“The Fantasticks?”
“That’s right, did you see it? Oh, I’m sorry, of course you didn’t see it.”
“Ruthie and I saw it, when? I think about 1963. It was a smash off-Broadway hit, and is still going strong…almost forty years!”
“It was really great, especially afterwards, and we went backstage to Aunt Ruth’s dressing room. She acted like we were royal celebrities coming to see her.”
“Well, I’m sure she must’ve been thrilled that you were in her audience, and that she had a nephew to show off afterwards.”
David chimed in: “Oh, she did that all right. She shared the dressing room with four other girls, so she hollers: ‘This is my gorgeous nephew Sharbel; so hands off, girls.’ The girls all squealed like…like…”
“Chorus girls,” Mama added. “That whole crowd act like teenagers when anybody good looking comes into the room. You want to know what it was like? Picture Omar Shariff going to Fanny Brice’s dressing room after the show…Sharbel could play his double, don’t cha think?”
Mama was obviously proud of her grandson, and often embarrassed him, I’m sure. Sharbel just sat there and smiled with a slight Lebanese blush.
“Grandmama, I don’t look like Omar Shariff; he’s much older than I. And I don’t sport any facial hair.”
“Of course not,” Mama quipped, “he’s an old man…probably thirty something when he played Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl.” Mama continued to laugh on her own thinking this was a riot.
“And you’re more ‘gorgeous’ than Barbra Streisand.” Sharbel added, making Mama blush this time.
(I’m thinking, this kid is a smooth operator. I’m happy he makes Mama so happy. He did look like a young Omar Shariff with those dark eyes, square features, and thick black hair. He had Papa’s smile, but his mother’s eyes and complexion, and a certain serious frown that he probably got from David.)
“You know,” I was going out on a limb here, “I only found out about you a couple years ago, so I missed all the growing up years.
“I am, too, Sister, I mean Aunt Mary; do you mind if I call you Aunt Mary?”
“Not at all, Sharbel, it’s unique in all the world; you’re the only one that will ever call me that, so that makes it very special. And it sounds better than Aunt Baruch!” We both laughed.
“It also reminds me of Our Lady.” This was Sharbel talking! “I think John the Baptist maybe called Our Lady Aunt Mary.”
That brought me great delight. “Oh, I never thought of that. I wonder what she called him.” And there was a long silence. Mama and David had already faded in the silence of this conversation, and Sharbel looked very intently at me, deep in thought, and then, with a quarter of a smile, he said:
“Jackie.”
And we both laughed. A good shared-Catholic laugh. “Then I shall call you Jackie.”
“That would be swell; my confirmation name is John, for John the Baptist.” And he beamed.
“Well, before we have a little bar mitzvah here, let’s have a drink.” Mama was pulling out her usual Mogen David from her handbag and David was getting the cheese glasses from the cabinet. “You’re allowed to have a little elderberry in Advent? Such a meeting should go without a toast?”
We normally wouldn’t have wine at all during Advent, for heaven’s sake. We wouldn’t have visitors or get our mail till Christmas, but this was a special First Sunday of Advent, and our Dominican practice of epikeia fits here very nicely.
When we all had our glasses filled, it was Mama who raised her first: “To this first wonderful meeting of Aunt Mary and Jackie. Mazel tov!”
The afternoon sped along quickly as I told them all about the Sisters in the community, especially in the novitiate and the infirmary. Sr. Gertrude’s name came up first and Mama joined in.
“Oh, that Sr. Gertrude, Sharbel, you’ve got to meet her; you’ll love her. She was Ruthie’s favorite nun, after you, Becky, after you.” I smiled.
“I know that Mama, and Sr. Gertrude did more than I ever did to raise Ruthie’s opinion of our life.”
David, looking forlornly at his empty cheese glass, broke his silence. “Ruthie would tell me you were behind bars for a life-time sentence, and loved it.”
We all laughed at that. I gestured to the grille. “Well she was right about the bars, and yes, we take what we call ‘Solemn Vows’ that we will live for the Lord in this manner of life until death.”
“It’s like you’re married to the Lord, right?” Sharbel added.
“That’s right, and at Solemn Profession we even get a wedding ring.” And I held up my hand.
“Such hands you should have, not a liver spot on them.” (Mama’s comment, of course.)
I held up my other hand and toasted: “What marvels the Lord works for us; indeed we are glad.” And my agnostic brother added: “Hear, hear.” Maybe that’s his version of ‘amen, amen.’
Sharbel promised he would be back soon and bring pictures of his growing up years, as he put it, and asked me in good Catholic fashion to pray for a special intention.
Mama and David were happy, I could tell, the way it all turned out. And Mama left saying: “I’ll be back in two weeks with a special Chanukah/Christmas gift for you and something for all the nuns.” She wouldn’t say anymore. David winked at me and said: “We’re eating Mexican tonight. We’ll be in touch, okay.” And they were off.
Vespers was especially joyful for me. The reading was one of the shortest we have, from Philippians: Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand.
Chapter Thirteen
Advent Gifts 2000
Since to live the contemplative life in a monastery is a lofty and difficult undertaking, great prudence is needed in order to recognize true vocations and to ensure the timely exclusion of unsuitable aspirants. (Constitution 122)
During Advent and Lent we have a short Chapter after supper before recreation and Compline. It’s a time for Mother to give a little Advent fervorino, or to make any special announcements or request any special prayer intentions.
It was with great joy, as she reread the Scripture from Vespers, Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, Rejoice, that she announced that we would be welcoming two aspirants who will begin their life with us as postulants. The first would enter next Sunday and the second right after Christmas, before the New Year.
This was wonderful news to me, as they would be my charges. There was no longer a postulant mistress, but the novice mistress now assumed that role. I call them our Advent Gifts of the new millennium.
The first was Brenda Hubbard, who was our first African-American sister; ten years ago she would have been our first black sister! Brenda is from Manhattan. Her father is a doctor and has been a part of a movement called “Doctors Without Borders” who volunteer their services in third world countries for a month at a time. Brenda herself is an R.N. and worked for several years at Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side. She is one of seven children, and is a convert from the Methodist Church. She told me that a big part of her conversion was that her work got her so depressed that on her lunch break she would go a block away to the Paulist Church on 60th and Columbus Avenue. At first she just sat in the church and absorbed the peace; then she’d read things from the pamphlet rack; then she began reading the bulletin and in there was an invitation to join RCIA…Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. She was received into the Church at the Easter Vigil in 1995.
A few years later, when she began to look around at religious orders she discovered the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne and visited their convent in Hawthorne, New York. She loved it; the hospital section was so different from her regular nursing experience that it literally made her cry, but it was the hospitality and prayer of the Sisters that moved her the most. She spent her summer vacation as an aspirant with the Sisters. At the time she didn’t know there were contemplative nuns in New York and New Jersey till one of the patients she was feeding s
upper to mentioned Mary Queen of Hope Monastery in Brooklyn Heights. That patient was Helen Parmigano, the mother of our Sr. Antonia. Mrs. Parmigano would talk to Brenda all the time about her daughter, without realizing she was planting seeds of a vocation. When the end drew near, Sr. Antonia visited her mother at Rosary Hill. She sat by her bedside for hours. Brenda was very impressed by that. She was able to sit with her and pray the rosary together for Sister’s mother.
When Brenda’s vacation was over, she returned to work, but her prayer now was absorbed by the Sisters and patients at Rosary Hill, especially Helen Parmigano. She called the following weekend and learned that Helen had died the day after Brenda left. Brenda thought of Sr. Antonia, and decided to pay her a visit and offer her condolences. She arranged with one of the Paulist Fathers to have a Mass offered for Helen, and she gave Sister a lovely Mass card to the effect. Sr. Antonia shared it with us at recreation.
Sr. Antonia was very grateful for the visit and the kindness of Brenda Hubbard, and told her she would be welcome to come to the monastery for some peace and quiet, and to pray. Brenda had shared briefly that she was thinking of religious life, and thought the Dominicans of Hawthorne were wonderful.
Brenda came to the monastery for several weekend visits, and said she was moved to talk to the “vocation Sister.” Afterwards Brenda went for a walk and sitting, not in the chapel, but on a park bench on the Promenade looking at the skyline of Manhattan she got her inspiration. She said she didn’t know if it was the Holy Spirit or just plain exhaustion, but the City was work and nursing and emergency rooms and noise, and she just wanted to be hidden away and pray.
“When I came back to the monastery and was sitting in the extern chapel before Vespers, there was a silence and peace I never knew before.”
So Brenda entered on the Second Sunday of Advent, 2000. She was my “first postulant.” Like me, she loves to be with the older sisters in the infirmary, which makes me very happy. She also has a great sense of humor and loves to sing. Of course, I’ve never heard of the pop singers she admires and tries to imitate. She let go of her pierced earrings; she liked big hoops. I told her there would be “bigger hoops” to jump through down the road! She also had dread locks which she kept although it gave an odd shape to the postulant’s veil.
Our second postulant is very interesting, too: Sr. Grace. I first met Grace maybe a month after Ruthie died. Leah was a fan of Ruth Steinway, and Leah’s grandmother, Mrs. Levinson, lived in Mama’s apartment building. When I went home that first night, Leah and her grandmother dropped off a tuna noodle casserole and creamed string beans with almonds. I’ll always remember that detail because Mama was so effusive in her gratitude to Mrs. Levinson for her wonderful tuna casserole, and the minute after they left, she told me to dump it in the garbage, but keep the string beans. Mama liked Mrs. Levinson; she just didn’t like her casseroles. When we were sitting Shiva the next night, Leah and grandmother appeared again. Leah was able to get me aside, and asked if she could come visit me at the monastery with her best gentile friend from school, Gracie. She didn’t know that sent a chill down my spine!
Almost a month to the day, Leah and Gracie came for a visit. We mostly spoke of Ruthie. But I also shared as much as I could about our life. Leah, of course, was all ears and wanted to know how I came to be a Catholic. I gave them the “Abbreviated Cliff Notes” version. Grace was very quiet and seemed shy. She mainly asked about the habit, which she thought was “so beautiful; I’ve never seen anything like it, in real life.”
“I’ve seen Sister Act probably five times, but their robes were all black. Have you seen it?” Grace was sitting on the edge of her chair. “It was with Whoopi Goldberg.”
“No, I haven’t seen it. We heard about it, though. It came out about five years ago, I think. I did know some Goldbergs but never one named Whoopi. Such a name for a Goldberg.” And Leah laughed. Gracie didn’t quite get it.
I didn’t hear from either one of them for about six months. Then, they came again for a visit in the summer and then again over the Christmas holiday, right before New Year’s 1998. They came bearing gifts, neatly wrapped in shiny red Christmas paper. The first was a large coffee canister, and three pounds of Zabar’s French roast coffee. (“I know who suggested this gift to you. Thank you both very much; we will all enjoy it tremendously.”)
The second was a framed 5x7 photo of Ruth Steinway in her Queen Elizabeth gown which she wore for her show at Penguin Pub. (“I love it, thank you so much. I’ve never seen Ruthie in this costume that everyone talks about. She must’ve been a riot with her proper Elizabethan English.”) They both laughed and agreed.
The third gift was especially from Grace. I thought at first it was some kind of book, but it was what she called a DVD of Sister Act Parts 1 and 2. I didn’t have the heart to tell them we didn’t have a DVD player or watch movies, but thanked her profusely. “So this is the Goldberg girl, such a high bandeau.”
I didn’t have anything for them of course; it was a surprise visit after all, but I invited them to stay for Vespers and Compline. There were retreatants on retreat but they could have supper with them, if they didn’t mind eating in silence with a tape playing. They thought that would be “awesome.” They stayed for supper, thanked me, and promised they would come back again soon.
They graduated high school that new year. Leah actually went to Israel that summer and lived on a kibbutz. Grace went to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology on Seventh Avenue and 27th Street. I told Sr. Gertrude about them, and she smiled and sang softly: “Two different worlds, they live in…”
Indeed two totally different worlds, I thought, as I continued to have visits from Grace who would share with me letters and what she called “emails” from Leah, who was planting organic vegetables and building houses. Grace was eating organic vegetables and designing casual wear, or whatever the next assignment was. Grace was caught up in the whole world of fashion and design. I think she made some of her own clothes, and dyed her hair three different colors. I don’t think Helena Rubenstein would have approved, but then, who am I to say? I recognized more that there was a big “hole in her soul” and that another Interior Designer was at work fashioning His own design. (David would like that!)
She once said to me on a more serious note: “You must get tired of hearing me talk about clothes; you must think it’s very worldly and not a very spiritual career to pursue.” I didn’t know if she was speaking to me or to herself!
“On the contrary, I’ve found it all very interesting. We learned in one of our classes in philosophy that Aristotle—you know who that is, right?”
“Yeah, he was married to Jacqueline Kennedy after John Kennedy died.”
“No, not that Aristotle. I mean Aristotle the Greek philosopher who lived around 350 BC, who said that a ‘thing’ that stood by itself, a ‘substance,’ had nine accidents that belonged to it; these could all change, but the substance never changed…the accidents were things like quantity, weight, position, quality, color, what one was doing or what was being done to you, and one of the accidents was clothes, and it only applied to human beings. Animals don’t wear clothes—but we do. And like other things that we even have in common with animals, like eating and drinking, we human beings elevate these things to a fine art…even movement and singing, and cooking. It’s because there’s a spiritual part of us that stretches upward to the finest form of everything. So creating beautiful clothes can be a very spiritual thing…to do so one must really be an artist, or maybe I should say, the finest clothes designers are really artists.”
Grace sat silent taking it all in. She had never heard anything like this in all her life. “That Aristotle guy was really an awesome dude.”
I did well in suppressing my laugh. But indeed, he was just that! Grace then asked: “Did he design your outfit?”
I couldn’t suppress anymore! Laughing, I said, “No…but he did give it a name, in a way. In Latin the ‘accident’ that refers to what one wears is
called ‘habitus’; in English, habit. Our habit is actually part of the fashion women wore in the 13th century, which the first nuns adopted and we haven’t changed since.”
I could tell that the mystique of our life was beginning to hit Grace, as it does most of our aspirants; some by our chanting, or the enclosure, the grille, the silence, and for many—our ‘habitus.’ So I showed Grace how most of it was constructed, and promised at her next visit, I would bring a coiffure and veil and show her how it was all put together. I normally wouldn’t do that with an aspirant, but Grace was a student of clothes design. She would talk about the textures of the fabrics and colors I had never heard of and how things were constructed.
“It’s never changed in eight centuries. That’s totally awesome. Everything in my world changes with every season. I suppose there are a few artists in my school; I don’t think I’m one of them. And many of the guys and girls are not very nice people…there’s a heavy spirit of competition. And some are really weird,” spake Grace with chartreuse and fawn green hair, and a gold ring in her eyebrow, and only one dangling earring—in one pierced ear, which had two other rings in the upper part.
“Oh, I can just imagine. Our unchangeableness goes back much longer than our habit. It‘s our faith in Christ that never changes. He is the substance of our lives…and come to think of it, St. Paul once said: Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and you have been clothed in Christ. He is our unchanging ‘habitus’ that gives everything else meaning.”
There was a substantial pause in the conversation, but I could see that Grace was deep in thought. She started to twirl the fawn green hair around her index finger and thumb. I was watching closely, afraid it would get caught in her eye-brow-ring. I kind of drifted in my thought too…If I were in the world, I’d like to have green hair too, at least for Ordinary time…and purple for Advent. Then I snapped back to reality.
The Middle Ages of Sister Mary Baruch (Sister Mary Baruch, O.P. Book 2) Page 14
