The range of topics that the Education Deanery has been able to incorporate into our Lectios is surprising. We’ve had Lectios on Shakespeare thanks to Deborah Curren-Aquino, a scholar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, who visits us annually. She is brilliant and leads us through a different play each year. We’ve had a Lectio featuring the music of the South African Zulu choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which related to a specific experience then taking place within the Community—a renewal of our understanding of the psalms at Matins. Whatever the topic, Lectio can be one medium to help the Community grow on a human level.
Regarding the news of the day—which was one of my pet peeves—the Community now has much more access to media than we had before. In the past, only Lady Abbess and maybe a couple of other nuns had some awareness of what was going on in the outside world. Portions of newspapers were read every now and then, but there was nothing like a general presentation of current events.
The Community is far better informed today. Now there is no one person who brings news to the Community. News can come into the monastery from various sources: radio, television and the Internet; our portress at the door, Mother Debbora Joseph; and Mother Catherine of Alexandria, who is in charge of the art shop. Both women are constantly speaking with visitors from the outside.
Mother Catherine was Kathleen Talbot Steif, a professional chemist and married with two children before her entrance in 1983. In addition to the responsibility of the art shop, she is the abbey herbalist who grows and creates the legendary teas sold there. My personal bond with Mother Catherine began years ago because of the herbal throat tea she invented that never fails to hasten the end of a Connecticut cold.
Before she became Mother Debbora Joseph, Josephine Buck had been a New York debutante whose affluent family had a summer home in Southampton, where as a teenager she played tennis with neighbor Maria Cooper at the Cooper’s summer house. Their adult lives went in different directions, Josephine becoming a Wall Street investment manager, until they met again years later at, of all places, Regina Laudis.
—Mothers Catherine and Debbora Joseph represent the face of the monastery to our visitors and guests. They exemplify the Rule that instructs us to behave toward each one as if he were Christ.
A crisis happens in the life of a cloistered nun when she comes to a point in formation where she feels judged. In the past, this could make it impossible to continue. The old monastic stand was “If you don’t like it, leave.” During the years before the Education Deanery, you wouldn’t know when someone left the monastery. You would wake up one morning and her cell would be empty. That no longer has to be the case. Moreover, a woman who leaves religious life doesn’t need to face the cold shoulder, as did Sister Luke in Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story, nor must she end the relationships she has formed with other sisters. Relationships can and do continue after a nun has left Regina Laudis.
Mother Macrina is a case in point. She left this Community over twenty years ago—but not surreptitiously. She knew she did not have a contemplative vocation and left to enter an active Franciscan order. She comes back from time to time to renew her spiritual life with us. Likewise, Mother Nika and Mother Bernadette went to other orders.
Some, like Valerie Imbleau and Nobuko Kobayashi, go back into the world. Valerie’s departure was the first significant one for me personally, but the emotional impact of it diminished over time.
It was no secret that Nobuko left because she could not really do the life. All of her sisters here sensed the pull she felt to go back to Japan and take care of her father. Now a successful clinical psychologist in Tokyo, Nobuko engenders a far closer relationship between Regina Laudis and Japan than we would ever have had. She comes back to us often and was instrumental in our introduction to Hatsume Sato, a Catholic woman in Japan who for many years has been helping people in need—physically, emotionally and spiritually. When Hatsume’s dream of building a place to lodge these suffering people came true, Nobuko learned that she had one remaining wish—a bell for this refuge named Ischia in the Woods. Nobuko asked for our help.
Nobuko remembered, “The abbey responded so quickly and kindly, offering as a gift to Hatsume the lovely old bell that was hanging in Mother Dolores’ carpentry shop. There is a Japanese expression describing such a quick response: ‘On stroking a bell, instantly comes a beautiful echo.’ ”
—This story is included in Jin Tatsumura’s 1995 Gaia Symphony II, his ecological documentary that features Hatsume Sato as one of the remarkable figures of the twentieth century. Our bell echoes on.
There have always been notable visitors to our monastery. Clare Boothe Luce, the former Connecticut congresswoman and US ambassador to Italy, was an early and frequent visitor, as was the actress Celeste Holm, who starred in the film Come to the Stable.
Dorothy Day, the prominent American journalist and social activist, came a number of times at the invitation of Mother Prisca Dougherty, whom she knew from the Catholic Worker movement. The Austrian philosopher Ivan Ilyin Illich was a close friend of Mother Jerome. Theologians Ewert Cousins, Henri de Lubac and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose books I kept at my bedside as a teenager, were all friends of Lady Abbess. Opportunities for the study of Scripture and theology were afforded through the visits of priests and theologians who shared with us the wisdom of their experience, study and prayer.
Buckminster Fuller, the architect, inventor and philosopher, offered a seminar on the environment. Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who came with his wife, Anne Morrow, gave a seminar on, of all things, the earthworm.
The Education Deanery has no powers of decision in the matter of guests, but we can recommend a subject and then aid in finding a master in the field. Experts in archeology, medicine, ecology, engineering, business, geology, botany and even seismology have offered the abbey their skills and knowledge.
The guest list is rich and varied and has included my historian brother, Dr. Martin Gordon; environmentalist René Dubos of Rockefeller University; New York City mayor Ed Koch; Vice Admiral Jean Betermier, former commander of the French Atlantic Fleet; Rabbi Richard Israel, director of the Hillel Council of Greater Boston; Enzo Fano, a UN water-resources specialist; Sir George Christie of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera; the great twentieth-century theorist and founder of integral humanism, Jacques Maritain; head of ABC News Roone Arledge; and nutritionist Andrew Weil.
With Mother Dolores as the moving force, professional artists from the stage, film and concert worlds visit Regina Laudis regularly—on retreat, like Lois Nettleton; to give a talk, like Broadway manager Lew Wilson; or to entertain and teach, as Gloria DeHaven and Veronica Tyler have.
Gloria DeHaven, a musical star at MGM in the forties and fifties, performed her one-woman show, The Spirit of Vaudeville. Veronica Tyler, whose career has taken her to opera stages all over the world, originally came to Regina Laudis to do some soul-searching. Lady Abbess invited her to give an informal concert for us, and Veronica decided to stay on and give us a seminar in polyphony. This generous artist has returned to the abbey often to participate in concerts and productions and to continue to educate us in workshops.
Vanessa Redgrave has visited at the invitation of Mother Dolores. Permission had been granted for Mother Dolores to accompany me to a Broadway matinee of Eugene O Neill’s autobiographical drama, Long Day’s Journey into Night, featuring Redgrave as Mary Tyrone, the character based on O Neill’s mother. Miss Redgrave invited us backstage after the performance and thoughtfully offered a bit of information about the real-life Mary that she thought would interest Mother Dolores. In the last act of the play, Mary wanders through the house in a morphine haze, bemoaning the loss of something that she knows would finally bring her happiness if only she could find it. That something, said Vanessa, was her Catholic faith, which she did, indeed, regain.
Vanessa was extremely interested in the abbey and asked if she might visit sometime and perhaps read some poetry for the Community. Mother Dolore
s invited her on the spot. But it was not until a few years later, when Tim Ridge of the abbey’s Act Association escorted Mother to the revival of Driving Miss Daisy with Vanessa Redgrave, that the friendship was renewed and a date for the visit was set. The Community was treated to an afternoon of Shakespeare sonnets read by Vanessa and the Redgrave clan. Vanessa brought sister, Lynn, and brother, Corin, for a rare ensemble performance.
Performance artists have also been welcomed at the abbey. Dzieci—the Polish word for “children” and almost impossible for an American to pronounce—is an experimental theater group in Brooklyn that is as engaged with personal transformation as it is with public presentation. Dzieci’s director, Matt Mittler, explained, “Everyone in the group feels a calling to serve something higher. We really don’t perform before audiences. We have groups we interact with—call them witnesses—that actually change the dynamic, and we create community. What we do is evolving always. Always reborn. Always renewed.
“The company combines work of performance with work of service. We’ve worked a lot in hospitals, detention centers, hospices. We believe that helping others generates a profound healing effect that not only serves the patient but also strengthens the ensemble’s work. But we do perform in more traditional venues such as New York’s well-known experimental theater, La MaMa, where Maria Janis saw our production of Fool’s Mass and insisted upon introducing us to Mother Dolores.
“We felt such a compatible vibration with Mother Dolores that we spent four days at the abbey, working with the Community in the hay fields and attending the Offices.”
—Including Matins!
“After many months of enjoying the abbey’s nurturing,” Matt Mittler continued, “I felt the need for Mother Dolores to know our work, and I asked her about doing Fool’s Mass for the Community. She agreed.
“As soon as we had a committed date, everyone at Dzieci became terrified because this is a very daring piece, a disturbing piece in some ways, and we didn’t want to risk the nuns telling us to get out. Fool’s Mass is set in medieval Europe during the plague years. A group of village idiots are forced to enact their own Mass when their beloved pastor dies suddenly. Although there’s a great deal of improvisation, the basic structure is the Mass itself, but a Mass full of wild buffoonery and comic audience participation.
“The actors, in full costume and makeup, were already in character as the nuns arrived at the Jubilee Barn and immediately began to improvise with them. Their responses were at once touchingly eloquent and of such depth of understanding that it brought us new insight that we had no inkling of. We actors felt more entwined with the piece than we had ever experienced before. Since then we’ve been invited by a number of churches to bring Fool’s Mass to their parishes. It’s become our signature piece.”
In the forties, before the word itself was coined, Anita Colby was a supermodel. She was known as “The Face” for her beauty and had multiple careers as actress, author, advertising executive, even host on the Today show. In her later years, after her husband had died, she was introduced to Lady Abbess through a friend who felt she might find some solace at the abbey. Lady Abbess, in turn, suggested she meet with Mother Dolores.
Anita, who was going through a really bad time, made numerous visits. One day she mentioned that her good friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had played the leading role in the London production of The Pleasure of His Company and was exactly the kind of person I would like.
Anita urged me to drop Mr. Fairbanks a note, and she made him sound so fascinating that I did, mentioning that I hoped his experience with our play had been as happy as mine had been. He replied very quickly, and our correspondence continued until his death. He was always asking questions regarding religious life. He didn’t even know what the habit is called.
Mother Dolores has kept his letters and notes—all predictably charming and, insofar as they never met, unpredictably intimate. Fairbanks even revealed his long-lasting affection for Joan Crawford, who was his first wife. “Joan forced me to stand up to my parents,” he wrote, “and made a man out of a boy.”
He never visited Regina Laudis, but I’ve included him among our visitors because there is an observation in spiritual life known as “consolation without cause”. This refers to a feeling of warmth and comfort that comes for no apparent reason. You don’t ask for it. But out of nowhere, you instinctively have this marvelous feeling of well-being that comes from—somewhere. That was Mr. Fairbanks.
Another “consolation without cause” was the movie actress June Haver. I hadn’t known June in Hollywood, but her brief time as a nun was the reason for all the secrecy demanded of me before my entrance into Regina Laudis. She wrote to me because she had met Sister Theresa, who remembered me from Corvallis, my high school. God bless Sister Theresa, because knowing June Haver was a precious experience.
Initially I was surprised that she was so open about her life as a nun and her return to Hollywood—not to her career but ultimately to a happy marriage and family life with the screen actor Fred MacMurray. June wrote to me often, and with such firmness of spirit, always urging me never to lose hope about anything—referring, of course, to the fact that, after years of longing and deep spiritual communion, she had been at last allowed to receive the sacraments again. “Never, my friend,” she wrote, “never take the sacraments for granted.”
When June first visited us she discovered our dairy was in need of a semen storage tank. Her highly unusual gift of this apparatus, as one can imagine, got some interesting reactions from our congregation.
—Her letters and visits and generosity continued through the years until her death in 2005. Her daughters, Laurie and Katie, remain good friends of the abbey. To this day, I treasure their personal gift of a crucifix that belonged to their beautiful mother.
By the late eighties, the Community was looking toward an educational involvement—in the sense of formal education. This coincided with the arrival of Iain Highet, a Canadian student who was pursuing a master’s degree in environmental studies at York University in Toronto. He was motivated to come on the barest suggestion from someone in his philosophy seminar that an abbey in Connecticut needed help with the hay. He had never been to an abbey and was not Catholic or particularly interested in religion. But he was genuinely interested in the land and joined the land program, working hard that year, learning everything he could from Father Prokes and Mother Stephen.
Ian had a certain charisma. His presence drew other young people to come and explore. It was really with Iain’s coming that we started to formalize the whole structure that evolved steadily into our present Monastic Internship Program.
We knew that we had a tremendous resource in the land program that could be a practical educational base for young persons if it could be set up in a more recognized way. Mother Lucia was indispensable in structuring an educational program in which college students can learn something and we can be accountable for what they learned. For example, each intern adheres to a unique program created to reflect his particular interests. Thus, interns might learn to weave the wool of the sheep they have raised, develop the theological implications of cheesemaking or discover the meaning of a chant piece at the blacksmith’s forge.
We have been able to give classes in Latin and what we call Ritual and Creation—monastic customs, history and the liturgy that we follow. If students are interested in art, weaving or pottery, the nun they work with gives them reading materials and assignments to help them develop the theoretical measure of what they are doing. Some interns, both American and French, have received academic credit for what they’ve done here in agriculture.
Mother Lucia added, “We ask them to stay for a year in order to experience a whole cycle on the land. One needs all four phases: preparing the soil, planting the seeds, tending the plants, harvesting. If the interns don’t stay through the four seasons, we feel they don’t experience the totality of the process or see the fruits of their labor. The program is surviving, and I wo
uld say now that at least forty young people have passed through it.”
Through the internship program, we have even had a hand in pest control. Our fruit trees were hit by a massive invasion of gypsy moths. The larvae of the gypsy moth is one of the most notorious pests of hardwood trees in the Eastern United States. Because we raise our crops organically, we were opposed to using commercial pesticides to control the infestation. Philippe Mennesson, now an engineer in France, was then a young intern working with Mother Perpetua in the land program. They learned about a natural way to stop the plague: spraying the trees with the ground-up bodies of the larvae. All the Community was mobilized to collect the creatures, picking them up with—thanks to Sister Ida Nobuko—chopsticks.
“It was a challenge, but we really did well”, Philippe Mennesson recalled years later. “There was only one unpleasantness. During the grinding operation, we perceived a very bad smell. Those caterpillars stank worse than the compost.”
The Education Deanery also helped to open the Community to the world of dance. Lady Abbess was always after us to stand up straight so that we wouldn’t get what she called the “nun’s hump”. She thought that dance, specifically ballet, would make us all more able to move with grace and dignity during liturgical processions.
—I think it was mainly to keep us from “the hump”.
She found Miss Evelyn Jantzer, a retired New York-based teacher, who agreed to conduct a class in dance movement one hour a week, and the Education Deanery set up her program. Dance was a springtime explosion in the Community. It had been germinating in the hearts of the younger members, and it blossomed like the brilliance of new life on our land in April. Even Mother Ida, who was in her eighties, insisted on being part of the corps de ballet. We all wore black leotards under a sheath of black cloth, like a scapular. We even built ourselves a barre! Miss Jantzer taught us for five years, and when she finally had to stop coming, a lovely English lady, June Christian, came for a two-day visit and stayed for three weeks. June was a highly trained teacher on the staff of the Royal Academy of Dance in London for fifteen years, and in later life has been an examiner for the Royal Academy, traveling the world judging competitions. She picked up the dance program where Miss Jantzer left off, and it was a fruitful experience for us all. Mother Perpetua was particularly responsive to body movement and shone as our star ballerina; I supported her as her danseur.
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Page 36