And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  The light and airiness had a great impact on my well-being. I felt as if every care in the world had fallen away from me. I began to regard myself more as one who could be useful to others than as one with something to prove. My ambition was subsiding nicely, thanks to regular ministrations of kindness, and I glowed with the radiance and earnestness of a new recruit. At times I had to pinch myself to believe that I was really there.

  The more I saw of Sister Elizabeth Ann scurrying around the place, listening to everyone’s two cents—always with a genuine smile, not a patronizing one—the more I appreciated what a mammoth job it must be to lead thirty or so women and run a convent. My thoughts returned to the Camino pilgrimage where I had been the de facto leader of fourteen women. I had lost the group a week into the hike, which says something about my leadership abilities, but was a blessing for the others in that group because by then I had used up a small reserve of patience. A reverend mother supports, counsels, consoles, works with, lives with, and eats with her sisters 24/7. I couldn’t do that.

  Far from feeling detached from the secular world, I actually felt more connected to it. The sisters monitored national and international events and brought these into the daily corporate intercessions during the offices. That summer, one or two professional sports teams and those competing in the Tour de France were included. We prayed also for people known to the sisterhood, and the prayers became very personal petitions for those who were in hospital or who were bereaved, depressed, or unemployed. Some of the sisters had specific areas of interest: Sister Helena always prayed for Bible socie-ties, Sister Helen Claire prayed for the community’s associates and oblates, and Sister Beryl prayed for First Nations dioceses. Frequently, one of the sisters would pray for “those in our Women at a Crossroads program, that they may be guided toward a vocation with our community.”

  I took to the routine and the arrangements so easily that I began to wonder whether the attraction was for the wrong reasons. I had a tendency to latch on to an idea and burrow into it, nose around for information and sniff out the truffle of truth, at which point my interest usually waned. I didn’t want that to happen to my ardor for monastic life.

  So I put on my objective-thinking cap, tamped my zeal, and considered “the life” with more practicality than passion. I got out my pen and a pad of paper, and made a list—Finally. An excuse to make a list!—of pros and cons.

  From a practical standpoint, religious life was the perfect all-inclusive lifestyle: an excellent balance of prayer, work, and leisure; three squares a day; small but comfortable rooms; a chapel; a couple of libraries; Wi-Fi; and an infirmary. I privately wondered whether the nuns would consider installing an outdoor pool in the courtyard garden. You know, just for exercise. A large barbeque was already set up against a wall in the courtyard, and when I allowed my imagination off the rein, I could conjure up a scene of white umbrellas and teak patio tables and perhaps a covered bar along the wall manned by a couple of cabana boys—cabana monks, perhaps?—who would serve gin-and-tonics and nibblers while I sat on a chaise longue in my tankini habit and pondered God.

  In all seriousness, the convent was sublime, a masterpiece of serenity and order. No divas or drama queens that I could see. And the pace was good: I liked being on convent time.

  With my pen, I drew a vertical line down the middle of the page and made a secondary list of the emotional and material sacrifices:

  Limited family contact. Difficult one. The kids were older and independent, and I was probably just a nuisance to them now, but I would miss being involved in their lives, and if they ever had children of their own, I would miss the grandparent stage.

  No more boozy, giddy lunches with the girls. I loved hanging out with my friends, but the opportunities for getting together were not as frequent anymore: everyone was glued to their job. As for eating out, it was becoming less satisfying and more expensive: alcohol was the new smoking; food, the new sloth.

  No more luxury shoes or nice clothes. Give up my only pair of Blahniks? And how would I handle seeing a great pair of boots or kitten-heeled shoes that I could not buy? Then again, amazing age-appropriate fashion for middle-aged women just doesn’t exist, so it would be a blessing to no longer have to worry about any of it.

  No more travel. Yeah, that would be tough. I get a thrill from seeing the world and immersing myself in different cultures, and I revel in the freedom to go where I want.

  No more Colin. Very tough; ending our relationship would be close to traumatic. I thought of some of the highlights of our time together: a year earlier, we had been in Spain, exploring Andalusia’s white-washed villages, spending hours cavorting on clothing-optional beaches and diving into sapphire waters. Was I really willing to trade that for a habit?

  Lots to think about. There was no rush to make a decision; I hadn’t been in the convent that long. Still, at the back of my mind the idea had lodged: Yes, I could definitely live here.

  ( 2:vii )

  “SO? HAVE you come to a decision?”

  We were in the courtyard garden, taking a morning tea break from our class. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, the little pond was burbling like a coffee percolator, and a slight breeze was causing the flowers to sway as if they were listening to a gospel choir.

  The question had not exactly surprised me. I had been asked it half a dozen times since Day One. This was only Day Seven. What was I—the vocational bellwether? Talk about pressure. If I made a move, would the rest fall like dominoes?

  “There’s a lot that I’m liking about this life,” I said cautiously. I didn’t want to tip my hand, especially with Sister Elizabeth Ann within earshot—she was weeding among the snow queen hydrangeas and pink spirea. “But it’s also not an easy decision. Lots to consider. How about you?”

  “Nah. That’s not the reason I’m here,” said the woman. She was one of the younger ones in our pack. “But it is really nice. I don’t know. I thought by this stage in my life I’d be married or at least have a boyfriend. I worry about my future—I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life. If some of you guys join, though, I might be tempted.”

  Our group—the Crossroads Coven, I dubbed it—had gelled easily. A good bunch. Lots of intense discussion, but lots of laughs, too. Most of us were divorced with grown children; I think I was the only one with a steady partner: steady in my case being defined as being romantically attached to someone who lived more than 3,700 miles away.

  If our group was so interested in what each of us was thinking in terms of commitment to the sisterhood, I could only wonder what was going on among the sisters themselves. Had they placed bets on the odds-on favorites for the novitiate sweepstakes? Maybe there were some of us the sisters did not want. Ouch.

  One evening, after supper and before compline, a few of us gathered in one of the sitting rooms. We made tea and piled a plate with chocolate digestive biscuits and then settled ourselves on the sofas and chairs, our bare legs tucked beneath us.

  (For a place that was supposed to eradicate desires and appetites, the convent had done a good job of giving me a new one—chocolate digestive biscuits. Who invented these things? They are beyond yummy. I was scarfing down at least six a day.)

  We chatted about our classes and shared new intelligence we had unearthed about convent life from the sisters. It was clear that I wasn’t the only one in the group kicking the tires of religious life. It was all very well what Sister Sue and Sister Jessica and some of the other sisters were telling us, but it wasn’t enough. Was monastic life just another frustrating autocratic system? A Venus flytrap for the spiritually eager? And what about those three vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity: Was there some wiggle room on that last vow, a sort of Clintonesque definition?

  “You know, there is a difference between celibacy and chastity,” said Lorraine, once the giggling subsided. “The vow at SSJD specifies chastity, so technically that does not rule out a stable relationship with a man. I mean, you might not be able to
have sexual intercourse, but you could at least hold hands. Maybe cuddle.”

  Would Colin be willing to downgrade our relationship to cuddling and hand-holding status? Would I?

  “Maybe we need to start our own convent and establish our own version of Benedict’s Rule,” I quipped.

  The remark brought the room to an abrupt silence.

  Sonya, one of the young ones in our group, as well as the quietest, looked as if she had gone into shock. Her large brown eyes widened.

  “Would we still work in secular jobs outside the convent?” she asked eagerly.

  “Yes, it would probably be a good idea. How else would we support ourselves?” I answered, not knowing a thing about what I was proposing but continuing on in my merry fashion. “And maybe we’d only be nuns in our convent for a season or two, a sort of rota: you arrive for, say, two or three months, then return home to your family or whatever, but you would still be connected to the convent and be expected to keep it going in various ways.”

  “Where would it be?” someone else asked.

  “Not Toronto,” I said. “It should be somewhere inspiring and remote. And warm. Like Morocco.”

  “I love Morocco,” enthused Sonya. Clearly, she was getting into the idea.

  “Have you ever been?” I asked. “Because I haven’t, but it looks great.”

  “It’s fabulous. You’d love it. There is something holy and mystical about it.”

  “Great. So that’s settled: a convent in Morocco.”

  “Would we wear habits?” another asked. “I hope they’re more attractive than what the sisters wear here.”

  “At least wearing it is optional,” murmured Laurie, who was sketching something on a pad of paper. Maybe she was designing new habits.

  Laurie and I had become fast friends. She was an effervescent gal with light brown hair, a big laugh, and a flair for the creative. She was a priest and an artist who lived along the Nova Scotian coastline. On the first day of the Crossroads program, we realized that we had met several years earlier—at her brother’s funeral. Fred had been a spirited man whose demons had carried him away much too soon. Laurie and Fred could have been twins: when I looked at Laurie, I saw Fred; when she cracked a joke, I heard Fred; when she spoke about her art, it reminded me of Fred, and I would miss him all over again.

  Like me, Laurie was checking out convent life. We both agreed: as shallow as it seemed, the habits would be an issue.

  Now, I do not for one minute suggest that a habit should be body-hugging, lacking in modesty, or—God forbid—concocted by a committee of designers, but SSJD’s were shapeless and bulky, and their floor-grazing length was impractical. The design appeared to be taken from a traditional monk’s habit, with a scapular worn over a floor-length cassock, and tied at the hip by a thick black cord. (The cord is a mark of a professed religious. For those who have taken life vows, the cord has three knots tied into it, each signifying a vow.)

  Habits are uniforms, as well as symbols of devotion and sacrifice, but I wanted a habit I could run in, one that was somewhat attractive and that would prompt a passerby to comment, “Now there goes a nun with God-given purpose and style. Gee, I’d like to join up.”

  Then there was the color: SSJD’s habits were royal blue. They looked like something an order of flamboyant gay monks might wear. Royal blue is certainly distinctive if you happen to be on an expedition and need to keep the community within your sightlines, but as a general daily color? I don’t think so. A color like that just screams to be dressed up with chunky silver jewelry or a bold Mondrian-style scarf.

  “We could grow our own vegetables,” interjected Sonya, who was more interested in nutrition and didn’t want the entire evening deteriorating into a blather about habits.

  Sonya was a bohemian-scholar type: tall, slim, with long, straight brown hair and brown, square-framed glasses. She had done a lot of traveling and was now back at university finishing her master’s degree in theology with a focus on urban and international development. Quiet and observant, she seemed to be furthering her education as a way to buy time until she figured out what she really wanted to do. Maybe she knew exactly what she wanted to do but was held back by the same thing that holds back so many of us—what we want to do doesn’t fit the prescribed pattern of what we’re supposed to do at various stages of life. For thirtysomething women like her, that meant career, marriage, family, and home ownership. But really, who sets these rules?

  Talking about setting up our own convent, however, animated Sonya, and she dove into the conversation.

  As I padded back to my cell that evening, I thought about how all age groups are saddled by the expectations of society and how those limits intimidate many women (and men, for that matter) and keep them from pushing the boundaries.

  Granted, not everyone has the freedom to seize the life they want: some are housebound because of disability or illness or are caregivers to their spouses, disabled children, or elderly parents. But there are many others who do have energy and freedom and who squander their time and their money on trivial things like obsessively managing their appearance. If you choose to ignore modern guidelines for the fiftysomething woman, you are considered irresponsible. If you don’t pursue your lost youth or figure with life-or-death zeal, you are deemed slothful and neglectful; if you don’t hit the nail bar every other week, people question your grooming standards; if you stop coloring your hair, people think you’ve “given up.”

  In the convent, the sisters did not seem to give a toss about any of that, and they were as happy as a litter of Labrador puppies. They lived life on their own terms without anxiously measuring their appearance against the standards of a fashion magazine or going into debt in a desperate attempt to plump up their sagging jowls. Imagine the freedom.

  ( 2:viii )

  I WAS struggling to keep pace with Lorraine. What was supposed to be an evening stroll around the leafy neighborhood beyond the convent grounds had turned into a power walk: Lorraine was exercised about the Lord’s Prayer. At evening prayer, the sisters had used a new version that went like this:

  Abba, Amma, Beloved,

  your name be hallowed,

  your reign spread among us,

  your will be done well, at all times, in all places,

  on earth as in heaven.

  Give us the bread we need for today.

  forgive us our sins

  as we forgive those who sin against us.

  Let us not fail in the time of our testing.

  Spare us from trials too sharp to endure.

  Free us from the grip of all evil powers.

  For yours is the reign, the power, and the glory,

  the victory of love, for now and eternity,

  world without end. Amen and amen.

  It had not bothered me too much, but it had sent Lorraine into a near-apoplectic state. Her stride and speed increased as she got more worked up about it.

  “You know, it’s one thing to bring in new versions from time to time, but what drives me up the wall is when they bring in prayers with that gender-neutral crap,” she fumed. “It completely eliminates God-as-Father, and turns Him into a eunuch.”

  “Is this about erasing the paternal aspect of God?” I asked. I didn’t always grasp the reasons why the church made such changes.

  She sighed heavily.

  “It is part of an effort to be sensitive to people who were abused by their fathers. And while I get that “father” can be a loaded term for some people, it’s absolutely insane to neutralize God just so you can make Him more palatable to everyone. Really. It’s like the nanny-state has invaded church life. It drives me crazy!”

  The argument is also made that non-gender–specific language for God prevents us from putting God in a box. “God is so much more than ‘Him,’ than ‘Father,’” Sister Sue told me later on. “God transcends all, and that includes masculine, feminine, neutral language. God never self-identified as male or female; we assigned God’s gender.” />
  Lorraine and I shared a strong affection for The Book of Common Prayer, the four-hundred-year-old Anglican prayer book, and often our rants about the tinkering and politically correct fastidiousness going on in the present-day church would invariably cycle back to the BCP, as it is known colloquially.

  Much more than a collection of liturgies for morning prayer, evening prayer, Holy Communion, funerals, weddings, and baptisms, the BCP contains some of the most soulful and intimate language you could find. There is not a pedestrian prayer in the entire book, and its elegant wording makes you strive to be something better than you are.

  Some thirty years ago, The Book of Common Prayer was relegated to the sidelines when The Book of Alternative Services was introduced in Canada. (Revised versions also appeared in the United States as The New American Prayer Book and in Great Britain as Common Worship.) It was done to make the prayer book more accessible, which was ecclesiastical code for “modernizing it so that we can get more bums in pews and by extension more cash in the collection plate.” But the tinkerers missed the point of the BCP and of religion itself: dumbing down a prayer book doesn’t make it more accessible; it insults the reader by assuming she or he is too stupid to understand the prayers in their Elizabethan form. For who cannot comprehend these lines from the General Confession?

  Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep; we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.

  While younger people may indeed have trouble making sense of some of the ancient wording in the BCP—though, really, they just need someone to read it with them a few times—it is a prayer book of beautiful and comforting language for adults, for people who have lived a bit and are grappling with life’s often overwhelming passages.