‘I don’t know why the other nuns left me alone so often,’ says Cathy comically, and I can’t help laughing. ‘The order didn’t send any young ones after me for a long time either,’ she adds in a thoughtful tone. And the other nuns do seem to have been away quite a lot.
‘When the other nuns were all away travelling for the Feast of St Benedict, I thought, “Well, because it’s the Feast of St Benedict, I’m going to have a party.” And so I invited people, including Janet and Paul, and I said to Janet, “If David wants to come, tell him to come.” He came as well, and it was a fun night. We had a shared dinner and conversation. Even then I didn’t consciously think about it, but I was really happy that he’d come. I remember seeing him helping Janet with Simone and carrying her out to the car, and thinking, “Oh, he’s lovely with little children.”’
It wasn’t long after this that she did know, finally and fully, how she felt about David. He had dropped in after a function Cathy had organised for children. It was a rainy day, and the children were excited, and she looked up to see David talking to Janet. David nodded to her, and smiled, and came over to talk … and as Cathy thought to herself, ‘How nice to see him’, she suddenly knew just how attracted to him she was. It was a double awareness: she realised her own feelings and for the first time made a guess at David’s own.
Finally Cathy was awake. Her first thought was that it must be infatuation on both sides and she knew that that feeling was not one to trust. But was it infatuation? In the midst of this unlooked-for confusion, this sense of David having overturned her beautifully balanced applecart on its pre-determined path, the convent was visited by the congregation leader for Western Australia, Sister Colleen. Cathy knew her well and had a great respect for her, having lived with her in Adelaide.
‘And Colleen said to me: “Where to from here?” Because normally nuns will go to a place, stay there a set time and move onto something else. She said: “Maybe you’d like to do a theology degree?” And I would have! It would have been really good to go back to Melbourne to do a theology degree, I’d have enjoyed that. But when I was talking to her I did tell her that I wasn’t sure what was happening, that it was probably nothing, but that there was a man around who was kind of … something was happening … but I was sure it was going to be nothing.’
Perhaps because for so long he had looked for a sign that Cathy was aware that he felt more for her than friendship, and finally he could read that in her face, perhaps because there was a chance she would leave Mt Magnet, or perhaps for both these reasons, David chose early July in 1992 to say exactly how he felt.
‘I used to go for walks in the evening. I went for a walk one evening, and went past the corner hotel. Henry Jones (David’s father) and David were in there, so I stuck my head in to say hello. They said, “Come in, come in!” so of course I went in, because I liked David, didn’t I? We were talking, and I said I had to go, because I needed to be home for tea and I was already a few minutes late. David came outside with me. And then he said: “I love you, and I just wish I could tell the whole world.” I knew he meant it and I thought, “Oh, no! What is going on in my life?” I knew then that I had to make a decision. Was I going to stay in religious life or was I going to leave?’
*
The Rule of St Benedict places great emphasis on willingness to listen for the voice of God and in doing so, transcend the limitations of your personal vision. Cathy’s faith required that she not go against God’s will. Was David, and marriage to him, simply a temptation away from the path she had rightly taken all those years before? She still wanted to be guided by God and to read, as if from a compass, the direction her life should take.
So Cathy immersed herself in the work that she had to do. In her spare time she walked, in every moment listening within for the voice of God. That year was a particularly good one for wildflowers, especially for everlastings, which are Cathy’s favourites. Only in some years, when it rains for long enough and at the right time, do everlastings grace Western Australia’s outback. In a good year they flow across great swathes of flat inland like the rain that calls them out of the soil. Everlastings grow best in the places where a puddle once sat. The deeper the water was, the higher the plant. So, where road edges were splashed with puddles, now they were splashed with everlastings. The channels that directed water away from the road and into the bush were occupied now by flowers, floating improbably above the softly grassed red earth. This hallucinatory effect is courtesy of their nearly invisible dark stems, and the way their papery heads respond to the softest zephyr.
In drawing comfort from the everlastings Cathy was also aware of their symbolism. One everlasting on its own does not achieve very much, but in assembly every pink, white or yellow flower works to create a glorious tapestry and Cathy prayed to be guided to the tapestry God had in mind for her. Although these flowers are called ‘everlastings’, like us, they do not last forever. While Cathy believed in an eternal life of the spirit, she believed too that there is just one life for us all on the planet. How best could she give of herself in this life?
She called her friend Trisha again.
‘I said to Trisha: “I don’t know what to do. I really like him, he really likes me, and he wants me to make a decision but I have to do God’s will …” and Trisha said, “Cathy, God wants you to be happy.”’
Of course, for Christians those words are not as simple as they sound—they might sound like ‘you go, girl’, but that is not what Trisha meant. She was suggesting to Cathy that guidance would come in the form of being shown where to find that happiness. Benedictines believe too that guidance should be looked for within everyday life and conversation and community, and so Cathy listened to her friend.
That night Cathy lit a lamp, knelt down on her prayer stool and prayed for many hours. It was very late when the thought came to her that she should take twelve months’ leave from the community—and with the thought came an incredible feeling of peace, like the softest and warmest blanket, wrapping around her indecision, her confusion, her sense of failure. Weeks of turmoil slid away as the peace sank into her bones. Cathy knew she had finally set foot on the right path in God’s eyes.
In the morning she rang to ask for leave, eventually speaking to the head of the congregation. Leaving religious life is a serious decision. Just as when she entered religious life counselling was required in order to ensure she was not acting on a whim, she was now required to trial life outside the convent before making a final decision, to ensure she was not being snared by infatuation. The head of the order asked Cathy to return to Melbourne so this counselling could take place.
With her request for leave in place she went to see David at Boogardie. At this stage David and Cathy’s love was not even suspected by most people. However, David’s mother Josie, a most devout Catholic—for whom it was unthinkable that any man should charm a nun away from her calling and out of the convent, and horrifying that a son of hers should do so!—was unable to dismiss her suspicion that this was in fact what David was doing. Josie is famous for her good cheer, her honesty, her good business mind—but inside the family she’s also known for her ‘40 questions’ and she was beginning to ask them.
Cathy found David at Janet and Paul’s house. He was sensibly, but most unromantically, dressed in a tracksuit. Mt Magnet in late July is extremely cold. It was clear that Cathy had something important to say, so David suggested they move somewhere both warm and private—difficult in Janet’s busy house with three little children who knew that these two adults could be counted on for games and attention. This warm and private place was Janet’s pantry.
With the pantry door shut tight Cathy brought David up to date. He was delighted. He’s not a man for half-measures or nuances of feeling. All he wanted was for Cathy to marry him.
The next visit was out to Boogardie, for Cathy and David to tell his parents Henry and Josie what was happening. Cathy was nervous about this, because the Joneses are a Catholic family and there
is a general disapproval about nuns or priests renouncing their vows—she was equally concerned about the reaction of her own parents. She heard later from Josie that David didn’t actually say who it was who was coming for dinner—he had simply said to his mother, on the way out the door in the morning, quite casually: ‘Somebody will be here for tea.’ This was rather a typical statement by David (and, indeed, many station men) because, for all their isolation, stations can be very busy with people passing through—friends travelling, stock agents, agricultural department staff …
Cathy arrived, very nervous, homemade fruit cake in hand, and hoping that David would be in from work. He was, but he was in the shower, and it was Josie who came to the door. The sight of Cathy standing there must have transformed all Josie’s teeming suspicions into an astonished and horrified certainty and she said, ‘Oh, it’s you!’ in a voice that clearly revealed this.
The four of them—David, Cathy, Josie and Henry—sat down to dinner and the conversation was wide-ranging but did not touch at all on why Cathy had come to dinner. At the meal’s conclusion, Henry took in the increasingly taut atmosphere with foreboding and immediately excused himself.
‘He didn’t muck around with things like this—he went straight to bed,’ says Cathy, matter-of-factly, affectionately and comically. ‘The three of us went to sit in the lounge room and Josie asked all her questions. David charming a nun was the last thing she’d have wanted—she believed a nun should stay a nun and not go off and marry somebody. And she wanted to know, “What is going to happen? Will you still be able to be in the Catholic Church? Can you and David get married in the Catholic Church?” She was really concerned about that. I said, “Yes, we can get married in the Catholic Church—if I was a priest leaving it would be much harder. Women are dispensable, but priests are not. They are pretty strict on releasing them from their ordination, but it won’t be a problem for me.”’
In Melbourne Cathy also spent time with her family. She had been anxious about telling her parents that she was leaving the church, and particularly anxious about telling her father. He had been so proud of having a daughter in the congregation, and he helped out the local sisters with maintenance and sports coaching. In fact, both her parents were supportive. Her siblings felt rather more strongly—they’d been having sisterly intuitions of a disruption in Cathy’s world. They were utterly delighted by her romance with David and they cheered her on.
*
Cathy returned from Melbourne to Mt Magnet in late August. She’d been counselled, she’d lived once more in the convent, and now she was back to trial living out in the world. This was complicated by the fact that emerging from religious life meant Cathy had to establish herself in the way an eighteen-year-old does.
Within the order you don’t need such things as a tax file number. You haven’t accumulated savings. You haven’t accumulated ‘stuff’ either, not even the basics for setting up a house. The Mother-General, the head of Cathy’s order, had asked that she go to the Catholic Education Office in Geraldton and apply for work there. Geraldton is a four-hour drive from Boogardie, so in addition to somewhere to live, she would need a car and, of course, Cathy had almost no possessions and no money. She was utterly dismayed at the thought of setting up a house—before she left Melbourne her sister Bernadette’s husband had, as a joke, given her a little present, a green vegetable peeler that she still treasures.
On returning to Mt Magnet she emptied out her room at the convent and, with the intention of it being just for a week, she went to stay in Josie and Henry’s house at Boogardie, where David also lived.
‘Josie showed me into my room. David’s room, of course, was on the other side of the house!’ This was the beginning of Josie’s careful supervision of the rest of this courtship. She was determined that David and Cathy’s behaviour should remain within the boundaries decided by the Catholic Church—and, after all, Cathy was only on leave. She was still to decide whether or not she would marry David and renounce her vows.
Cathy now says that religious life was right for her: it was just not right for her life long.
‘I am sure I was meant to be in religious life for a time. I went on retreat in early 1992 and the priest presenting was saying that he felt a change was coming in the Catholic Church, where people will commit for a period of time rather than for life. And I thought that was interesting, but I didn’t think it was particularly relevant to me. One of the things they asked us to do was to go off and draw ourselves in religious life—they gave us oil pastels and paper. And I divided the paper into four and what I drew was each of the seasons: summer, autumn, winter, spring. I didn’t think about it at the time, but when I looked back it was almost as if I knew I’d completed the full cycle of my religious life.’
If there was a Bible text for this time of confusion in Cathy’s life, it was surely 1 Corinthians 13. This contains one of the best-accepted definitions of love in human literature, not as a feeling, but as an umbrella term for principled action: it describes love as patient and kind; it does not keep a record of wrongs, rejoices in truth, protects, always trusts and hopes, and it always perseveres. A great deal of the Bible tells us that love is action—and in reading about this I came across the frequently debated question of what was more true—love as action or love as feeling?
Cathy was ‘in love’ with David, but she needed to know if she could translate that feeling into doing. She needed to know how well she fitted with David, with the rest of his life and with the rest of the family, because this is the way of things in station families: business, family life and recreation are tangled together. And, despite the request from the Mother-General that she should move to Geraldton, life conspired to keep her with David and his family at the station, and there she served another kind of novitiate.
She could find no work in Geraldton, but she was offered teaching work in Mt Magnet without even looking.
‘I rang Mt Magnet School to enquire about teacher registration and the principal said, “Can you do relief teaching?” and I said, “Well, yes,” and he had me in there immediately.’
The shops and main street of a small town like Mt Magnet act like antennae for gossip—rumour is refined in homes and on the backstreets, travels in with the daily business of shopping and posting and is exchanged in conversation in the shops, taking new forms with each speculation. All small towns are like this. Few small towns ever have a love story like the one of Cathy and David to wonder at—so on the day Cathy started at the school there was hardly a person who didn’t know some of her story. This, naturally, included the students.
Cathy’s first class was with three high-school boys who needed help with written language. Shocking the pants off the new teacher is the first tactic of struggling students. Of course, this new teacher would be delightfully easy to shock—only last week or the week before, she was a nun! What would she know about ‘life’! At the start of the lesson, in a gleeful chorus, they began: ‘You know what we did on the weekend, Miss? We got pissed, Miss! We smoked dope! And we had … sex!’
Teachers need to direct and shape the relationship with the children—and when teachers are rattled or offended by this kind of behaviour from children it means the children become the ones in charge. Cathy knew this.
‘I just said, “Well, I don’t think those were good ideas, but that was the weekend. Let’s do some work now.” If I’d allowed them to get to me it would have been the end of my teaching there.’
In Cathy’s years of teaching she had found that for a child to be prepared to learn, first they needed to know that the teacher cared for them as a person—not as an outcome to be demonstrated, but as a child living their life every day. The greater your capacity to care and to consistently show that, the deeper the wells from which you give and invest your time, the faster the children will come to care for you—and from there, to learn from and with you. Without those capacities a teacher can cope with the easy student, but has nothing to offer the student kept in
the classroom only through the law and the relationship with the teacher. A teacher like Cathy is a gift in a school full of such students.
Not only was Cathy suited for a teaching life in the bush, her years of living ‘in community’ proved a wonderful training ground for the challenges of living in a multi-generation pastoral business.
‘It was very good training. I thought at the time: “If I hadn’t done that, I might not have been right for this.” I had to work out if I could live with him, and also with his parents and the rest of the family, because we were obviously going to be closely connected. One of Josie’s gifts is her ability to accept a person for who they are—even if she doesn’t like what you are saying or doing, she’ll accept you. And so, despite times of tension between David and me, and family tension, I decided that I could live with them all.’
The next step was for David to meet Cathy’s family.
‘He and I went over together after Christmas. He got on well with my family and they liked him. And next door were the O’Neils and David got on very well with Mr O’Neil who loved to tinker in the shed. Tinkering in the shed and talking to Mr O’Neil helped David cope with being in the suburbs. I had to take him out into the country every now and then so he could see the green, but he found it really hard. He stayed there two weeks—he came back before me—and I stayed until February. I arrived back in Mt Magnet on Valentine’s Day, late at night, and I got off the bus and there he was with a rose picked from his mother’s garden. That was the only flower I’ve had from him—he’s romantic in his own way, not flowers, not presents—but it didn’t bother me at all, I’d rather have him.’
Cathy and David married in August 1993 in Melbourne.
‘You were the happiest bride I’ve ever seen,’ said one of her sisters. Cathy went from happy bride to happy wife. She and David lived for a year in Mt Magnet itself, with Cathy picking up short teaching contracts at the school and David working off-property on drill rigs, driving trucks and mustering goats. Cathy knew that frequently nuns who had left the order and married had no children, or just one child. She was now thirty-six years old. She warned David that she might not be able to have children, or, if she had a child, she might only be able to have one.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 8
