And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  With my senses at various stages of wakefulness, I arrived for lauds the next morning and took a seat in the congregation area of the chapel. At least I don’t have to think, the lazy monastic in me reasoned. I can just sit and let the liturgy and the dreamy chants float over me.

  “The sleepy,” wrote St. Benedict, “make many excuses.” I doubted that ol’ Benny had ever contended with this level of disorientation, or set a refectory table with a complement of cutlery that rivaled what one might find in the sideboard of Hampton Court Palace.

  I was barely settled in my seat when Sister Dorothy Stella caught my eye and cocked her head toward a choir stall.

  Are you sure? My quizzical look asked.

  She responded with a nod and a confident smile.

  I moved tentatively from the congregation area to the choir stalls and took a seat in the double prie-dieu she had indicated. A prie-dieu à deux? I chuckled to myself. My humor drained when I saw the small shelf in the prie-dieu crammed with an assortment of books: a psalter, two hymn books, a binder, a couple of spiral-bound booklets, a prayer book, and a few loose booklets and sheet music. Oh dear.

  The next thing I knew, Sister Margaret Anne was standing beside the stall staring at me with a similar look of panic, only hers wasn’t about the prayer books; it was the fact that The Incompetent One was sharing her choir stall. What the hell? her look screamed. She spun toward Sister Dorothy Stella, whose head was conveniently bowed and her eyes shut tight in prayer.

  I met Sister Margaret Anne’s gaze with a sheepish shrug of my shoulders. She did not look pleased but took her seat anyway. She shifted uneasily, looking at me, then turning away, then looking back several times as if not quite believing this intrusion.

  Resigning herself to it, she pulled a few books and binders from my shelf, deftly leafed through the pages, and marked certain ones with greeting card covers and postcards that had been repurposed as bookmarks.

  I mouthed “Thanks” many times. Angels do not always come in the guise of cooing, ethereal beings: they sometimes reveal themselves by their steadiness and their quick, no-nonsense help. Sister Margaret Anne was one such angel.

  I was hopeless during the office. I flailed like a dog in a bathtub. Everything was inexplicably strange, only marginally familiar to the office said by the sisters at St. John the Divine. I glanced at the cover of the prayer book to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently walked into the Lutheran Church.

  I messed up the psalm by not pausing between lines, as is the monastic custom. I stumbled over the chanting of the Venite, which I have known by heart for years but which now struck me as foreign. As for the Lord’s Prayer, had someone rewritten it? I did not dare sing. It was like being presented with a new language.

  The learning curve didn’t stop there. An infinitesimal number of things had to be remembered not only in chapel but about chapel: the times of the offices, how to decipher the abbreviations of the weekly chapel schedule that indicated what hymn book to use, what psalms to recite (and which verses), which version of the Magnificat to chant, which Eucharistic prayer was to be used for Holy Communion.

  Around me the sisters flipped effortlessly between multiple books, landing on the right canticle or antiphon, locating the proper responsory, hymn, and prayer. Each office began with a vocal recitation of the Angelus to accompany the tolling bell. Would the day ever come when I could recite it without needing a cheat sheet?

  ( 5:vi )

  A PLACE of silence tunes your antennae to the observation of body language and of mood. At St. Hilda’s, you had to keep your head bowed in prayer and humility and still be able to gauge facial expressions and gestures to know what was going on or whether you were messing up.

  Example: At breakfast, I initially helped myself to a bowl of cereal. So far so good. Then I walked to the fruit bowl at the far end of the refectory, plucked a banana from the bowl, and returned to my seat to slice it on my cereal. Sometimes I added a piece of bread with marmalade to this repast.

  It took a few breakfasts before I clued in, not by what was said to me but by the widened eyeballs of the sisters, that this amount of food was excessive. You could have cereal or bread or fruit, but not two of the three, and certainly not all three. I managed to figure out that two cups of tea were permitted with breakfast only because I saw Sister KT go up for seconds.

  The noon meal was more structured. We assembled in the refectory after the midday office, found our places at table, and stood until grace was said. Then we sat down, and those sisters assigned to serve the tables would fetch the food. The sister at the head of the table would serve the main dish and pass the plates to each person. Once you had your plate, you could help yourself to potatoes or vegetables. When everyone at your table had been served, you could begin eating. When you were finished, you waited until others were finished. Occasionally, you might be offered a second helping. This was all conveyed through a series of head nods and eye and eyebrow movements. When everyone had finished eating, the prioress would ring a small bell. A cacophony of moving chairs and clanging dishes and cutlery would erupt as dinner plates were removed to a trolley and taken into the kitchen. The same trolley would reemerge laden with dessert—“pudding” as the Brits refer to it. Again, the head sister at each table would serve the pudding, and again you did not dig in until everyone at the table was served. When you finished, you waited for the rest to finish. The prioress would ring the bell again. Dirty plates and bowls were heaped onto the trolley and wheeled into the kitchen. When the sister who had taken the trolley to the kitchen came back to the refectory, we stood and bowed our heads for a parting grace.

  Supper was sometimes formal and sometimes not, and periodically the vow of silence was relaxed at these meals, but I was at a loss to explain how this was determined. I did manage to retain the fact that Sunday dinner was a “talking” meal.

  By evening I could not get into bed fast enough. As I waited for sleep, my brain neurons continued to fire like pistons with the eternal question cycling through my draining consciousness: Are you or are you not going to be a nun?

  I was too tired to think about it. All that mattered was to stay out of everyone’s hair and do as I was told.

  ( 5:vii )

  SISTER HEATHER Francis was off to York for the day and invited me along for the ride.

  We set off after lauds under moody skies across the scrubby moors, our small silver car navigating an undulating landscape of dense fog like a small tugboat rising and dropping in choppy water.

  There is a disturbing beauty to the North Yorkshire Moors in February. With its clots of brown prickly shrubs studded across a vast no-man’s land, it seems ideal for two things—getting lost, and being able to scream without disturbing anyone.

  Sensing my thoughts, Sister Heather Francis piped up, “You can’t tell now, obviously, but later in the year, this becomes a blanket of purple when the heather blooms. It is a marvelous sight.”

  Her hands gripped the steering wheel as the car hugged a sharp turn.

  Sister Heather Francis was a tall, thin, precise type with a degree in biology. She was unnervingly quiet but always perked up when the conversation came round to plants. On our way to York, I made an admiring comment about hedgerows, and she proceeded to give me a master class on their care, their uses, their ecological value, as well as legislation relating to them.

  I am fascinated by hedgerows and how decades, sometimes centuries, of careful cultivation and grooming have managed to create these enormous foliated fences, giving the British countryside a look that seems sprung from the pages of a storybook. There is much to know about hedgerows. From Sister Heather Francis, I learned that hedgerow maintenance is expensive, that pruning requires tractor-mounted cutting equipment, and that in some regions there are bylaws concerning hedgerow stewardship. Cuttings are harvested and used to construct and repair thatched-roof buildings; hedgerows protect the fields from flood damage and erosion, and they provide shelter and nesting places for birds
and small critters such as the great crested newt and the dormouse. And here I thought hedgerows existed merely to make the landscape pretty.

  When we arrived in York, Sister Heather Francis continued my education by taking me on a walking tour along the top of the ancient city walls and then down through the park bordering the River Ouse.

  We stopped in front of the strange, reptilian-looking monkey puzzle tree—“Araucaria araucana is its botanical name,” she said. “You probably noticed lots of shops in Whitby selling jewelry made of a black stone called Whitby jet? Well, it is from the compressed and fossilized wood of the monkey puzzle tree that Whitby jet derives.”

  I felt as if I should be taking notes.

  We gravitated toward the Old Quarter and meandered through the narrow, winding cobblestone streets where Elizabethan timber buildings teeter overhead. And there were shops. Lots of them, all with tempting window displays of vibrant and colorful clothing like I had never seen: long multi-textured and multi-colored scarves, tailored velvet jackets, long, gored skirts, and almost all of it on sale to make way for spring wear. I thought of my 2011 Winter Nun Collection and felt a pang of—what was it? Longing? Regret? Desire? Greed? And yet it wasn’t as if I could tug on Sister Heather Francis’s arm and say, “Hey, let’s check that out! There’s a sale!” She was enviously free of the world of skinny jeans and chunky jewelry.

  I liked the feel of York. It was a proud city, not arrogantly proud but proud in a genteel and protective way.

  When it was established in AD 71 as a Roman fortress and given the name Eboracum, it was a trade hub, but over time it became a key player in ecclesiastical matters.

  During the Anglo Saxon period, Edwin, King of Northumbria, made York his seat of power, and re-introduced Christianity to the region with the help of Paulinus, a priest who served Edwin’s very religious wife. Whether Edwin’s conversion was due to faith or politics (or pressure from his wife) is a question still batted about by historians, but what is undisputed is that it was a seminal event. Edwin was baptized along with members of his family and court on Easter 627, in a small frame church. The occasion proved auspicious on several fronts: that small frame church was the genesis of magnificent York Minster; Paulinus the priest became the first bishop of York; and among Edwin’s family was his thirteen-year-old niece, Hilda, who would play a pivotal role in Christianity’s rise in Britain and become one of its major northern saints—the same Hilda whose statue graced the reception area at St. Hilda’s Priory and who the Order of the Holy Paraclete had adopted as its patroness.

  There was so much about York I wanted to know, and I had an urge to hop on a tour bus and get the lowdown on its chocolate history (Rowntree and Terry’s both started here), its Viking roots, and its reputation as the most haunted capital in Europe, but Sister Heather Francis was several paces ahead of me, her black veil fluttering in the breeze. She was one of only a handful of sisters in the order who continued to wear the veil.

  “I like people to know who I am and what I do,” she replied matter-of-factly when I asked her about it. “The veil is instantly recognizable. People say they never hear about religious orders anymore, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we do not make ourselves visible. I wear it to promote religious life.”

  It seemed to be working, at least in terms of making her visible. In the streets of York several people did double-takes when she passed by, and a woman in a café pointed her out excitedly to her companion as if Sister Heather Francis was the Queen of England. Maybe nun-spotting was the new thing.

  Again I was reminded of the remark by former Archbishop Carey about nuns being “the best-kept secret of the Anglican Communion.” Which prompts one to muse, if a nun doesn’t wear a habit, does her vocation truly exist?

  We walked to the order’s branch house, a smart-looking townhouse across from the Minster, to have lunch.

  Most religious orders have branch houses where sisters live when their work and ministry makes it impractical to live at priory HQ. The Order of the Holy Paraclete had eight branch houses—five in England and three in Africa.

  The two York sisters were engaged in duties connected with the Minster such as serving as tour guides and helping run the Sunday school.

  They had prepared lunch for us, and over salmon sandwiches, a bag of crisps, fruit, tea, and a Kit Kat bar (a York invention, by the way, that pumps out a billion bars a year locally) we chatted away. It did not feel as if I was among a group of nuns; it felt like a neighborly coffee klatch with women who had extraordinary experiences.

  Joining us at lunch was a woman visiting from South Africa, and that got the sisters reminiscing about their work in that country.

  From 1950 to the mid-1990s, the Order of the Holy Paraclete had a branch house—it was called St. Benedict’s—in the Rosettenville district of Johannesburg. At the height of the apartheid era, St. Benedict’s was a locus for hospitality and refuge. The sisters adopted a passive-aggressive resistance to the apartheid law, and fed, comforted, treated, and advocated for those who were being terrorized by the regime. Desmond Tutu and Trevor Huddleston, both priests during the struggle, were frequent visitors. Not surprisingly, St. Benedict’s was subjected to midnight raids, random searches, intimidation, arrests, and phone tapping. At the time, Huddleston was surreptitiously working on the manuscript for Naught for Your Comfort, his excoriating critique of the regime, and the sisters took turns hiding the manuscript under their mattresses. One of them ultimately risked her life to smuggle it out of Africa and deliver it into the hands of Huddleston’s English publisher.

  Huddleston’s book had taken aim at the apartheid regime but it also took a strip off Christians who used the shield of patriotism and religion to defend odious government policies. He felt Christians should be held to a higher moral and ethical standard. I wondered how the experience he related in his book squared with his fellow clergy today and the barriers their own regime had erected against women and gays.

  As memories were excitedly traded around the kitchen table the sisters’ eyes lit up. It was clear that their work at St. Benedict’s had shown the order at its finest, living its calling to the fullest. When the order had handed over St. Benedict’s to another religious order, the termination of its work and the loss of connection to the place had been traumatic for the sisters, as well as for those in Johannesburg who were recipients of the nuns’ courage and kindness.

  After lunch, I wandered across the road to York Minster, a monster cathedral of soaring pillars and mammoth tracts of stained glass. The stories reverberated in my head of the sisters’ descriptions of life under apartheid, the muddy overcrowded squalor, the horrific treatment of blacks, and the emotional brokenness that swept through the shanty towns like a plague. I tried to reconcile those images with the Minster’s glittering interior.

  A cathedral can be as distracting and as gaudy as a shopping mall, and pilgrims can easily get as swept up by the artistic and architectural wow factor as shoppers do over displays of handbags and housewares.

  I was just as transfixed by the Minster as everyone else, but when I tore my gaze from its splendor, I noticed brokenness amid the perfection. While the tourist throngs had been admiring the ornamental ceiling bosses, other souls had slipped through to tend to their world of big and small traumas. Some stared ahead at the altar; others buried their faces in their hands; a few were weeping.

  My strident attitude toward the church’s organized structure softened, and I became appreciative of the silent and largely unsung service churches provide to those who come not to worship or to gawk at majestic architecture but to sit and come to grips with the pain and the muck of life. If not for churches, where would people go to safely unburden their souls? Where would I go to confront the memory of my rape?

  ( 5:viii )

  A CELEBRATORY mood rippled through the priory as the sisters fussed with flower arrangements and prepared for the first profession of Sister Samantha.

  There are several ste
ps in a woman’s journey toward becoming a full-fledged nun: aspirant, postulant, novice, first professed, and life professed. There are generally three years between each of those last three stages. Theoretically, you could become a doctor faster than you could become a nun.

  Sister Samantha was young, in her early twenties, and as I observed the ritual along with the rest of the congregation, I wondered how I would respond had it been my daughter, of similar age as Sister Samantha, making her profession vows. Would I have been overjoyed that she had found a passion for this life, or would I have been sad that she was cutting herself off at such a young age from experience and discovery?

  The Anglican ceremony is far more low-key than the Roman Catholic tradition, in which the profession ceremony involves a bridal gown and mimics a marriage to Christ.

  Dressed simply in the order’s habit, Sister Samantha fearlessly approached the presiding priest and made her vows in front of her community:

  Priest: Do you believe that you are called by God to serve Him in this way of life?

  Sister: I do.

  Priest: Do you promise to live by the Rule of this Order and to observe its customs for the next three years?

  Sister: I do.

  Priest: This life to which you are called involves a steadfast intention expressed in the three-fold vow of Poverty, Celibacy, and Obedience. Will you undertake to be bound in this way during the period of First Profession?

  Sister: I will, God being my helper.

  After signing the register, Sister Samantha held it open, displaying it to the congregation, and repeated the verse from Psalm 119: “O stablish me according to Thy word that I might live, and let me not be disappointed of my hope.”

  She knelt before the priest to receive the first-profession gifts of the silver cross of the order, the black girdle or cord, and the veil. Only at life profession does a nun receive a gold wedding band and have three knots put in the girdle to signify that her three vows are being made for life.