And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  One day in the kitchen we found ourselves across from each other stirring our tea, and we both reacted with surprised laughter: “Oh, this is what you look like from the front,” Sister Margaret Anne exclaimed. “I’m so used to seeing you in profile in chapel!”

  ( 5:xiv )

  TO BE or not to be a nun, that was the question. I could not make up my mind. One day I was in; the next, I was out.

  I decided to stop fretting about it. After all, if God the Father Almighty, Maker of Souvenir Tea Towels, had directed me to St. Hilda’s, He would surely speak to me again. I wondered when and how He might appear this time. No burning bush for me; maybe the tea kettle? A cereal box? A chair? This is how I know God has a sense of humor: He’s like a pop-up store.

  At times, I wondered whether God was trying to tell me something through the Bible passages that were read in chapel. In Matthew 19, Jesus speaks about marriage and divorce and says that those who divorce and remarry are guilty of adultery. Each time this passage was read—and since the beginning of my spiritual quest, it had been read half a dozen times and twice so far at St. Hilda’s—I would feel prickles of discomfort. I wasn’t sure whether it was intended for me or for the priest reading the passage: he was about to be married for a third time. Maybe the hat-trick marriage was the new thing.

  Multiple marriages are more acceptable these days, a sort of life-stage thing: you have your starter marriage, your kids-and-mortgage marriage, your midlife marriage, and perhaps a retirement marriage and then a nursing-home marriage. Gosh, that’s what, five marriages? Three marriages seemed an almost naïve level of experience. Seriously, no one, or rather no one with a heart, dreams of being a serial bride. Each misfire makes you wonder where the fault lies—with your personality or with your skill at choosing a partner. I was embarrassed by the prospect of a third marriage, and part of the draw to monastic life was a way to atone for my failure in that department.

  Another Bible passage that was on heavy rotation was the parable of the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4: 7–27). It has always made me chuckle, because it revealed—I’m sure not intentionally—Jesus’s sense of humor. When Jesus tells the woman to “go and get your husband,” the woman replies that she does not have a husband. This prompts Jesus to say, “You’re right. You don’t have a husband, for you have had five husbands and the man you’re living with now is not your husband.” Talk about a Biblical gotcha moment.

  I felt sorry for the Samaritan woman and her multiple marriages, and I wished that John, in writing his gospel, had been more of an investigative reporter and had ferreted out the reasons for them. Were they due to adultery on her part? On her husbands’? Had her partners died? Had one or two walked off without so much as a good-bye, or “I’m just stepping out for a skein of milk”?

  Like an epoch, each marriage has its reasons for blossoming and for dying. If I had had only one marriage or if I had never married, I might have indeed looked askance at people with wedding albums cataloged under the Dewey decimal system.

  That winter, marriage was in the air and in the media every single day. While I dithered over whether to enter the convent, Prince William and Kate Middleton were picking out china patterns and mulling over guest lists and wedding menus. Part of me missed not knowing every delicious detail of the wedding plans or not being able to weigh in on the relative merits of fascinators versus traditional hats. That is, until I dipped in one day to the online comments about the upcoming nuptials. The snipes were vicious, especially those aimed at the bride-to-be’s family. The British media were no better, as they feigned disdain for the entire event and offered people holiday getaways to escape the celebrations. What a way to react to a couple of kids who announce their wedding!

  Reaction was far more civilized at St. Hilda’s. Once a week, we prayerfully included the betrothed couple in our intercessions.

  ( 5:xv )

  SISTER GILLIAN cornered me in the kitchen after breakfast to inform me that I was to have a day off each week. The news was like a lottery win. At first I tried to make out like I didn’t need a day off. Sure, I was tired and I was working hard, but sweeping the refectory and praying four times a day wasn’t exactly breaking my back.

  Sister Gillian was adamant.

  “You cannot keep working like this and remain here all the time. All of us have a space day. You can do what you like: go for a walk, go into Whitby; you don’t have to attend office...”

  “Any of them?” I might have asked that too eagerly.

  “... any of them. You can use the day to do errands or as a retreat day. You don’t even have to show up for meals. Just indicate it on the sign-up sheet in the refectory, and I’ll keep a plate for you that you can microwave when you get back.”

  I adored Sister Gillian. She really took her role as guest sister to heart. She was diligent in her duty, but she also radiated happiness to such a degree that you could not help but feel better just by being around her. She would move through a room and deftly accomplish several tasks en route, chatting amiably as she did so and never giving the impression that her tasks were more important than you were.

  I took my tea into the parlor and mentioned my impending day off to the sisters gathered there. They were all keen to know what I was going to do, since it was only two days away.

  “I think I’ll go and explore Whitby.”

  “Have you got a bus schedule?” one inquired.

  “No, I was going to walk into town,” I replied.

  Eyebrows shot up, glances were exchanged, and cheeks puffed out as if to say, “You think so, do you?”

  “Well,” began another sucking air between her teeth to indicate that the prospect was doable but somewhat foolhardy, “you want to go through the castle gates, turn right, and just opposite the bus stop you turn...”

  “No, that’s not it,” interrupted another sister. “You go out the gates and then two streets down on The Avenue, you turn past the mini-roundabout...”

  “No,” injected a third impatiently. “She wants to go through the housing development along Westbourne...”

  “No, the fastest is through the path off High Stakesby...”

  I politely excused myself to top up my tea and steal a chocolate digestive biscuit. (I was considering giving them up for Lent.) My hand was in the biscuit tin when Sister Patricia walked in.

  Sister Patricia was a doll. She had a thick frothy cloud of white hair and the sort of ethereal aura that often gets mistaken for flakiness. During some of our casual conversations, Sister Patricia had revealed a sharp insight, and the combination of her wisdom and free-spiritedness was enchanting.

  “Don’t mind them,” she said in her soft, slightly shaky voice. “I’ll show you a shortcut to the sea where the road leads straight into Whitby. We’ll go for a walk tomorrow afternoon if the weather’s fine.”

  The next day after the noon meal, Sister Patricia and I met in the coatroom and girded ourselves against the cold with an armor of thick coats, scarves, and gloves. She pulled a black toque over her white hair.

  We threaded through a residential area, the wind knocking us about and howling so loudly that it made talking virtually impossible.

  At the end of Upgang Lane, on a small lookout, we clung to a metal railing and stared out at the choppy, leaden North Sea. Far below us on the beach, appearing to be roughly the size of ants, were people enjoying a Sunday stroll. Dogs fetched sticks thrown by their owners, young tots in bright-colored jackets waddled as close to the water’s edge as their parents would permit, couples walked hand in hand, and children kicked around a football using scavenged rocks as goal posts. It was a joyous sight.

  Down the beach to the right of us was Whitby; to the left as far as the eye could see was a cluster of white stucco buildings.

  “That’s Sandsend,” said Sister Patricia. “It’s a rather pretty village. You can walk along the beach to it. Maybe we’ll do it together one day. Shall we walk down to the beach?”

  We started down
the precariously steep, narrow asphalt path to the beachfront when Sister Patricia suddenly turned to me and asked with immense concern, “Are you sure you are up to it, my dear? I don’t want you to get too tired.”

  Bless.

  There were little gullies along the stony route to the beach, but Sister Patricia skipped lightly over these. Her face wore a look of childlike delight, and she treated everything and everyone she encountered as a source of wonder. Like Sister Gillian, her face was in a perpetual smile.

  As we walked along the beach, Sister Patricia told me about her years growing up in Derbyshire. She had taken a degree in literature from Oxford and migrated into teaching jobs, one of which was a teaching exchange to Pretoria. She had fallen in love, but it had not worked out, and she intimated that that was the reason she had chosen a job far away from England. It was only when she returned to the U.K. and got a job teaching at St. Hilda’s boarding school that she decided to enter the novitiate. She made her life profession vows in 1964 and had spent long periods working at St. Hilda’s branch houses and at missions in Ghana and South Africa, which she had loved as much for the work as for the sun and the heat.

  It was good to get out and feel the sea air. The intensity of the wind combined with the mighty roar of the waves blunted my senses and filled me with a wild and pure energy.

  On the way back to the priory, we chatted about the funeral that had taken place a few days earlier. Sister Patricia was as excited as a child on Christmas Eve at the prospect of her own funeral.

  “I can’t wait,” she enthused, clapping her hands with glee. “I’ve decided that at my funeral reception, people will be served soup and a roll and the rest of the meal will be puddings! All types of puddings!”

  “You get to choose the food that will be served at your funeral reception?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. We fill out a form listing all the particulars that we want—the menu, the type of funeral, the music we want played, the hymns we want sung—and it has to be followed. To. The. Letter.”

  She told me that the order had never had a nun reach the age of one hundred.

  “Maybe you’ll be one of the first,” I said.

  “Oh gracious, no! Please, no!” she laughed. “I’m ready to go now. I don’t want to wait that long.”

  ( 5:xvi )

  I LEAPED out of bed the next morning. Woohoo! It was the last day of February—I dislike February intensely: the shortest month of the year feels so damn long—and it was also my day off. I couldn’t wait to see what mischief I might get up to.

  When I heard the Angelus and was certain everyone was at lauds, I scampered downstairs from my attic cell, dropped my laundry onto the cart in the corridor, had breakfast alone in the refectory—bliss—and then sailed out the front door of the priory. The sky threatened rain, and the wind threatened to hurl me off the planet. Perfect conditions to hunt for Dracula.

  Not exactly Dracula, but his creator, Bram Stoker, the Irish-born journalist/personal assistant/business manager/novelist. Stoker had been smitten by Whitby during a holiday one year. He loved its narrow streets; the tall, skinny, imperious-looking terraced houses that loomed like disapproving aunts; the dense, rolling fog; the wild North Sea storms; the nefarious activity along the docks.

  Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, also stomped through this town, and I wondered whether Stoker had come to the town to mop up some of the muse dust left by Dodgson/Carroll.

  In 1885, during a storm, a Russian schooner crashed into Whitby Harbour, and the event became the catalyst for Stoker’s dark tale of coffins, vampires, and a pair of innocent girls—Mina and Lucy—on a seaside holiday.

  The good folks of Whitby are not the least bit offended to be associated with a blood-sucking count, and both Stoker and Dracula have pride of place in its tourist industry.

  I sat down on a bench to take in the landscape and the atmosphere that had inspired Stoker. The River Esk bisects Whitby, dividing it into two steep cliffs known—none too imaginatively—as East Cliff and West Cliff. They are linked by an iron swing bridge (in Dracula it is referred to as “the drawbridge,” across which Mina makes a breathless dash toward the churchyard to save her friend Lucy). Directly across from me on the opposite cliff, high above the Esk, was the churchyard of St. Mary’s, and behind it loomed the eerie, skeletal remains of Whitby Abbey. Seagulls soared and dipped agitatedly through the moody skies above the harbor, their high-pitched screeches sounded like screams. All that was missing was a fog machine and a bat.

  Several gulls landed nearby and strutted muscularly toward me like hoodlums. As if to reinforce their territorial prerogative, they set about using the patch right in front of me for their morning shit. I moved on, their beady little eyes following me. Has anyone noticed that certain species of birds—gulls, geese, swans, pigeons, crows come immediately to mind—seem to have interbred with a biker gang?

  Once a thriving shipbuilding and fishing center, Whitby, like many mid-sized towns in Britain, was floundering through the New Economy with high levels of underemployment and unemployment along with the ancillary social wreckage. Another round of job cuts to the decimated fishing industry had just been announced in the local newspaper.

  With Stoker and his toothy creation in its back pocket, Whitby had repurposed itself as a tourist destination. About 90 percent of the working population now toils in the service industry.

  I made my way through twisting passageways and subways, down steep steps, past Victorian brick homes with their red pantiled roofs snuggled together along quiet, wet narrow streets.

  I crossed the swing bridge to Church Street, a narrow, cobblestone street jammed with quaint tea rooms, sweet shops, and jewelry boutiques selling creations fashioned with Whitby jet. There were also goth shops galore stocked with skull jewelry and vampy-looking lingerie and feather boas, and goth-inspired housewares. Looking for a set of vampire bookends or a toilet brush with Dracula’s head as the handle? You will find it here. The goth-nun I had met at St. Cecilia’s was right about Whitby’s goth reputation.

  Church Street ended at the base of the 199 Steps, which Mina clambered up on a dark and stormy night to warn Lucy before Dracula planted his incisors in her neck. I started up the steps myself. It is one of the “things” you do when you visit Whitby.

  The steps—pedantic locals will remind you that “stairs” are made of wood and “steps” are made of stone—have existed for four hundred years. In the early 1800s, the wood treads and risers were replaced with stone, and handrails and landings were added to make the journey easier for pallbearers hauling coffins up to the church cemetery. Judging from historical accounts, the refurb had not entirely solved the problem: in several instances the coffin had slipped from the pallbearers’ grip and torpedoed back down to the base.

  At the top of the steps in the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church, I wandered among the worn, battered gravestones, their inscriptions all but erased by time and the elements, and then nosed around the twelfth-century church before crossing the churchyard to Whitby Abbey, site of a thirteenth-century Benedictine monastery.

  For tourist and goth potential, you could not wish for a more dramatic landmark. The ruins are noticeable the moment you enter the town, and they follow you everywhere you go in Whitby: in fact, I could see them all the way from St. Hilda’s Priory. The iconic silhouette of Whitby Abbey is festooned on almost every piece of tourism material, on the ubiquitous Whitby jet jewelry, on café menus, on souvenir tea towels, and in books. In the last eight hundred years, the Abbey has been subjected to climatic battery, pillaging vandals, and war bombs. It is remarkable that so much of it is still standing. Up close, the lacey ruins of mottled charcoal stone stand like an old soldier before a cenotaph, damaged and scarred but resolutely upright.

  Weeks earlier in York, I had stood near the site where thirteen-year-old Hilda had been baptized with her uncle King Edwin. Now I stood on the site where her spiritual journey had brought her, and where she had founded a mixed
religious community in 657. There is nothing left of the buildings from that era—people mistakenly think the Abbey ruins are from Hilda’s time—yet she is inextricably linked to Whitby, and to Northern England.

  It was said of Hilda that she was a patient woman, energetic and blessed with the ability to recognize the paraclete—the spirit of personality—in people. It was Hilda who overheard a young cowherd named Caedmon singing to himself, nurtured his gift, and turned him into one of the great Celtic poets. It was Hilda who schooled five monks who eventually became bishops. And it was Hilda who hosted the first synod, the Synod of Whitby, in 664, at which a heated debate ultimately decided the way we calculate the date for Easter.

  How sadly ironic, then, that the site where Britain’s first recognized female priest established her community and where many believe Christianity officially took root in Britain had been appropriated by the cult of a fictional demon.

  The Winter Desert

  ················

  Order of the Holy Paraclete

  Whitby, England

  A MONK’S LIFE SHOULD always be like a Lenten observance.” So declared St. Benedict. No wonder his monks tried to poison him.

  Lent is the desert season, an intense, bleak period requiring more spiritual vigilance, deeper introspection, and greater resistance to self-gratification than is demanded during the rest of the Christian calendar. The grand reward is spiritual transformation.

  From a liturgical point of view, I could not have chosen a better time than Lent to continue discerning my vocation to be a nun. From a psychological point of view, it almost did me in.

  I have always thought the church misses an opportunity at Lent to encourage people, regardless of their faith, to use the forty days and forty nights as a personal challenge—to quit smoking, lose weight, volunteer in the community, and otherwise set goals to change or improve their lives.

  Lent appeals to the part of me that likes rigorous self-improvement, so when one sister cautioned, “If you can survive Lent in a convent, you can survive anything,” my reaction on the morning of Ash Wednesday was, No sweat, baby, followed by a cavalier chuckle. That blithe attitude lasted until suppertime, when I discovered that the bun-and-tea menu from breakfast would be repeated at supper. Almost every night. Until Easter.