And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  And Then

  There Were

  Nuns

  ················

  ADVENTURES

  in a

  CLOISTERED LIFE

  ················

  Jane Christmas

  Copyright © 2013 by Jane Christmas

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books Ltd.

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55365-799-6 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-55365-800-9 (epub)

  Editing by Nancy Flight

  Copyediting by Catherine Plear

  Cover design by Peter Cocking and Jessica Sullivan

  Cover illustration by Talent Pun

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  I will lead her out into the desert

  and speak tenderly to her there.

  HOSEA 2:14

  Contents

  ··········

  ( 1 )

  In the Beginning, There Was a Proposal

  ( 2 )

  At a Crossroads

  The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine

  ( 3 )

  Battling Demons

  Quarr Abbey

  ( 4 )

  An Invalid Religion

  St. Cecilia’s Abbey

  ( 5 )

  The Cloistered Castle

  Order of the Holy Paraclete

  ( 6 )

  The Winter Desert

  Order of the Holy Paraclete

  ( 7 )

  When Silence Knocks

  Order of the Holy Paraclete

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  In the Beginning,

  There Was a Proposal

  ················

  Essex, England

  THE TIMING WAS SO unbelievably awkward, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I did neither. I just said, “Yes.”

  I had dreamed of this moment for six long years (very patiently, I might add, because six years in female terms is like, what, fifty years?). A marriage proposal. Who doesn’t love that? Despite having two failed marriages under my Spanx, I remain intractably optimistic about wedlock.

  I was visiting my beau, Colin, over Christmas. Our six-year transatlantic relationship had evolved into a contented pattern of visiting each other every three months in our respective countries: England (him) and Canada (me). The subject of marriage had been broached several times in the intervening years (by me), but it had hit a sticking point—specifically, a complete lack of interest (by him).

  So here we were in a guest room of a seventeenth-century village pub in rural Essex. It was a bright Boxing Day morning, and a thin crust of frost shimmered on the surrounding fields. I was absorbed in a near-commando-type mission to find a missing earring. How does an earring so easily disappear? It was on this table a minute ago.

  Colin was gathering up our bits and bags in preparation for check-out. From the corner of my eye I saw his lean, lanky frame methodically checking drawers and closets to ensure nothing was left behind. He is a quiet man by nature, but he was more so this day, and I assumed he was perturbed that I was taking so long to get organized.

  Ah, there it is!

  “Found it!” I said triumphantly, as I plucked the earring from its hiding spot beneath the corner of a clock radio. I whispered a prayer of thanks and hooked it into my lobe.

  Suddenly, Colin grabbed one of my hands.

  “I’m ready now; sorry to have taken so long,” I said, trying to wrench my hand from his so that I could get my coat. But he wouldn’t let go. When I turned to face him, he was on the floor. On bended knee.

  Oh dear, has he stumbled? I yanked on his arm to help him up, but he resisted, pulling me toward him instead. This tug-of-war went on for a few seconds until I noticed his smiling blue eyes gazing up at me through a fringe of gray-flecked ginger hair.

  Uh-oh! My heart raced, my face flushed. I saw a small velvet box bloom from his unfurling hand as Colin said softly, “Will you marry me?”

  I stood in a state of ecstatic disbelief, one hand holding his hand (more for balance now), the other covering my mouth as I blubbered like a schoolgirl, “Yes!”

  And this is where the awkward-timing aspect came into play, because moments earlier I had been rehearsing in my mind how to tell Colin that I had decided to become a nun.

  ( 1:ii )

  I DON’T want to give the impression that I am one of those nut jobs who listens to the voices in her head, but in all honesty I am someone who listens to the voices in her head.

  Like most people, I hear the voices of my children, my parents, past and present partners, friends and acquaintances who babble away and bounce off the walls of my head.

  But there is another voice—the Voice Within—that originates not from my head but from my heart. A kind, soulful, authoritative voice, a sort of Dumbledore-meets-Peggy-Wood-when-she-played-the-mother-superior-in–The Sound of Music. The voice of God. And for a big chunk of my life the Voice Within has been steering me toward a religious vocation: the Voice Within has been calling me to be a nun.

  At least, I am pretty certain He said “nun.” God is a bit of a low talker and from time to time He gets drowned out by some of the louder, more excitable voices.

  Did He absolutely say “nun”? Or did He say “run”? If it was “run,” then wouldn’t I be gravitating toward spandex and marathons rather than habits and convents? Bun? Done? Fun? Gun? Pun? Sun? Oh, sun. I could so get behind “sun.”

  But no, there were no sibilants in what He had said. It was definitely “nun.”

  If that was the case, then what sort of nun-to-be accepts an engagement ring? It was like two-timing God.

  During our courtship, Colin’s laconic attitude toward marriage had always pulled me up short, and in the long stretches of solitude I alternately nursed my bruised ego and reassessed my future. If he didn’t love me enough to marry me, who would? If marriage wasn’t in the cards, what was? Did I need to be married again? What would I do with the rest of my life? Subconsciously, I was writing a new chapter for myself.

  What I was absolutely certain about was that I was done with what Isak Dinesen referred to as the business of being a woman; in this case, the type of mature woman that society was funneling me toward: a tepid, somewhat infantilized character obsessed with appearance, dithering about whether to consign every wrinkle to a syringe or a surgeon’s scalpel, mulling over dubious fashion advice, and sprinkling in light amusements such as gardening and cooking. The world seems in an awful hurry to scoot midlife women into a pre-retirement stupor.

  By contrast, I had an urge to explore, question, prod; to belong and yet to set myself apart and take up the challenge Carolyn Heilbrun passionately declared: “We should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”

  Oh, it is easy to be unpopular these days. You just have to mention that you’re in your fifties to feel the slap from the media, society, and governments for not looking or being twenty, for not responding to their coos to retire early and hustle i
nto the cocoon of a retirement home, for not making way for the stampeding generations behind you. You can hear Western society’s toe tap with impatience as it waits for us to shuffle into the shadows. It used to be the churches that railed at us from the pulpit about our unworthiness; now it is the media that preach and tell us we are too fat, too old, not attractive enough, not rich enough, not smart enough.

  After two decades of juggling single-parenthood and deadline-driven jobs, I didn’t need any preaching, not that kind anyway.

  There’s a natural inclination as you age to draw toward the spiritual, but the restless energy and the itch in my soul that needed to be scratched had nothing to do with joining a church group or attending religious conferences. It was a stronger and deeper tug that had a note of urgency to it. So when the Voice Within piped up for the umpteenth time with the suggestion Become a nun, it was a perfectly logical and sensible proposition.

  Of course, I did not heed the call at first. I said yes to marriage.

  Then, a few days after Colin and I became engaged, as the plane returning me to Canada sliced through the atmosphere dividing Heaven and Earth, I had a change of heart.

  I loved Colin, and I did not want to hurt him, but by agreeing to marriage, I would be firmly closing the door on the nun option and tossing away the key forever. The idea of ending my days without ever responding to this persistent call to religious life broadsided me. I saw the opportunities of life, rarer as you get older, trickle away; saw myself on my deathbed, encircled by a Greek chorus of wailing ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends and being asked about “regrets,” and my response would be, I had the chance to see if I was nun material, and I regret not testing that vocation. That’s how I knew I had to do it.

  As soon as I got home, I phoned Colin and poured it out to him.

  “I’m thrilled that we’re engaged, really I am. But there’s this... thing. I had been thinking of looking into religious life.”

  “You want to be a priest?” he ventured.

  “Um, no. A nun.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line.

  “Look, it’s probably a silly idea,” I said quickly. “Maybe just something I need to get out of my system. But it has been on my mind for ages. Like, since I was fifteen.”

  In the ensuing long, awkward pause in the conversation, I scrambled together some reassuring words, something that would prevent him from thinking What kind of a lunatic is she? But bless him, he said, “Well, it’s not like we have a biological clock ticking. If this is something you feel strongly about, then you have to go off and see if this is what you want.”

  He didn’t even ask for the ring back.

  He did ask if he could come and visit me in the convent, but I told him that visits from boyfriends were almost certainly frowned upon.

  We quietly disengaged our engagement, and I set about searching for a place where I could find out whether I was meant to be the bride of Colin or the bride of Christ.

  ( 1:iii )

  LIKE MOST families in the fifties and much of the sixties, ours went to church on Sundays. Mine was not an overly religious upbringing but it was certainly unconventional. I was raised an Anglican, but because I was the product of a mixed marriage (as it was called in those days)—having an Anglican father and a Roman Catholic mother—I learned to move comfortably between both faiths. I attended an Anglican Sunday school and learned hymns, Bible stories, and the Lord’s Prayer, and I sometimes attended Catholic Mass with my mother. My parents ensured that I said grace before meals and prayers before bed. I figured everyone did this.

  My father augmented my religious education by taking me to churches of other denominations. This was pretty forward thinking for the times, but my father was a gentle and sensitive man. He had served in the war as a gunner, an experience that had horrified him and left a lasting impression about what happens when people are locked into narrow mindsets about religion and politics.

  As a youngster, I enjoyed church—the Bible stories, the Sunday-school crafts, and the anthem-like hymns belted out by the congregation, but when I reached my teens, Sunday mornings became a battleground in our household. I was bored and impatient with church. God felt flimsy, and besides I wanted to sleep in. This latter reason was more inflammatory than telling my parents that church was boring or God seemed flimsy. We were not a family that slept in. Ever. We were expected to be up, dressed, and at the breakfast table by 7:30 a.m. regardless of the day of the week.

  Like every other teenager caught in the crosshairs of rebellion, I questioned God’s existence. My arguments were half-hearted; I don’t know whether I entirely convinced myself of it or whether I simply enjoyed the adolescent thrill of contradicting my parents. Regardless, I was always left with the distinct feeling that God was rolling his eyes at the whole business, much like a parent does when a biological child insists that she was adopted.

  Oddly enough, it was during this rebellious phase that the call to be a nun began to flicker. It did not happen suddenly. There was no dramatic religious conversion or stunning epiphany. It grew slowly but steadily, as if the possibility was placed on my tongue, and I was being given a chance to swish it around in my mouth, to get a sense of its taste, its texture, its heat, its sharpness, its sweetness. To digest it or spit it out. I never spit it out. Instead, I began to relax about religion. I treated it more like G.K. Chesterton’s characterization: “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” I liked that. And the more relaxed I was about religion, the more intrigued I became. I saw the beauty and the fluidity of it. Faith in God was not about sermonizing and rigidity. It was a complement to life, not an adversarial stance. I could never understand those who insisted on a line of demarcation between science and religion as if it were the Great Wall. Why couldn’t people be more like Augustine of Hippo, who said that Genesis should not be read literally, or like Albert Einstein, who said that “science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind”? Frankly, everyone needed to chill out a bit more when it came to the Bible.

  I began to pay less attention to religion’s glittery ceremonial aspects and more to its outer edges—the attitudes, the politics, the people who toiled in its shadows. That’s when I first noticed nuns.

  My first real connection with nuns was not entirely positive. It occurred during a hellish year at a Catholic girls’ school where the nuns were more intent on converting me than on educating me. When my classmates taunted me about my religion, the nuns did not come to my rescue but rather subtly fanned the flames.

  “Now class, take out your rosaries, and we’ll say the Hail Mary,” Sister would say. “Of course, Jane doesn’t have a rosary, do you Jane? What religion are you again?”

  All heads would pivot toward me, my classmates scandalized by how anyone on the planet could be anything but Roman Catholic.

  “Um, I’m Angli...”

  “Never mind, dear. Just go to the back of the class and you can do some homework.”

  From that standpoint, no one could ever accuse me of having a case of the warm fuzzies for nuns, and yet they were mesmerizing creatures. They had an air of secret-agent cool as they glided along the stone corridors of Loretto Abbey. Their floor-length black habits swooshed and billowed like approaching storm clouds, while the edges of their white veils fluttered like angel wings. The black and white, the dark and light, the good and the not-so good—it was this duality that drew me toward nuns. While their heads were bowed in serene surrender, their faces bore smirks of feminist defiance. They operated beyond the boundaries of conventional society, and I felt an affinity, which never went away, with that sort of life.

  I cannot explain why the fire of faith burned so steadily and intently in me; it’s not like I was the angelic type. Nor can I explain why I chose to be a nun rather than a priest, an archbishop, or a theologian, except that whenever I thought about being a nun, the idea passed through me like an electric current, as if my heart’s d
esire had made contact with a rogue cell residing in my DNA. Like a Geiger counter, the signal intensified whenever I approached a church or spotted a nun, a monk, or a cross or heard someone mention Jesus or God.

  My tableau of a nun’s life was pieced together with literary and historical remnants and richly embroidered with imagination (rather a lot of imagination, in fact), and it became my teenage template for religious life. I wove myself into a fantasy as a way of trying on a virtual habit. In my mind I could hear the Angelus echo through a green, undulating valley and see myself dashing into a medieval chapel and falling to my knees on the cold, worn stone floors, head bent and hands clasped in prayer. I would be dedicated to Christ, to God, and to all His saints. I would do His will. I would be a model of simplicity and goodness. I would never swear or complain. (How far off the track I have fallen from those teenage aspirations!) If I were put on floor-washing or toilet-cleaning duty, I would carry out my chores with industrious humility. I would till the gardens, peel potatoes for dinner, and polish the altar chalice until it shone like the star over Bethlehem. The trade-off would be the provision of plenty of time for lazy contemplation. It would be a dreamy, calm existence, offering the luxury of time to count the petals on a flower or compose poetry. The idea of being silent, unbothered by the drama of life or of trying to fit in with my peers, appealed to the misfit in me.

  Frequently inserted into this sunny scenario was a monk from a neighboring monastery who was tall and gentle, with a soft mop of hair and a witty sense of humor. We would arrange secret meetings in the woods and flirt, maybe fall in love. I would be Héloïse to his Abelard.

  OK, so my attraction to convent life back then was neither realistic nor pure, but at its heart was the understanding that monastic life offered a stable, God-centered ethos. I wanted to be part of it, so I waited for a sign.

  When I was seventeen, one arrived in the form of those highly unscientific punch-card career tests that were popular in high schools in the 1970s. Frankly, the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter does a better job. A week after I wrote the test, the results arrived. I tore open the envelope and stared at the verdict: rabbi.