I paused to consider whether being told I had done “really well” meant I would make a good nun after all. But I was done with the self-interrogation. Besides, I understood the deeper reasons for the journey.
“I wasn’t sure whether I needed more silence or more God,” I said. “I do need silence, but not to the extent of what a traditional cloistered order offers. Plus, I am a rebel at heart, and I need to fight—not in a violent way, but in a positive way. I need to find a battle.”
I thought for a moment and then spoke again.
“Have you ever had visions? I’ve had one or two in the last three months.”
“Not visions per se, but I frequently feel a sense of disruption, that things are not right with a person or a situation.”
She mentioned a specific incident involving an international celebrity and said that she could feel the turmoil in this person’s life long before it came to the attention of the mass media. She could also, she said, hear the cries of people far away, on the other side of the world; sometimes she was awakened by it at night and would immediately get out of bed and start praying for them.
I had had time to ponder the vision in the Lady Chapel, as well as the creepy events in St. Cecilia’s, and the voice from the tea towel at St. John the Divine, and I did not regard them as nonsense or mental illness, nor did I dismiss them as the neural equivalent of the “undigested bit of beef” that Scrooge blamed for the visitation of the three ghosts. After all, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was inspired by a vision; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him during a head trip; and Jack Nicklaus’s method of holding his golf club was based on a dream.
God turns up in the silence. He doesn’t come when we expect or as we expect, and when He does, He gives us more than we can control or handle. That’s probably why we so often avoid silence: we fear losing control.
We returned to the priory in time for dinner. The table had been assiduously laid with the full complement of cutlery and dishes, along with baskets of rolls and a variety of condiments.
After so much grimness, the gaiety of Easter seemed almost obscene, but when a plate of roast lamb was passed to me, I dug into it without a smidgen of guilt.
There was lots of happy chatter during the meal, as wine was passed around and people were offered second helpings. It was a celebration that was as much about reaffirming our common faith and the importance of community as it was about reminding us that it is possible to move beyond the dark past and be hopeful about the future.
I helped Sister KT in the kitchen, unloading the trolleys of teetering stacks of dirty dishes and transferring them to the dishwasher racks.
“I’ll miss you, Ms. Wally,” she said. “The place won’t be the same without you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, Sister Wally. Promise to stay in touch.”
By five o’clock, the cloister was empty and silent again. As I walked along the main corridor, I noticed that someone had returned the vividly colored primrose plants to the planter. I went over to them and welcomed them back.
I slept with the curtains open on that last night so that I could watch the sky move from vivid blue to subdued blue to deep blue and finally a fade to black. The window was open too, and I could hear the distant swoosh of cars, the barking dogs, the life in the night grass blending together as ambient silence.
I glanced at my bags, packed and stacked, ready to be hauled down four flights of stairs. The journey had been overwhelming; I hardly knew how to process it all. Before I could think too much about it, I fell into blissful sleep.
( 7:viii )
I WAS in the kitchen staring down a plateful of chocolate digestive biscuits when one of the sisters poked her head in to tell me that two people were waiting for me in the priory reception area.
I raced down the hall. Colin was standing there with my daughter, Zoë. I almost cried at the sight of them. I cupped their beautiful faces in my hands, stroked their skin, and inhaled the familiarity of their love and presence in my life.
I hugged Sister Dorothy Stella good-bye. It was fitting that she, who had been the first to greet me when I arrived at St. Hilda’s on that cold, soggy day, was the last to wave me off on a stunningly beautiful sunny day.
There was another peculiar symmetry to my departure from St. Hilda’s: I had arrived as a stranger, and in a sense I was leaving as one. In the three months I was there, no one had asked me much about myself beyond the most superficial questions of name and country of origin. It is not that I had expected an interrogation, but I had hoped for a bit more give and take, a bit more curiosity; after all, I had asked some of them about themselves. Maybe it says more about the British reserve than it does about the social skills of nuns in general, but as I discovered during my stay, many of the sisters did not know that much about one another despite living together for decades, some for thirty or more years. Then again, people called to the contemplative life do not enter for the promise of sparkling conversation or in the hopes of finding intimate friends. It would take several months before I understood that the silence of the sisters had played a tremendous part in helping me come to terms with the rape. Had they given me the conversation I craved, I would have fallen into distraction rather than intention.
As we stood in the car park finishing our small talk, I could feel the wind change direction. It felt like the end of a prolonged drought.
I thought it would be difficult to leave St. Hilda’s, that I would weep the moment our car began its journey down the long driveway toward the opening in the castle’s stone wall, but I did not cry; I felt renewed. Hopeful. And I did not glance back, because I knew I would be back.
( 7:ix )
SIX MONTHS later, I was in Toronto standing before the altar of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, its chapel infused with a wheat-colored October sun.
The sisters were there in their long royal blue habits and large black and silver profession crosses. So was my Roman Catholic–Anglican mother, who beamed from the front pew. I smiled back, grateful that she and my late father had given me a healthy, catholic attitude toward religion, but more importantly that they had given me a faith.
Sister Anita, who had taken me to see Bede’s tomb at Durham Cathedral, happened to be visiting from England, and she was there, too. It was the Feast of St. Luke, a nod to Father Luke who was an ocean away, likely in his choir stall at Quarr Abbey saying vespers at that moment, but aware of the importance of the day to me. In some form, all the religious communities who had helped me along the way were there to support me.
I prepared to take my vows in a clear, resolute voice.
One of the sisters approached me and asked, “What is it you desire, Jane?”
“I desire to be received”—I paused to make sure I would say the correct words—“as an associate of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine.”
Sister Constance Joanna put her hands over the small silver cross that lay on the altar and blessed it. She handed it to Sister Sue, who brought it over and hung it around my neck.
Before the service, Sister Sue had brought me four crosses from which to choose. I had chosen the most tarnished.
“That’s the one I chose for you initially, but I wanted to be sure you were OK with it,” she said, as she reached for the silver polish and worked it into the corners where the tarnish was darkest.
OK, so a lay associate isn’t a full-fledged nun, but it was as close as an elastic monastic like me was going to get. And I was fine with it. As a lay member of the community, I would be required to live by a Rule of Life. I might not have been able to live with the nuns, but I knew I could not live without them.
A few months before I had made my associate vows with SSJD, I stood with Colin before a priest on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and we exchanged vows. After all the time I had spent discerning a traditional religious vocation, ours was a decidedly untraditional and unconventional wedding. It wasn’t held in a church or
a convent but in the sitting room of a small hotel. With a CD of the Quarr monks playing in the background, we pledged ourselves to a community of two, a community that intersects with many other communities.
Epilogue
················
London, England
THE FIRST THING I did when I got back to London after leaving St. Hilda’s was bake bread. After a long, bread-filled Lent, you’d think I’d never have wanted to look at the stuff again, but the opposite proved true. Before I left, the convent’s cook wrote out the recipe:
OHP BROWN BREAD (Makes two loaves)
43/4 cups strong wholemeal bread flour
1 ounce of lard or butter
1 7-gram sachet of fast-action yeast
13/4 cups of very warm water
Empty the yeast into the water and let sit. Mix all dry ingredients and break in the fat creating a crumbly mixture. Add the yeast and water mixture and mix well into a dough. Knead for 12 minutes. Halve the dough, shape into loaves and place on a greased baking sheet. Cover with greased plastic wrap. Let rise for one hour. Bake in a preheated oven (350 degrees) for 20 minutes.
Making bread from scratch—sans bread machine—is both therapeutic and holy. The gathering, careful measuring and blending of ingredients, the kneading, the leaving-it-alone-to-rise stage, the baking, are like the stages of prayer. Kneading is the heart of the process and therefore the trickiest part because it requires patience and attentiveness, which are not my strongest traits. It would be easy to flick on the radio and lose myself in news or music while kneading, but the convent taught me the virtue of discipline—not the whip-twitching type, but the kind that blooms from serenity. Silence floods into my space and twelve minutes of kneading becomes twelve minutes for prayer and for keeping an ear out for God. Tea towels, pictures, and anything that might serve as a possible spiritual portal are purposely kept out of my sightlines. He hasn’t called on me to do anything lately, but I suppose He’s already given me my marching orders.
The second thing I did was to join an organization fighting for female bishops within the Church of England. The battle had been long underway, so all I could offer was my name to the growing email list of supporters, write letters of outrage to newspapers, and attend occasional meetings. I met many inspiring, dedicated, and learned women priests through this association. And I also met a number of male priests who were apoplectic about the treatment of women by the church.
I had once regarded the church as a lover who seduces with lyrical prayers and liturgies, heart-tugging hymns, and mystical art and architecture, and whose goodness is evident in its hand-wringing pleas to aid the poor and the outcast. But as I became better versed in the issue of women bishops in the U.K., the church appeared more like a controlling husband who excludes certain people from your circle and who will not tolerate discussion or dissent.
The way women are treated by the church reminds me of my rape. Like rape, exclusion and bullying are emotional violations intended to punish, to subdue, to “teach a lesson,” and to assert the oppressor’s domination. A harsh metaphor perhaps, but maybe it needs to be articulated in those terms for people to understand the deep hurt it causes.
In the summer of 2012, during the U.K.’s General Synod (a sort of big AGM for Anglicans), the proposal to accept women as full-fledged bishops was routed.
“Women will become bishops with full parity eventually, but perhaps not for a few more years,” sighed one female priest as we gathered in a church hall to discuss the verdict. I flopped and thrashed about in my seat like a sea lion on dry land. I didn’t exactly want to suggest we transform ourselves into a foaming-mouthed rabble and march on Lambeth Palace with blazing torches, but I did want to turn up the heat.
I wanted women to use tougher tactics, withhold their money, their support, and their volunteer labor until satisfactory change is made. Or maybe the time has come for women to start their own female-centric church. After two millennia of scorn by the church, isn’t enough enough? Our group did not opt for the kick-ass approach. Instead, we faffed about and wordsmithed yet another amendment we hoped would find favor with the male-only house of bishops.
As I write this, a new Archbishop of Canterbury has been elected, and his first order of business is to reconvene synod in July of 2013 to deal with the matter. There are still vast tracts of opposition throughout Britain, so victory is far from being in the bag.
An interesting remark about power and religion jumped out at me when I was transcribing the speeches of Mother Margaret, the founder of the Order of the Holy Paraclete. In the early 1950s, a committee had been struck to work toward reunification of the Anglican and Roman Catholic faiths. Wise Mother Margaret saw it as a hoary exercise. Unification, she said, would never happen for the same reasons there would never be unification of all Christian denominations: the church’s desire for power and its leaders’ tendency toward self-interest. That sort of frank admission needs to be aired more and responded to by church leaders.
As for that other howler of hypocrisy—the attitude toward gay clergy—I cannot be the only person to notice that the church is the gayest sector on the planet. I’ll bet it surpasses the fashion industry in the gayer-than-thou stakes. Yet, to hear the church speak, you wouldn’t think there was a gay person in its ranks.
Accepting gays and women on equal footing with the current patriarchy is not about being populist or “moving with the times”—this never guarantees a rise in church membership—it’s about doing the right thing.
The institutional Christian church has survived on a long wave of entitlement. A spiritual reformation is overdue to recalibrate its values and purpose, and to apologize to a long list of people. Does it possess the humility to do that?
On the other side of the Communion wafer, my attitude toward priests in general has softened. The bloody hard work being done by the church’s middle management, AKA the parish priest, is a testament to the faith of those who are drawn to that vocation. They sure aren’t drawn to it for the money. Parish priests work under demanding conditions to keep their churches buoyant and relevant—and, yes, happy—and integrated with the larger community. They are up against time crunches, scarce resources, frayed emotions, the usual workplace tensions, but with the additional workload of visiting their flock and praying with them through times of crisis; they organize committees to help parishioners out of debt and the homeless off the streets; they galvanize soup kitchens and drop-in centers and homeless shelters; they liaise with other social services to find ways of improving the community. They stay up late at night figuring out how to save a person from losing their home, or to find someone a job. Frequently, they help those who don’t even go to church or might not even share any form of faith. On top of all that, many have families of their own to look after. I have a lot of time for parish priests now.
There are good churches and not-so good churches. If you happen to be blessed with a wonderful and supportive church, consider yourself lucky, but if you have been burned by a church and are skittish about returning to church, then seek out a convent or a monastery. Make it the physical home of your faith.
If not for monks and nuns, I would have bailed on church. I simply would not be interested. But a religious journey allowed me a peek under the rock of institutional faith, and it matured my attitude toward it. I clawed back some of the power I had vested with the church, and began to accept it with more compassion, less deference.
Which brings me to another thing I did when I left the convent: After marrying Colin, I moved to England and to a new church. Initially, I was frustrated in my attempts to replicate the monastic schedule I had lived by for so long. The nearest convent would have taken half a day to reach by public transport. A happy discovery was that the local church had a midweek service. The Wednesday morning circle was welcoming, and in short order, I was asked to assist with the sacristan duties (Sister KT would be proud), which involves laundering and ironing the soiled altar linens and
preparing the bread and wine for Communion. On the rare occasion that there are Communion leftovers, I have to dispose of them reverentially, which basically means I have to consume them. Every job has its perks.
( ii )
SPEAKING OF Sister KT, she left St. Hilda’s, as I had predicted. The last time we emailed, it sounded as if she was adjusting well to secular life. Similarly, Sister Margaret Anne appears to be happy with her new life as a solitary. Two other sisters asked to be released from their vows. About six sisters died in the year and a half since my time at St. Hilda’s, including, quite suddenly, dear Sister Gillian, whose funeral I attended.
SSJD in Toronto, too, lost four elderly sisters and then gained a few postulants. Life in a religious community mirrors the secular world in this regard, with its unavoidable loss and gain of cherished individuals. The Sisterhood has also begun testing an alongsider program. For a fixed period of time, women can live with the community but also move between the convent and the outside world. It is a brilliant, progressive idea. It allows women to deepen their relationship with God, learn about monastic life, and take some of those lessons back to the wider world. It gives the sisters a pool of women to assist them in running the convent and responding to the needs of the secular world.
In Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness, one of his characters talks about her plans to retire to the bush. “Some people die in a convent, and I shall die in the bush. I have seen many jungles, and the worst jungle is a convent. Very unhealthy place. In a convent people hate each other all the time. In the jungle they hate each other sometimes but not always.”
It is sad that most people’s image of convents leans to the negative. Yes, there are no doubt monastic communities that are dysfunctional, but they are human communities, and like our own families and workplaces they, too, go off the rails. If I have learned anything from nuns and monks, it is their humanness. They bear the same emotional wounds and scars from difficult upbringings, rejection, abuse, and bereavement as the rest of us, and they wrestle with demons like we do, too. What sets them apart is that they have found a way to use faith and sacrifice to transform scars and imperfections into something less burdensome.
And Then There Were Nuns Page 25