And Then There Were Nuns

by Jane Christmas

  The monks finally buried the pair at Durham Cathedral, once the building was completed, in 1130. Cuthbert remained undisturbed—his shrine survived the Reformation—until the 1820s, when the poor fellow was dug up again, probed and prodded, and relieved of his cloak and pectoral cross, which is now displayed in the Cathedral museum. The last (and let’s hope final) exhumation was in 1899.

  I didn’t expect to find a story to rival that one in York, despite York’s reputation as the most haunted capital in Europe.

  My business in York and Bishopthorpe, as it had been in Dormanstown, was to interview the sisters posted there for the Order of the Holy Paraclete’s historical update.

  As the bus approached York, I checked my watch and realized I had a chunk of time before the arrival of my connecting bus.

  I ambled across Lendal Bridge to a café, a former toll house, ordered lunch and settled into a window seat overlooking the River Ouse.

  Whenever I would go out for lunch in my secular life, I would order what appealed to me—a tasty entrée, maybe a glass of wine, and invariably a scrumptious dessert. On the days when I was feeling particularly expansive (usually on pay day), I would take a gander around the shops and maybe splurge on a pair of shoes. There was always the confidence that another paycheck was around the corner. Now, my postulant persona kicked in. I ordered the cheapest item on the menu—a bowl of soup—and a glass of tap water. I was watching my pennies like a pensioner.

  In Bishopthorpe, a small, tidy suburb a few miles outside York, I was met by two charming sisters whose mission was to provide a presence of prayer at Bishopthorpe Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of York.

  It was a mild March day, and the three of us strolled the grounds of the palace, where drifts of daffodils shone in the late afternoon sun, their nodding blooms resembling yellow-bonneted women having a good chin-wag.

  We said vespers in the palace’s thirteenth-century chapel, with its floors of black and white marble; its ceiling studded with bosses painted with heraldic shields, and its thick stone walls of blind arcades inset with stained-glass depictions of the saints. It was the prettiest chapel I had ever been in. Edward II apparently worshipped here just before he signed a truce with Robert the Bruce in 1323, following the Battle of Bannockburn. If a chapel like this were located near my home, I would be in it every day, if not multiple times a day.

  It made me wish that more people were aware of such stunning spiritual oases but also that they recognized the abundant calm that an office such as vespers affords. Vespers, a mere fifteen-minute office, provides an elegant transition between a frantic day in an office cubicle or on a factory floor and the soothing familiarity of home. It would be a nicer world if churches resurrected vespers and people attended in enthusiastic droves.

  There were four of us at vespers—the two sisters, the palace chaplain, and me.

  The chaplain was a young woman possessed of a gentle manner that I hoped was an indication of her true personality and not the result of being browbeaten and bullied by those antagonistic to the idea of women priests.

  “Ah, Canada,” she nodded sadly when she learned where I was from. “It is so much easier for women priests there. Here, it is...” Her voice trailed away. There was no need for her to finish her sentence.

  Not long after I had arrived at St. Hilda’s, I had been asked whether I minded having a female priest officiate at the Eucharist. I had chuckled by way of response until I realized that the question was not intended as a joke. It would certainly be a joke in North America, where more than 35 percent of active Anglican clergy are women and fourteen of its bishops are women.

  In the U.K., I had to continually remind myself that I had not fallen through a crack in the space-time continuum and been sucked back to the Pleistocene era.

  The visceral opposition to female clergy in the U.K. from both men and women is as mystifying as it is scandalous. It made my blood boil, roused the Warrior Nun in me. What’s the fear? That women will do a fantastic job? That they will cause far fewer sexual abuse scandals? Bring some humanity back to the church?

  Those Christians who scoff at the notion that God sits on a fluffy cloud overseeing creation will assert with a perfectly straight face that female priests don’t belong in churches because they weren’t mentioned in accounts of the Last Supper. And my response is, how do you know for certain that Jesus had only twelve apostles and that they were all men? The gospels form a highly selective and edited anthology of stories and letters that were handpicked by the burgeoning hierarchy of the organized church centuries later. It might be “the gospel,” but it doesn’t mean it’s the whole story.

  A section of the Bible that often gets overlooked because scholars debate whether it is a true gospel is the Apocrypha, or Book of Wisdom. It contains riveting stories of heroic women who were no strangers to temples or to preaching (even during Jesus’s time). It is a shame that the Apocrypha is often left out of editions of the Bible and that it isn’t read more in churches, because it contains many terrific female role models. Then again, maybe that explains its exclusion.

  There are still many U.K. parishes where churchgoers refuse to accept Holy Communion from a female priest, never mind a female bishop. The Church of England actually suggested a compromise in which female bishops would be ordained but male bishops would be brought in to dispense the sacraments—Holy Communion, baptism, weddings, funerals, and the like—so that a woman could be bishop in name only but not in procedure. It was beyond ridiculous.

  There is a Church of England group with the ironic name of Forward in Faith that actively campaigns against the ordination of females. Replace the word “female” in that last sentence with “blacks,” “homosexuals,” “people with disabilities,” or any other such label and you have a human rights case.

  The Church of England’s two archbishops, York and Canterbury, had handled the situation badly. They vacillated (such an Anglican thing) and played the consensus game rather than assert their unequivocal support of female clergy at every level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and denounce the opposition as both patently wrong and definitely un-Christian. Their dithering alienated people on both sides of the argument, in particular women, who have done the grunt work of the established church for eons.

  It was mind-boggling how the same church that preaches the liberation of the poor and the oppressed in Third World countries can’t accord equal rights to women in the so-called First World. You cannot be a Christian and exclude others; nor can you cherry-pick those groups you wish to admit and those you set aside while you “study the theology.”

  It’s not enough to be the smartest man or woman in the room nowadays: you need to be the most compassionate and the most vociferous defender of human rights.

  And speaking of “studying the theology,” if we are to be absolutely true to Biblical theology, then all priests should be required to start off as Jewish rabbis before they can be baptized as Christians and then ordained as Christian priests. Of course, the idea is preposterous, but no more preposterous than banning women from ordination and leadership.

  The glimmer of hope is this: more women than men are entering the Anglican priesthood in the U.K. In 2010, there were 290 women and 273 men ordained.

  I was also detecting a streak of paternalism cropping up in other areas of the church, specifically a kind of slavery among the religious class. Many of the sisters I met had exceptional executive-level skills but were largely relegated to the status of handmaidens. At important church functions, nuns were used as servers and dishwashers rather than encouraged to circulate, offer their insights, participate in intelligent discourse, and at least make their vocations visible. Instead, sisters were trotted out by churches on special occasions and used as spiritual window dressing, only to be packed away along with the bunting after the events. You do not see monks setting tables and drying dishes at church functions, so why is it OK to make nuns do it?

  That evening back in York, as I
sat in the Minster for compline with a full choir chanting and singing the liturgy, I wondered about this attitude toward women and why it has been allowed to go on for so long in the English church. The real theological scandal of our time is not whether God exists but why women have been shut out and in some cases obliterated from full inclusion in the church—both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. Perhaps it was time to establish a new Anglo-Catholic denomination, entirely led by women. St. Hilda—that Celtic trailblazer—would surely approve.

  ( 6:x )

  THE NEXT morning after finishing my interviews, I found myself with some time to kill before the bus arrived to return me to Whitby.

  The term “time to kill” suddenly sounded awfully harsh.

  Was “time to waste” better? No, “waste” is so un-Benedictine.

  “Time to spend”? Too much of a material ring.

  “Time to bum around”? Yes, it had just the right balance of self-effacement and no fixed address. Like Jesus.

  I wandered into the old quarter and sat on a bench in the square near Holy Trinity Church. The sun shone brilliantly and the sky was the clearest of blues. Stall keepers were arranging their wares, people were hurrying to work, and young mothers were corralling children who were running and squealing with the delight of their freedom. People ambled into cafés for a morning coffee, then returned to settle around the outdoor tables hastily set up to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather. It was a mundane sight, ordinary in the extreme, but it gave me so much pleasure. I sat on the bench mesmerized by people jumping, running, laughing out loud, squealing with happiness.

  Added to this was the profusion of color everywhere. There was such a kaleidoscopic swirl—in the sky, in the clothing people wore, in the shop window displays, in the enormous urns of flowers, in the brickwork of the buildings, in the almost blinding glint of light from the chrome café tables. It made me smile in a way I hadn’t for a long time.

  It occurred to me then how much I would miss not being a part of this if I disappeared behind the walls of a convent. Would I be content to pray for these people and for this life in my intercessions, or would I prefer to be in the thick of things, where I could muck in with them and pray alongside them? The hurly-burly of life is exhausting and maddening, but it is also invigorating, and a rather large part of me needed that stimulation.

  A year of wearing virtual nun’s weeds of black, brown, and gray and nearly three months living in the monochromatic-toned world of the Lenten cloister began to fall away from me. It was like regaining my sight.

  I got up and walked along the main artery, and at a side lane, I came across a boutique with a riotous display of clothing in its window. I could not resist. Or rather, I did not resist. Among the racks of gypsy skirts with their Kaffe Fassett–like explosion of variegated patterns and textures, one caught my eye.

  It’s not exactly nun wear, the Voice Inside warned as I held the skirt against my body and admired it in the shop’s full-length mirror.

  And I’m not exactly a nun, I shot back.

  When I emerged from the shop, the sun was beaming full strength. Everything around me was so intense and alive with laughter and movement that I had to sit down and catch my breath.

  Why can’t monasticism be a wee bit more colorful? Surely embracing color and being devoted to God aren’t mutually exclusive.

  I wanted my monasticism with a side order of materialism. Would that make me a material monastic? A monastic materialist?

  The bus back to Whitby deposited me at a garden center at the far end of the priory grounds. I walked through lonely and uneven fields of wheat stubble as dusk descended. A grove of poplar trees, their bare limbs uplifted, seemed to hail me in greeting. Between their thin branches, the backdoor light near the priory kitchen twinkled “welcome home.” I sped up my pace, one hand clutching my overnight bag, the other a shopping bag of new clothes.

  ( 6:xi )

  A GUEST arrived at the Priory: John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York.

  In simple terms, the Archbishop of York is the Church of England’s number two. His jurisdictional responsibility covers the territory north of York, whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury looks after Anglican matters south of York. Matters pertaining to the Anglican Church outside Britain fall mainly in Canterbury’s domain. It’s all very Anglican and therefore completely confusing and unsatisfactory.

  The Archbishop of York had arrived at St. Hilda’s to conduct a visitation, which is basically an audit to ensure that the Order of the Holy Paraclete was sticking to its mission and hadn’t branched out into arms smuggling or wasn’t running a casino. Although, come to think of it, there’s an idea for a new revenue stream...

  Archbishop Sentamu sat across from me at dinner. He appeared to be a hearty, good-natured man. He had a shaved head that revealed a hint of gray stubble and a charming gap between his front teeth. His deep magenta cassock looked rich against his black skin and set off the hand-painted pectoral cross of wood that hung from his neck.

  Sentamu—he prefers people to refer to him by his surname—came to the U.K. from Uganda, where he had practiced law. His judicial independence caught the attention of Idi Amin, who threw him in jail and had him beaten. When he was released, Sentamu fled to England, studied theology, and was ordained a priest in 1979. He was appointed Archbishop of York in 2005.

  Dinner that day was a “talking meal.” There were so many things I wanted to talk to Sentamu about—the attitude toward female clergy, the redacted sign boards I had seen outside Anglican churches on the Isle of Wight, the lack of cohesion within the Church of England, the church’s attitudes toward religious orders—but this was not the time or place. Instead, I told him how much I liked the chapel at Bishopthorpe Palace.

  “Ah, you mean the St. Paulinus and St. Hilda Chapel!” he exclaimed in a deep, booming voice. It was the sort of voice given to exclamation marks.

  “I wasn’t aware it had a name,” I stammered.

  “It didn’t, until recently. In seven hundred years no one had bothered to give it one, so I did!”

  When the Archbishop learned I was from Canada, he regaled those of us sitting near him with the story of his visit a few years earlier to a conference in Winnipeg.

  “It rained the entire time—all week! Rain, thunder, lightning! Never experienced anything like it. At one point we wondered whether God was trying to tell us something!”

  I remarked that Winnipeg was not known for its fair weather and that the city is nicknamed “Winterpeg” on account of its bitter, snowy winters.

  Suddenly I felt a little sad for Winnipeg—some cities just cannot get a break from the ridicule of outsiders—so I related a positive anecdote about how a Canadian serviceman on his way to England had impulsively purchased a small black bear and named it Winnie, after his adopted hometown of Winnipeg. It was the First World War, and when the serviceman, arriving with his unusual pet in England, discovered that he was being sent onward to France, he donated Winnie to the London Zoo. Frequent visitors to the zoo happened to be A.A. Milne and his only son, Christopher Robin. So captivated were they by Winnie that Christopher named one of his toy bears after it. Thus was born Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Well, I blush at the memory of how transfixed my tablemates were by this story. Sentamu himself let out an enthusiastic “Incredible!”

  Afterwards, a few sisters who had been seated at the adjoining tables cornered me in the kitchen and begged to know what I had said to capture the attention of the Archbishop of York.

  ( 6:xii )

  IF SISTER Patricia had not become a nun, it is quite possible that she would have become a goth. She was fascinated by goths and by the subculture lifestyle.

  The previous day I had wandered into the Whitby Pavilion to discover that the place had been turned into a veritable goth mall. You know you’re on your way to reaching your nun potential when you encounter men wearing more makeup than you own and who are able to apply it with more skill
than you ever could. It was depressing.

  I mentioned the goths to Sister Patricia as we started out for what was intended to be a short walk. She stopped in her 85-year-old tracks, and her hands began fluttering: “The goths are in town? Oh! We must go into Whitby and see them. Right now!”

  She loved the costumes, preferring the Edwardian goths to the vampire-cult version. “They look rather harsh,” she said diplomatically. As we waited at a traffic light, a tall, husky man stood beside her in a long black leather coat, a spiked dog collar sans shirt, black leather trousers, and black platform boots with studs and spurs. What was this guy’s inner life like? Was he a cerebral type, perhaps an aficionado of Gorey and Poe, with a helping of Lovecraft and Gaiman thrown in for lighter fare? Did he hold down a regular day job—an investment banker perhaps?—and don his goth gear on weekends, or was this a full-time personality? When he raised his arm to brush back his curtain of dark brown hair, his sleeve retracted and exposed two bracelets—one of thick brown leather with Iron Maiden’s logo burned into it, the other of instantly recognizable pink silicone. Mother, sister, lover? I said a quick prayer.

  Along Church Street, near Sanders Yard, an Edwardian goth couple was posing for the tourists. The woman wore a fitted black lace-trimmed jacket over a black ruffled-lace dress with a bodice that had its work cut out for it keeping a set of creamy breasts in place. Her hat was a frothy confection of black lace, black feathers, and red ribbons. Her partner was attired in black breeches and boots and a mottled purple ankle-length waistcoat topped by a tri-cornered black and gold hat.

  “Now that’s lovely,” said Sister Patricia, clapping in enthusiastic approval.