethos—Lorraine and I had been assigned the job of sorting through a jumble of old furniture and knickknacks discarded by the sisters and then cleaning and pricing it for a garage sale that was to take place in two weeks. It was the first garage sale the sisters had held.

  I was glad to be paired with Lorraine. She was a strong, good-humored woman with wavy shoulder-length hair, and like me, she was divorced and in her fifties. She was working toward a theology degree: her thesis argued that Western churches had misinterpreted the gospel when it claimed that justice was central to Jesus’s teaching, and she was comparing the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible to support her theory.

  “But the Anglican Church in Canada is all about peace and justice at the moment,” I said slightly puzzled.

  “Don’t get me started on that,” Lorraine said, gritting her teeth. But usually she would get started on it and rant a little to explain her point.

  “The church has hijacked Jesus’s call to righteousness and created an assumption that it’s a call to social justice. I don’t believe that it is. Did you know that in the King James Version of the Bible—the Bible of the English-speaking Protestant world for several hundred years—the word ‘justice’ doesn’t appear once—not once—in the New Testament? And it appears only twenty-eight times in the Old Testament. And the word ‘justice’ is almost never defined by the people who use it: What does it mean? Fairness? Equity? Equality? And what’s the relationship between justice and the law? The whole social justice thing is a great deflector, a patronizing finger-pointer that says ‘The problem is with systems and not within us.’ It’s easier for the church to talk about social justice than to talk about the inner journey or the inner work that individuals need to do.”

  In the early hours of morning, Lorraine and I would often bump into each other in the small library down the hall from our cells. When the sisters and some of the more devout among our Crossroads group were tuned to private prayer, Lorraine and I would be in the library checking our email. (The convent had Wi-Fi.)

  Lorraine loved books, and she was forever recommending titles for me to read. Occasionally, while sitting across from one another in the library, my laptop would ping with the arrival in my inbox of yet another book recommendation from her. By the time I left St. John’s, the list had grown to about twenty-five books. (The sheer number of books about faith that are published each year is staggering. The moment you express an interest in a religious vocation, everyone has a dozen books that “you absolutely have to read.” They are rarely loaned and seldom stocked in public libraries; you can find them only in religious book centers. It required a self-imposed vow of poverty to save me from the tyranny of book recommendations.)

  I looked forward to Lorraine’s suggestions because she would often throw in a title that had nothing to do with religion, and once in a while she would email me a joke, which sent us into uncontrollable giggles during what was supposed to be the Greater Silence.

  In the basement, as we sorted, cleaned, and hauled furniture, we chatted and joked some more.

  The other thing that made our basement work enjoyable was our supervisor, Sister Sue.

  Like Sister Jessica, Sister Sue was a character. In her pre-nun life, she had been a professor of ancient history in the United States—and an atheist. It was while dealing with an addiction via a twelve-step program that she forged a bond with God, likening the experience to being wrapped in a big electric blanket of comfort and warmth. She gradually began yearning to be part of a community that was rooted in a common faith, and ended up baptized, much to her surprise. After becoming Christian, she realized that she wanted “more God” in her life, and that got her thinking about the religious life. She visited the Canadian convent hoping she wouldn’t like it, “but as soon as I got here, I felt at home.” She entered religious life at age fifty.

  A side-parted chin-length blunt cut, which she hooked behind an ear, gave her a girlish look, but it was her inscrutable expression with its Mona Lisa smile that hinted at a feisty side.

  It came as no surprise when we discovered that Sister Sue had a “colorful” past, as they like to say in hagiographic accounts. A few of the nuns had alluded o
bliquely to their past relationships, but Sister Sue was entirely upfront about hers—she had lived with a few men.

  We adored her candidness, and during our tea break, the other members of our Crossroads group would come in from dusting the library shelves or cleaning the guest house—Lorraine and I had obviously drawn the short straw when it came to manual labor—and migrate to our table to hear Sister Sue dish the goods about a nun’s life.

  Was convent life really just high school in a habit?

  “If you mean, ‘Do the others get bitchy and are there bruised egos from time to time?’ the answer is yes,” said Sister Sue. “What do you expect from people who live and work together day in and day out?”

  Do you feel oppressed?

  “Ha! Are you kidding? There is a great sense of freedom here. I don’t feel I’m missing anything from the outside world. I’ve been liberated from consumerism and all that other crap.”

  No one had the nerve to ask, “Do you miss sex?” Well, not yet.

  She did not sugarcoat convent life, nor did she castigate it. She seemed proud, defiant even, that she had taken the brave and unconventional path, though she was quick to admit that the call to religious life had taken her by surprise, as it had Sister Jessica. “This is the last place I thought I’d end up.”

  ( 2:vi )

  IN NO time, I was as embedded with the nuns as I could hope to be. I loved every minute of it.

  The place bubbled with optimism and activity, and it had a collegial, noncompetitive vibe.

  Being a bit of an architecture freak, I was initially disappointed that the convent wasn’t a dark Gothic cliché. It had been built in the past five years and was airy, with an abundance of windows. Glass lined the corridors and the entire wall in the refectory, which faced out to a beautiful courtyard of swaying wildflowers and young trees; the nuns’ cloister featured a glass-enclosed porch on all four sides; and the chapel had a glass clerestory that allowed you to watch the clouds pass as you listened to a sermon or a Bible reading.