Contrition

by Maura Weiler

  “Dorie McKenna, I’d like you to meet Melanie Bunye,” the extern said. “Melanie came here as a postulant over five months ago. Her family is saving up to visit for her clothing ceremony next week. Meantime, I thought she might get a kick out of you.”

  “I’ll do my best to be entertaining,” I said.

  The fact that Melanie was a newcomer and had stylish, rectangular glasses supported my emerging Eyeglass Theory. I guessed that the various outdated styles worn by most of the nuns directly corresponded with the decade in which each woman had entered the cloister: pointy, cat-eyed frames on the older nuns who’d entered in the sixties, bulbous, owl-eyed lenses on the middle-aged nuns who entered in the eighties, and lightweight, rectangular frames on young women like Melanie.

  “I’ll leave you two alone.” Teresa winked and turned to leave. “You can’t have proper girl talk with an old lady hanging around.”

  “Congratulations, Melanie.” I shook her hand through the grille. “What happens at your clothing ceremony?”

  “I choose a new name and receive the novice habit.” The woman tried to straighten her postulant veil but only managed to set it further aslant. “Let’s hope I can master the veil thing by then. I’m still adjusting to life without mirrors.”

  “No mirrors anywhere?” I’d thought the absence of mirrors in the bathrooms I’d visited was just an oversight.

  “They foster vanity,” Melanie explained. “No mirrors only fosters crooked veils.”

  I laughed. “What’s your new name going to be?”

  “Sister Dominica. My doctoral advisor was a Dominican priest.”

  “Do you have a PhD in theology?”

  “Physics. I taught for a couple of years, but even then I planned to enter the convent.”

  “From the lab to the cloister—that’s quite a change.”

  “Not really,” she said. “All the marvels of science point to the existence of God, at least for me. The only difficult part was convincing the sisters I could be happy without my career.”

  “It must have been hard to leave academics to submit to the rules of a male-dominated church,” I said aloud without intending to.

  “It’s not any worse than what I experienced working in science. I’d probably have more of a problem with it if I’d chosen an apostolic order where I was out in the world and found myself hindered by my gender. But I’ve chosen to make myself as humble and lowly before God as possible. If I were a man, I would’ve chosen to be a brother, not a priest.” The postulant looked at the print of Jesus on the wall and smiled.

  “Huh.” I leaned back. In an odd way, it almost made sense. I shifted in my seat and craved a cigarette.

  “But I absolutely believe women should be restored to the priesthood,” Melanie added.

  “Restored?” I said a little too loudly.

  “Women were ordained as priests up until the fifth century—at least that’s what some historians argue. Women baptized, said Mass, you name it. I’d like to believe it’s true, anyway.”

  “I had no idea,” I said, wondering what else I didn’t know.

  “Our own Sister Scholastica is seminary trained and ready to be ordained if it’s ever allowed,” Melanie said. “We need someone in the monastery to perform religious rites when a priest isn’t available. But what about you? How long have you been discerning?”

  “Oh, I’m not considering a vocation,” I said, and then gulped. I still wasn’t familiar enough with my own ruse to answer correctly on the first try. “I mean, I am, but—”

  “You ask questions like you are.”

  “Do I?” That was a frightening thought I wasn’t ready to contemplate. I changed the subject. “What do you think of Sister Catherine’s paintings?”

  “I think they’re divinely inspired.”

  “The very face of God,” I said, not previously aware that I felt that way.

  The cloister bell rang.

  “Already?” I checked my watch. It was 12:30. “I thought the fifth Divine Office wasn’t until two o’clock.”

  “We’re having an emergency finance meeting.” Melanie made another unsuccessful tug on her veil and rose to leave. “Really nice meeting you, Dorie.”

  “You, too.”

  • • •

  I found Sister Teresa in the courtyard pruning one last bougainvillea vine before the second bell rang for the finance meeting. A light breeze sent tall stalks of pink oleander swaying, while the black and white cat wound in and around the foliage.

  “It’s so beautiful here that I have a hard time leaving,” I said.

  “I hear you.” Sister Teresa set down her pruning shears. “When I first arrived, I thought this place was too beautiful. The fancy estate and the pretty views didn’t seem rough enough for a life of prayer and sacrifice. Then the rainy season taught me otherwise.”

  “Do the storms do a lot of damage to your buildings?”

  “To say the least. Our vow of poverty means our finances are precarious by nature. I never guessed the ‘by nature’ part was meant literally.”

  “I hope you work it out,” I said.

  “God will provide.” Teresa pulled off her gardening gloves and turned to go indoors. “I’d better be off to the meeting.”

  “I think I’ll sit here a minute.” I parked myself on the stone bench beside the fountain, still reluctant to go. “I promise to stay in the public areas.”

  The extern cocked her head and looked at me. “You know, if you applied for an aspirancy visit, you wouldn’t have to.”

  “Have to what?”

  “Leave. Women considering the life may come live and pray with us inside the cloister for a two-week visit to see if it’s for them.”

  “Really.” My eyes lit up at the prospect of direct access to my sister and her paintings.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The moment my self-proclaimed hippie Aunt Martha appeared on the industrial blue carpet at LAX and saw me, she tittered and wiggled her arms aloft in preparation for the long hug to follow. Martha McKenna was a great, theatrical hugger who embraced with feeling, a far cry from the usual air hug most people delivered. Her cut-for-comfort batik skirt pitched and whirled as she squeezed me and swayed side to side. I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral.

  “So how’s your Wagner?” my aunt asked as soon as we sat down at the nearest airport Starbucks, where she sipped green tea from the travel mug she carried with her everywhere to avoid littering landfills with disposable cups. Her brief layover before her Osaka flight wasn’t long enough to allow us to leave the airport for our visit.

  “It’s good.” Unable to wait, I scalded my tongue on my hot chocolate. “I’m afraid to keep it at my house, but I go over and visit it in Trish’s vault.”

  Even though I’d learned my birth father’s identity through forces beyond my control, it still felt like a betrayal of my parents to discuss him, the painting, or my twin with my aunt. Martha, however, didn’t seem to have any problem with it.

  “And how’s your sister, the Sister?” Martha chased her tea bag around the mug with a spoon. “Have you looked her up yet?”

  “I did, actually.”

  “Really? What’s she like?”

  “She’s quiet. Silent, in fact.”

  “No kidding?” Martha asked. “She never speaks?”

  “Only in prayer. But her paintings say plenty. She may be even more talented than my birth father. The weird thing is, she doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  I explained Catherine’s desire to remain anonymous and my newly hatched plan to pose as an aspiring nun in hopes of convincing her otherwise.

  “Sounds pretty sneaky.” My aunt looked skyward. “Connor and Hope, you raised a deviant.”

  “They wish.”

  Aware of the tendency of adoptive parents to be overprotective, my parents went out of their way to give me freedom. In fact, they were so liberal that the only way for me to rebel as a kid was to conform. I think my goody two-shoes approach t
o public high school disappointed them.

  It was their own fault. College professors both, my parents valued rigorous academics over a school in keeping with their own beliefs or lack thereof, so off to Catholic grammar school I went. At Sacred Heart Elementary, conformity was the order of the day. When I asked if I could receive the sacraments so I wouldn’t feel different from the other kids, my parents agreed. I don’t think they expected me to actually like it, but since they weren’t sure about God one way or the other, they concluded it couldn’t hurt. I can still remember the looks on their faces when I was baptized in second grade. I may as well have landed on the moon.

  “Let me get this straight,” Martha said, lowering her chin and peering at me from under her wiry eyebrows. “You’re going to pose as something you don’t want to be to in order to get your sister to let you publish an article she probably doesn’t want you to write?”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is.” I couldn’t meet her gaze. “You’re about to spend a month visiting sacred temples in Japan and you’re not Buddhist.”

  “The difference being I’m not pretending I want to be a monk to get into them.” Martha folded her arms. “If your twin doesn’t want people to see her artwork, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet she doesn’t want them to read about it either.” She pressed her lips together and considered. “Then again, even if going against your sister’s wishes is wrong, your religion does have the benefit of confession and forgiveness.”

  “My former religion,” I reminded her. “Getting pardoned for my sins would require me to return to the fold.”

  As a child, I had embraced Catholicism from the beginning, if only to fit in with my classmates. I grew to like the church for offering the structure and discipline I missed at home. There was comfort in predictability. As an outsider tagging along, I never had the visceral, emotional issues that my “cradle Catholic” peers born into the faith sometimes struggled with. I obeyed the laws of the church, but the decision to do so came from me rather than any family obligation. That took away a lot of the pressure. I knew there was a lot about Catholicism I misunderstood or simply didn’t know, and I believed there were ways of making sense of the inconsistencies if only I sought them out.

  I’d never bothered. I understood that religions are human institutions with failings. I believed the Catholic Church was striving to do a better job of protecting children and fighting for social justice. Yes, I wished that women could be priests and that more of the church’s tremendous wealth was spent on educating the poor, but none of my issues with the institution upset me enough to make me leave the faith that had given me the direction my freewheeling family lacked.

  Yet the day after my mother, Hope, died, I did leave. No bells or whistles went off. I simply stopped going to Mass and calling myself Catholic. I said it was because I didn’t want to dishonor my agnostic mother, but at the time, my real reasons were beyond even me. They still were.

  “It’s a long shot anyway,” I said to Martha. “If by some miracle I get the cloister’s permission to make an aspirancy visit, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get the time to go. I used up my vacation cleaning out Dad’s house.”

  “Something tells me you’ll find a way.” Martha checked her watch. “I’d better head back to my gate.”

  We stood up and gathered our bags.

  “How do cloistered nuns support themselves anyway?” Martha asked as she rinsed out her travel mug in the drinking fountain.

  “Depends on the order. Usually, they rely on alms and have some sort of cottage industry.” I guiltily threw away my empty cup in the trash as my aunt watched. “But their main job is praying the seven hours of the Divine Office.”

  “Sounds impractical. Shouldn’t they be making some sort of tangible contribution instead of just praying all the time?”

  “I wonder about that, too.” I followed her to the security checkpoint. “Even if the sisters are self-supporting, part of me thinks they should be out there working with the poor or something. If you sign up to be a nun—”

  “Then again, just because you can’t see the results of prayer directly,” Martha interjected, “doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “I figured Connor and Hope would want me to play the devil’s advocate since they’re not here to do it.” She elbowed me in the ribs. “You still believe in God, right, Dorie? You take that on faith?”

  “I believe in God. But I don’t always understand God.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “What’s the difference between believing in God and believing in the power of prayer? You don’t have any more proof that God exists than that prayer works.”

  She had a point. I hated that.

  “You take care, Sweetie.” Martha delivered another long hug that I relished. “I have a five-hour layover on the return trip, so I’ll have time to take you out for a nice meal or something.”

  “Sounds good. Have fun,” I said, waving as she got in the security line.

  • • •

  During the drive home, I lit a cigarette and wondered about the power of prayer. Certainly frequent prayer and meditation are good for a nun as an individual, but did her efforts really make a difference in the world at large?

  For my own spiritual practice, I’d fashioned a personal theology out of the void left by my departure from formal religion. I shunned Catholic churches but often stopped by the house of worship of another faith, not for services necessarily, but just to sit in awareness of God’s presence. I found a few I liked better than Catholicism and encountered others that I liked less—usually ones where women were not allowed to enter without a male escort, or even at all in some cases—but nothing ever felt quite right.

  On such visits I’d relaxed and enjoyed the peaceful atmosphere. But now I wanted to pray, to understand what went on in the minds of Catholic cloistered nuns. I drove past my apartment building and headed for St. Monica’s Catholic Church a few blocks away.

  I arrived, parked in the church lot, and sat in the car until I’d finished the cigarette. Stubbing it out in the ashtray, I considered scuttling my prayer plans in favor of watching the pick-up basketball game in the park across the street. Eventually, I ambled to the church entrance.

  Feeling a little queasy, I opened the heavy, wooden door and entered the vaulted, softly lit structure. I forged on and chose a pew far from the other dozen or so visitors scattered around the sanctuary.

  I started with the Our Father and then recited other prayers from childhood. My mind wandered. Next I tried talking to God and asking Him to help people I knew to be in need. That made me feel silly and unworthy. Who was I to ask God for anything? Finally, I sat there smelling the candle smoke and listening to the hoarse whisperings of the bent, old woman several pews ahead of me, the beads of her rosary clinking like a handful of pennies. I watched the brilliant greens, blues, and golds of the frescoes reflect the light. Before long, my breath evened out and my shoulders relaxed. I wondered if maybe I’d been praying all along.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “So you feel you may be called to join us,” Mother Benedicta said from the other side of the parlor grille the following Saturday. A large, silver cross hanging from her neck identified her as the head of the monastery. The no-nonsense prioress’ face was stern, but the laugh lines around her gray eyes suggested a habit of smiling that I found reassuring. Still, she was not someone to be trifled with. And that was exactly what I was doing.

  “Yes, Mother, I—”

  “We try to avoid excessive talking whenever a simple nod will do.” The prioress held up her hand to quiet me as she checked over my written application for the aspirancy stay. “Silence provides our fellow sisters the quiet space they need for prayer throughout the day.”

  I nodded.

  “You’ve been in our chapel quite a bit recently. Was that late-night visit in the rain your first introduction to our convent?”

  I nodded again.<
br />
  “Had you discerned your vocation before that?”

  “Not really.” I was determined not to lie unless it was necessary. “Honestly, I’m not sure if I have one or not, but everyone else keeps asking me if I do.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Mother chuckled. “Having your vocation acknowledged by other people before you recognize it yourself is very common. In the end, it’s up to you and God to decide if the life is right for you. Meantime, it’s good to have healthy doubts. The ones who don’t doubt are the least likely to be happy here.”

  “I do know that I feel drawn to this place.” Also the truth, I reassured myself. “It’s so gorgeous.”

  “We are lucky enough to do God’s work in an earthly paradise. But we are not a vacation spot. We’re here to pray. Have you explored other religious communities since you began considering a vocation?”

  “Yes.” I was glad my thorough research had led me to Sister Barbara and the other religious artists. “I’ve met with a couple of apostolic orders in the Los Angeles area.”

  “Excellent. I encourage comparison-shopping. How did you find them?”

  “Very welcoming. But I prefer the monastic lifestyle,” I said, hoping to charm her.

  “And why is that?”

  I panicked at the unanticipated question and then realized I had an answer.

  “Back in high school, I felt some sort of Catholic obligation to save the world, or at least a small part of it.” My mind whirled, but I kept talking. “The thought was so overwhelming that I didn’t dare begin to try. I imagined that sisters and priests felt even more pressure to pull off peace and justice than the average person.”

  “We religious carry our share of Catholic guilt,” the prioress said.

  “The thing is, if prayer really is an effective tool, then the daily recital of the Divine Office is the first manageable approach to the task of world-saving that I’ve heard of.”