At first I was stoic, but by the second day, I was ready to bail. Now I was cold and hungry. This isn’t Lent; this is the gulag! This is Scott’s expedition to Antarctica!
After compline, I sat on the edge of my bed in flannel pajamas, pulling on multiple pairs of socks to cover my feet and hands and whimpering for a hot water bottle and a steak.
I had made two Lenten vows—to give up the Internet and to read the New Testament—but by Day Two, the first one was out the window, though this was Sister Gillian’s fault.
“That’s a rather impractical vow.” Her smile showed more than a trace of concern. “You need the Internet and email because your work for us involves visiting the sisters in the branch houses, and how are you going to arrange your visits without email and without the Internet to check the bus schedule?”
I could have suggested to her that I use the telephone, but frankly no one, not even a nun, gives up the Internet these days. I could also have done a swift amendment to the vow and given up chocolate digestive biscuits, but my rampant consumption was keeping a factory in Harlesden in business, so as I saw it I was doing my bit for the economy.
Lent also meant that the liturgy would be changing. When Sister Margaret Anne dropped the new prayer book on my prie-dieu I felt my resistance mounting. Why can’t things just stay comfortably familiar? It was like arriving at work and being told you had to learn a new computer system. No one expected me to know the lay of the liturgical land as well as, say, Sister Margaret Anne (who had been a sister for thirty years) knew it, but my own high standards insisted on it.
Sister Margaret Anne wordlessly took my books and methodically began juggling various binders and inserting bookmarks into specific pages to help me navigate my way through it all. Even then I lost my place, and she had to point to the page number in her book to get me back on track.
All this demanded the sort of mental agility that put my self-confidence in question. Maybe Sister Prudence had been right: maybe I was too old to be a nun. I might just as well have laced up a pair of toe shoes and presented myself to the Royal Ballet.
It would have been easier had there been someone with whom to commiserate about all this. I could have gone to Sister Dorothy Stella, but she had her hands full enough with nearly fifty women to placate. The last thing she needed was a wimpy aspirant clinging to her ankles.
As for the others, they swept into chapel for the offices and then vamoosed until mealtimes. Sometimes I would come down from my cell to see if I could button-hole someone, but there was no one about. Were they watching TV? Having secret nun meetings? Praying?
The nuns were all genuinely kind, like a coterie of caring maiden aunts. They offered smiles in the corridors, the odd wink of greeting in the chapel, light conversation in the kitchen and the parlor, but that was it. I needed more. Silence and solitude were beginning to have a shelf life as far as I was concerned.
Perhaps a walk was what I needed. I went into the coat room to fetch my coat from its hook. Sister KT was there zipping up her jacket.
“Going outside?” she asked. “Has anyone showed you the new trail? No? I will then. It’s really lovely.”
Yes! Someone to talk to! I was glad it was Sister KT. The other day, she had been helping me in chapel to mark the pages for the next office when we came across a bookmark that showed the statue of a black angel. We had paused to admire it, and turning it over I read aloud the name of the gallery where the statue was exhibited.
“I know that place,” Sister KT had casually remarked. “My ex-husband worked there.”
Ex-husband? I hadn’t said anything at the time but I was dying to ask her about her transition from divorcée to nun. What had led her to religious life? Had she tired of the bar scene? Given up on Internet dating? Couldn’t find a satisfactory responder to her SWSCF (single, white, straight, Christian, female) profile? Or had she been scratching at the crannies of her personality?
But now that we were on the trail together, I was afraid to ask her anything in case my questions scared her off.
She mentioned her divorce again and said that she had decided to enter religious life after her marriage broke up. Out of anger? Out of pain? Out of a long-held longing to wear a habit? Because convent life was unthreatening? Had she been in an abusive marriage? There were so many possibilities, but it felt smarter to let her take the lead in the conversation.
“You’ll never guess what I did before I joined this place,” she said.
“Um, were you a truck driver? A doctor?”
She snorted.
“Oh, I know... a fashion model!”
“Get outta ’ere. Hah!” She gave me a good-natured shove. “You’re trying to take the mickey out of me, aren’t you?”
“OK, so you weren’t a fashion model. What were you?”
“A secretary.”
I pictured her in a pencil skirt and black heels, her slim legs crossed beneath a desk as she typed something for the boss, her posture erect, just as it was when she sat in her choir stall.
“And were you a good secretary?”
“Oh yes, I quite enjoyed it.”
I’ll bet she was one of those secretaries that everyone liked, the kind who teased and got the others in the office laughing.
“And now you’re here,” I said enthusiastically, in hopes of encouraging her to tell me more about the kind of secretarial work she did, the town or city she worked in. Had she been there long? Did she rock out with her friends at the pub on Fridays after work? What music did she like? Did she like to read? It’s the sort of information you gather easily and quickly when you are getting to know someone.
But when that someone is a nun, it isn’t so easy. Just as I feared, Sister KT fell suddenly, inexplicably quiet. She ducked back into the silent zone like a spooked turtle retracts into its shell.
( 6:ii )
I TOOK my tea into the parlor and joined the others gathered around the table.
“Did you see that article in the paper about the nun who was refused her state pension?” I asked. A British Court of Appeal judge had ruled that the nun did not deserve a pension because she was supported by her religious order. Many nuns worked as qualified teachers and nurses without pay and were regular volunteers in youth centers, eldercare centers, soup kitchens, and children’s playgroups, and yet they were denied a state pension. It was another indication of secular society’s misinformation about how religious orders supported themselves.
“Well, what do you expect,” scoffed one sister. “People think that we come from wealthy families.”
“Or that we have big pensions from when we worked before joining the order,” said another.
“Or that because we live in a castle, we’re rich,” added a third.
“My father took me out of his will because he assumed that since I was in a convent, I wouldn’t need the money,” said a fourth.
“You do know that people assume that religious orders get financial support from the church,” I said. The issue still confounded me as to why a Mother Church did not fund or at least subsidize its religious orders.
The weary smiles and collective rolling of eyeballs reminded me of Father Luke’s reaction when I had raised the issue with him at Quarr Abbey.
Yet it wasn’t as if the monks and nuns in Britain or anywhere else for that matter go out of their way to set the record straight.
“What do you do to correct that assumption?” I pressed. My question was met with uncomfortable silence and lowered eyes.
I knew why, or rather I was learning why. Members of religious orders do not speak up because the tacit vow of humility forbids complaint. Complaining is contrary to the example Jesus set when He suffered on the Via Dolorosa. There had been another news item about elderly nuns at an English convent who silently endured a decade of abuse by their caregivers, the details of which only emerged when one of the caregivers who had been sacked by the convent took her case to an employment tribunal. Through the nun-vine, I also heard
about a community that had been robbed of its savings by a wily secular couple who had been entrusted with the community’s accounts. Such stories will never make the newspapers or be brought to the attention of the police or the courts because of this infuriating submissiveness by the nuns and monks themselves.
“What about discounts from local businesses for your regular housekeeping purchases?” I asked, trying a different tack.
The sisters responded with puzzled looks.
“All the beds you have here—and you must have at least fifty—did you buy them without negotiating a discount from the furniture store?”
They looked at one another. “We didn’t think to ask,” one of the sisters said. “We did order ten beds once, but the merchant never offered us a discount.”
“And all the supplies you order in bulk—toilet paper, soap, shampoo, jams, that sort of stuff—you don’t negotiate a discount?” My Warrior Nun was rising.
Again, their eyes dropped to their hands folded politely in their laps.
One of the sisters piped up helpfully, “If I have a large purchase at the green grocer’s, I might get ten or fifty pence off.”
“That’s not enough,” I said. “Every business negotiates with its suppliers. You need to approach things like a business and demand best-price discounts from your suppliers.”
The days of wealthy patrons footing the bill for religious orders had long passed. Nowadays, donations are modest, not the sort of dosh that puts food on the table for several months. If churches do not support religious communities, who does? Who will?
I’m no economist, but surely it made sense for convents and monasteries to pool some of their resources and maximize their purchasing power. The adage “God will provide” only works so far: God did not create us to be completely dependent on Him; He gave us brains to find solutions to our problems.
I understood that the raison d’etre of a religious order was to withdraw from secular life, but the sisters couldn’t exactly live on grass and berries. Besides, with a modest amount of self-promotion, they might encourage new recruits or find a benefactor or three. There is nothing sinful about self-sustainability.
As it had at Quarr, my brain scrambled into marketing and promotional overdrive. How about a retreat aimed at women, or publishing or promoting some of the controversial bits of Mother Margaret’s addresses, or hiring out the priory as a movie location or the chapel as a concert venue, maybe a cookbook called Puddings from the Priory or Cookies from the Cloister, selling the farmland to an enterprise that could train unemployed youth to be farmers and at the same time produce food for the local community? There was no end to the possibilities. But there didn’t appear to be much enthusiasm for new ventures. Perhaps the ideas had been tried before and had not succeeded, or perhaps that was the point of the contemplative life that eluded me: that you really do focus on prayer and nothing else.
The absence of free-wheeling, idea-driven conversation tugged at my heart like a primitive longing. Could I really surrender to a creative gag order, even if God were my boss? Surely He had something better in mind for me. Maybe I could become a life-professed shit-disturber.
( 6:iii )
BRAIN CANDY: that’s what I needed. All this thinking about how to save the nuns and monks from penury and avoiding the issue of my rape was making my head hurt. The inability to express myself within the cloistered world was beginning to chafe like an itchy sweater. I needed a respite from religious reality, something that wouldn’t break the rules, the bank, and local bylaws.
I had become rather good at finding my way around the castle and had learned a few shortcuts. One evening after supper, I trod across the squeaky floorboards of the attic passage next to my cell, careful not to bang my head on the thick, low-hanging rafters or trip over the Henry vacuum cleaner. (Britain must be the only country in the world that puts a happy face on a vacuum cleaner and makes it look like a character from Thomas the Tank Engine.) I emerged into a corridor of closed dark wood doors. I tiptoed down the long, narrow, threadbare-carpeted hallway, past the sisters’ cells, past assorted offices and storerooms, past the prioress’s office, and down a wide and graceful staircase. To the left was a door, and as I turned the knob, I looked over my shoulder at the looming portrait of Mother Margaret sternly staring down at me. She must have known that I was going to skip compline.
This was the sitting room that Sister Marjorie had showed me more than a month earlier during our whirlwind tour. I had stumbled upon the room again only the day before and remembered that she had said it was available for me to use.
It was a large reception room, the type you would associate with a country home. Original plasterwork decorated the ceiling, and there were very tall windows flanked by heavy curtains hung from large brass rings. The furnishings were a little faded and worn, which made them all the more cozy. There was a television in the corner along with the usual intimidating array of remote control devices. I picked up one of them and, remarkably, the first button I pushed switched on the TV.
A house-hunting program that I knew of was just beginning, and the sight of its two hosts prompted me to let out a little cheer.
The British media frequently ridiculed this pair, but I adored them. They were warmth and comfort itself. The man was always seizing a chance to duck into a pub, ostensibly to counsel nervous homebuyers; the woman in her plummy, bossy voice and impractical stilettos would herd them from home to home like a mother hen.
I curled up in one of the chairs and prepared to put my brain on “stun” when the door behind me suddenly opened. It was Sister Gillian.
“Just doing the night rounds before compline, and I saw a light on,” she whispered. “No, no, don’t get up; you need to relax. Maybe you should have a lie-in tomorrow if you’re not feeling... Oh! Is that Kirstie and Phil?”
For a few seconds the possibility hung in the air that Sister Gillian would capitulate to the dark side and say, “Well, no harm in missing compline for one night, right? Here, shove over. Should we make popcorn?”
But, of course, she did not. She cooed goodnight and, like the good nun that she was, scooted off to compline. Like the bad nun-in-training that I was, I snuggled deeper into the soft upholstery and aimed the remote at the TV to turn up the volume.
( 6:iv )
“GOOD MORNING, sister!” one of the worshippers arriving for Sunday Mass called out to me. I did not bother to correct her; it was a relief to know that I blended in with the nuns and that my being a sister was in the realm of possibility for at least one person. A few days earlier, a guest at the priory who had been told that I was discerning a vocation had exclaimed to all around her that I looked the part: “She has the eyes of a nun!” Not when they’re outlined in black eyeliner and three coats of mascara, I considered tossing back.
I looked forward to the Sunday Mass in our chapel when the local population attended. Sister Jocelyn played the organ at the services and the sound of diverse voices belting out heroic-sounding hymns would cause my eyes to well up as memories were awakened of attending church as a youngster with my parents. Church music has such an ability to ennoble our sentiments and memories.
It was also nice to hear some male voices for a change. On this particular Sunday, one man’s stout and practiced baritone boomed above the rest. I don’t think I will ever hear the hymn “Lift Up Your Hearts” without being reminded of his singing.
“What a fabulous voice,” I whispered to Sister Margaret Anne during the hymn.
She beamed back: “That’s my brother; he’s visiting me for a few days.”
The afterglow of a good hymn lasts only so long, however, before it all collapses at the Peace.
I detest the Peace. Or rather, I detest its placement in the service.
The Peace occurs after the prayerful confession of sins and absolution from the priest, when worshippers are called upon to demonstrate their reconciliation. They do this by greeting their pew neighbors with words—“The peace of Christ�
�—and a handshake. The custom originated with the early church and has over the centuries been removed and reinserted with various revisions of the Anglican prayer book. What never seems to change is its ability to summon feelings of immense awkwardness among the congregation. (I could be cynical and suggest that the Peace was reinserted as a way to butter up parishioners just before the Offertory, but I won’t.)
The intention of the Peace is good and uplifting and even necessary. But it is a ritual that has completely got out of hand. Even the restrained Brits, who I had counted on to wrestle this beast with their usual abrupt tact, had let it run amok. Anglicans have turned the Peace into intermission, a time to mingle and stretch their legs. No sooner has the priest said, “The peace of the Lord be always with you” when the place devolves into a raucous affair, responding en masse like a dog who hears the word “walk.”
I had made the mistake of reverting to my Anglican sensibilities at Quarr Abbey when the Peace was invoked during Mass one day. (Roman Catholics convey the Peace with a perfunctory nod to their pew neighbors while remaining fixed in place.) As I moved from pew to pew dispensing my bonhomie to all five people in the congregation like a politician on the campaign trail, people reeled in alarm. They must have thought I had lost my mind.
During the exchange of the Peace at St. Hilda’s chapel, all hell broke loose. Worshippers struggled over pews to shake hands with all and sundry, one woman lost her footing and fell, and there was much hugging and catching up with neighborhood news, commiserating about the previous night’s football match, extending of invitations to dinner or drinks at the pub, and avuncular forays into the state of the economy. Total and prolonged mayhem. The priest loudly called everyone to order and directed them back to their pews and on to the next hymn, but even then people continued to chat, greeting one another as if they had been displaced by war for several years and had only recently returned.
And Then There Were Nuns Page 20
