And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  I never understood why the church was so anxious to bring out a new book. You don’t rewrite Shakespeare’s sonnets to make them more understandable; you grow in understanding with the words. Prayers are not portals to instant gratification; they are meditations. The prayers I read when I was sixteen have taken on new meaning and relevance as I moved through the decades and through pivotal experiences.

  “There was a prayer we said at the Eucharist today,” I said. “Did you catch it? I’d never heard it before; it had all sorts of space imagery.”

  “Oh God,” Lorraine groaned. “It’s officially known as Eucharistic Prayer number four, but I call it the Star Wars prayer. All that language referring to interstellar space and galaxies; you half expect Darth Vader to pop up.”

  The sisters were firm adopters of The Book of Alternative Services, and they frequently added prayers from different Anglican sources to the offices. I had a grudging admiration for their desire to pray outside the book; though some of the language in the new prayers did not evoke the holiest of images. Whenever they said the doxology in its modern, androgynous version—“Glory to God, Source of all Being, eternal Word and Holy Spirit”—I felt as if I had been thrown into a scene from Children of the Corn.

  ( 2:ix )

  IT HAD to happen, didn’t it? A few things about convent life started to niggle, as my Colin-or-the-convent dilemma bore down on me.

  Before I arrived at St. John’s, someone had mentioned that it would not be the chastity vow I would struggle with but the obedience vow. I had dismissed the remark: How difficult is it to follow orders? But monastic obedience is different from run-of-the-mill obedience. It goes beyond obeying orders: it is about taming appetites and habits and about pulling yourself away willingly from things that distract you from God.

  Case in point: The previous night, one of the sisters and I had been playing cribbage during recreation hour. We were halfway through the second game (the aim was for the best two out of three) when Sister Elizabeth Ann announced that recreation hour was up. Just like that. We were not allowed to finish our game, not allowed to determine a winner or a loser. I’m a person who likes to complete what she starts, who derives satisfaction from ticking things off a list. I tried to entice my sisterly partner back to finish the game, but she shook her head and said resolutely, “Oh no, we mustn’t. Reverend Mother said recreation is over.” Cribbage interruptus.

  The following afternoon during tea break, another issue arose. A few of us were sitting with Sister Sue, peppering her as usual about what we would have to give up to become nuns. Makeup was a definite no-no; ditto for jewelry, nail polish, hair-coloring products. I knew this and had long accepted it, but now these strictures rankled my rebellious nature.

  “This strips away a person’s self-expression, her eccentricities, and identity,” I argued. “Eyeliner, hoop earrings, and silver bracelets are as much a part of my identity as the mole above my lip.”

  “But that’s the whole point of becoming a religious,” explained Sister Sue. “You have to give up self.”

  “But does God want us to be colorless versions of what He gave us in the first place?”

  “God wants us to love one another,” she replied. “That’s all. He doesn’t care what’s on us.”

  If He doesn’t care, why would a community care?

  Just when I felt certain that I could relinquish all my attachments and not let it bother me, I returned to my cell and stared longingly at a photo of my children that I take with me whenever I travel. Gazing at their optimistic faces and quiet smiles, I hardly noticed how quickly my tears began to fall. I whispered thanks for the blessing of parenthood—despite its ups and downs, it is a true blessing—and thought of how the easy phone calls and spontaneous visits would effectively end if I became a nun.

  My eyes bounced from the photo of my kids to the one of Colin. Our former once-a-day emails had become considerably less frequent, and I wondered whether he had lost interest in me. Who could blame him? It was one thing to maintain a transatlantic relationship and another to maintain it when one partner is cloistered in a convent.

  My engagement ring felt loose, and I knew damn well it had nothing to do with weight loss: the sisters were keeping us well fed and watered. Was a loose engagement ring some kind of a sign? And was it a sign that I should let my engagement fall away or a sign to be careful and hold on to it? Why can’t God be more explicit?

  ( 2:x )

  WEEK THREE. Aspects of institutional living were chafing; in particular, the lack of private time, which I began to hoard like a secret treasure. I would feel a peevish streak asserting itself whenever demands were made on my time. Even a conversation felt like an invasion of privacy. Then again, maybe it was just the heat.

  It was murderously hot outside. The sun’s harsh, relentless laser rays seemed to be on a scorched-earth mission. I sat limply in the chair in front of my cell window staring at the twelve slender white pines (One for each apostle?) that stood like soldiers, the clump of furry nettles at the ends of their outstretched branches like palms pleading for God’s mercy.

  There were few audible sounds: a papery rustle from a copse of poplar trees; the drone of a distant car blending with the vibrating buzz of the cicadas. An airplane jetted by, and I wished I were on it.

  I could feel my faith wilting. The intensity of the Crossroads program had become as heavy as the heat. Compounding it was the headache-like pressure that comes from indecision. The idea of being a nun no longer struck me as borderline lunacy, but what I wanted and needed was someone who had already been on this quest, someone as kooky and mercurial as I was, who was devoted to God, who yearned for monastic life and yet struggled with its restrictions. I truly wanted to be a nun. Indeed, I felt like one. But I wanted to be a different kind of nun, a more active one, and one with fewer limitations placed on my freedom. I loved all the sisters, and I felt extremely comfortable in my surroundings, but there was something... elusive... missing.

  I wandered down the empty, silent hall to the library. The drapes had been drawn as a shield against the oppressive afternoon sun and the effect of the humidity, but a few narrow gaps in the curtains made it look as if the fires of Hell were within reach.

  I perused the rows of book spines on the shelves wishing, willing, for something to grab my attention. My eyes landed on The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. Merton’s name was vaguely familiar, but I knew next to nothing about him. I pulled the book from the shelf: it was thick and looked as if it might take a while to read. It’s not as if there’s a lot competing for my time right now.

  I sat down, opened the book resignedly, and began to read. Within twenty minutes, you could not pry the book from my hands. I was hooked. With every page that I read, my heart expanded and my excitement mounted.

  Merton was a sensitive and conflicted figure. Born in France to artist parents, an American and a New Zealander, he had a peripatetic upbringing. I could identify with that. Although my parents did not move across the globe like Merton’s parents, they moved frequently within a single city, Toronto, inching gradually to the fringes and then to its outlying rural towns. The constant upheaval engendered in me a sense of transience.

  Merton’s mother died when he was very young, a loss that was to forever color his relationship with women, and by the time Merton had reached his mid-teens, his father, too, had died.

  A brilliant student, young Merton gave in easily to passion and excess, drinking and screwing his way through boarding school and later Cambridge University. After a serious indiscretion (Merton never fessed up to it in his autobiography, but I later learned it was a pregnancy that was hushed up by Merton’s wealthy guardian), he slunk back to New York, where remnants of his family lived. Migrating into writing and into Columbia University, he taught by day and continued to lead a desultory life by night. He was searching for his place in life, for something to connect to his wandering soul. He flirted with spiritual matters—he had been raised in both th
e Quaker and Church of England traditions—and after one of those glorious epiphanies that are the stuff of religious lore, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. He entered the Trappist Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky—“the four walls of my new freedom,” as he poetically described it. His abbot insisted that Merton write his life story as an exercise in shedding his ego, and the result was The Seven Storey Mountain. Ironically, the book catapulted both the monk and his silent order to loud international fame.

  Neither the fame nor the spiritual transformation attracted me as much as did his style of writing and his struggles and ideas. I suppose the choppy journey of his life resonated because my head continuously bobbed in recognition of many of the sentiments and doubts he laid bare.

  This was precisely the kind of role model that could help me with my own vocation. The date of his birth—1915—mentioned in the first line of his book hadn’t registered. And why would it? His writing and his thoughts were as modern as anything I had read.

  I rushed to my laptop and googled Merton’s name to see how I could contact him. And then the crushing discovery that he had died. In 1968. Accidentally electrocuted. I checked other sources in case Google had made an error. Nope. 1968.

  As my memory spun through the haze of my own history, I saw my fourteen-year-old self in 1968 sitting at the breakfast table one December morning, and my father looking up from his Globe and Mail and reporting to my mother with a mix of surprise and sadness, “Thomas Merton died.” Both of them had paused to allow the news to sink in, and there was sadness on their faces. So I had been aware, peripherally, of Merton’s death, but its impact had not registered back then. It did now.

  A maturation took hold and shook me out of my lazy religious thinking. Merton’s attitude and philosophy released me from worrying about whether I was thinking about faith correctly and orderly—do any of us get faith perfectly?—and freed me to approach religion more critically, to stop giving religion—the business of faith—unnecessary and sometimes undeserved reverence. God, not the church (any church) is the goal. Or to put it more crudely: if God is the destination, churches are the gas stations along the route. Then again, to some, God is the destination and churches are the bureaucratic city works department that erects roadblocks and sends you on frustrating detours that eventually force you to throw up your hands and say, “Oh, to hell with it; there’s got to be a better route.” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once opined, people come to church in a spirit of hope and openness but leave as if they’ve staggered from a maze of mind-boggling bombast.

  Merton was not without his criticisms of the church, and this too was liberating for me. Although I had labored under the impression that being a good Christian meant being faithful to the church, some big issues made me question why I stubbornly kept faith with it.

  On the magazine rack outside the refectory, I had picked up a copy of the New Yorker that contained an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury concerning the Church of England’s attitude toward female priests, and particularly toward the ordination of female bishops.

  The church was trying to “accommodate” (code for “appease”) “those whose theology cannot accept female priests.” The church was still talking in soft, pillowy language about the need to bring in male bishops to serve Holy Communion to the thousands of conservative Anglicans in Britain who refused to receive it from a female priest, a female bishop, a male bishop who had ordained a female, or a male bishop who had been ordained by a female. I felt the color rise in my face.

  There was a time—it no doubt exists in places today—when white Anglicans refused Holy Communion and other sacraments from a black priest. It was called racism, and the church rightly took a strong stand against it, though the cynic in me occasionally wondered whether the stand was guided by “the right thing to do” or by the fact that Africans were the fastest-growing cohort in the Anglican Church.

  Now the church was dragging its feet on the issue of gender discrimination, and from what I could see, was allowing itself to be blackmailed by Pleistocene parishioners who were threatening to withhold their weekly donations from the collection plate if a miter was placed on the head of a woman. Why didn’t the C of E have the guts to shame the blackmailers?

  I thought Anglicanism was better than that, that it had guts when it came to ethics and human rights, but it struck me now: What’s a nice girl like me wasting my time with a bunch of misogynists?

  It was fairly clear from the interview that the Archbishop was in favor of full ecclesiastical parity for women, but he could not muster the moral courage to push it through.

  The argument is frequently made that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not the Pope; nor does he have authority for the entire Anglican Communion. But the fact remains that the world’s 85 million Anglicans regard the incumbent as head of the faith and are therefore influenced and guided by what he says. It is true that the Queen of England is head of the faith, but when was the last time she addressed the church’s members? With two effectively mute leaders in the Anglican Church, who actually speaks and answers to church polity?

  That’s the difference, the tension, between faith and religion: faith is belief; religion is the institutional arm of faith. Can one be fundamentally opposed to church policy and still be a cloistered monastic? What would Merton do?

  ( 2:xi )

  “TELL SISTER Constance Joanna what you told me about wearing a nun’s habit,” Sister Elizabeth Ann goaded me as I sat between the current reverend mother and the former one during recreation one evening.

  Recreation was a bit of a misnomer; like all of convent life, it was structured. I thought it might entail kicking around a soccer ball on the convent lawns or playing croquet. Instead, the sisters and our Crossroads group were seated in a large polite circle in the conference room. Most of the sisters were engaged in various types of needlework.

  Sister Elizabeth Ann was crocheting a rosary while nudging me to dish out my anecdote from a few decades earlier when I had worked in the marketing department of a record company. One of our promotions involved a British novelty rock band called The Monks, who sang such catchy tunes as “Nice Legs Shame About Her Face,” “I’ve Got Drugs in My Pocket (and I Don’t Know What to Do with Them),” and “I Ain’t Getting Any.”

  Sister Elizabeth Ann knew of The Monks and even hummed some of their songs when I first regaled her about it. The story went like this: As part of the promotion for The Monks’ album (we called them albums or LPs in those days), my colleagues and I decided to make the rounds of radio stations and deliver the LPs dressed as religious—the men as monks, and me, the sole female manager in the entire company, as a nun. It was the early 1980s, and the men I worked with were foul-mouthed, drug-snorting, sexist boors. (Trust me, I am being kind here.) But when I emerged from my office dressed in a traditional nun’s habit, they suddenly turned all gentlemanly. Their tone softened; their swearing stopped; they ran ahead to open the door for me. I did not see a line of coke near any of them the entire morning. As we walked out of the office building together, one of them confided to me a bit sheepishly that he had once been an altar boy. I inclined my wimpled head receptively; it looked as though he was working up the courage to ask if I would hear his confession.

  Our first stop was a radio station at the busy intersection of Bay and Yonge Streets in downtown Toronto. As I made my way from the black stretch limo (we always traveled in limos in those days) to the office tower where the station was located, several people on the street genuflected before me; two asked for a blessing. Never have I had so many people falling over themselves to assist me. Who knew that a nun’s habit was the ultimate power suit and that it was such a guy magnet?

  Sisters Constance Joanna and Elizabeth Ann guffawed at this story.

  “When I had on that habit, I was overcome with a serenity and goodness that I had never felt,” I told them. “Somehow I knew I was meant to wear a habit.”

  “Well, just remember that vocations come fro
m the heart, not from the head,” smiled Sister Elizabeth Ann as she returned to her handiwork. She was working on an Anglican rosary, braiding sapphire blue thread and tying it into thick knots to resemble beads.

  My eyes were drawn to her hands, which were strong but delicate.

  Nuns have extraordinarily beautiful hands. I first noticed this as we exchanged the Peace during the Eucharist and I felt their soft skin slide against mine. I watched their hands during mealtimes as they deftly and elegantly manipulated their cutlery, their long, slender fingers showing patience even while struggling with a stubborn piece of meat. In chapel, their hands were folded serenely on their lap, or clasped in prayer, fingers wrapped lightly around the cups of their palms. One sister who sat a few seats away from me in chapel had hands like white marble. These were not idle hands: they gardened, cleaned, cut meat, and chopped vegetables and fruit in the convent and washed dishes and worked with the sick and the sad at the nearby hospital. They were busy, productive hands but entirely without blemish. How did they manage that?

  I looked down at my own fidgety hands: lines and wrinkles around the wrists, backs showing signs of crepe along with a few faint age spots, cuticles ragged and raw, nails bitten. No, they were not a nun’s hands, but they were hands that had baked and assembled birthday cakes, dug trees and planted gardens, painted children’s rooms, and even installed duct-work; hands that had at times slapped in anger and other times soothed away the tears on a child’s face. My life was written on my hands.

  ( 2:xii )

  SISTER SUE walked into the room where we met for class to teach us about the Ignatius method of prayer. Her lips were turned into that little Mona Lisa smile. A few days earlier I had heard her use the F-word in conversation with another sister. Noticing my shocked second-grader expression, she had said, “Oh, c’mon, we’re nuns, not angels.” Weirdly, the year I gave up saying the F-word was the year in which the only people I heard use it were nuns.