Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  Now, a decade later, having journeyed from my childhood evangelical community in Arizona to attend Wheaton College of Billy Graham fame, then on to an ecumenical Christian commune for graduate school, and finally to Seattle, I was faced with hell in a different form. Each morning I pedaled my bicycle to the beautiful green campus of Children’s Hospital, then made my way through halls bright with art—fantastical animals and clowns, clusters of balloons, whimsical landscapes—to a pediatric oncology unit where children were suffering unto death. I walked past wards of kids with broken bones and babies with birth defects, past little wheelchairs or stretchers in the halls and elevators, past the occasional murmur of voices or muffled crying and soothing sounds—with huge heavy silences in between.

  Some people think that when sick or wounded children are silent they are comfortable. I knew better, thanks to intense headaches that had started when I was not much older than the small boy with the tumor. Shortly after I learned to talk I told my mother my head hurt, and then I threw up. Throughout childhood my parents took me for consultations and tests. In one clinic I lay perfectly still while a nurse stuck little blobs of gummy cotton in my hair and attached electrodes, and then waves appeared on an unfamiliar machine. I picked gooey bits out of my hair the next day. The doctors could offer no solution; along with my salvation I had inherited a family pattern of migraines. When I could do nothing but be in pain my parents gently put hot cloths on my head. When I could think of nothing but pain they rubbed my feet. When I could be nothing but pain, they prayed for me. And then I would lie in a bath of hot water or with my face pressed against a pillow, waiting, waiting for the pain to fade—silent when I wasn’t writhing and sometimes even then. By the time I arrived at the oncology ward, I had no illusions about how much a child can suffer in silence.

  I looked at that beautiful, trusting two-year-old boy and my mind conjured up fragments of a Pat Benatar song, “Hell is for Children”: “Be a good little boy and you’ll get a new toy. Tell Grandma you fell off the swing . . . Love and pain become one and the same in the eyes of a wounded child . . . It’s all so confusing, this brutal abusing.” Benatar’s song is about child abuse, but for me, as a believer in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, interventionist God, the line between abuse and cancer was getting blurry. Child abuse or child cancer, little brains damaged by shaken baby syndrome or damaged by the birthing process, bones broken by angry parents or by car accidents: If God is our heavenly Father, is there a difference?

  Despite my growing sense of doubt, it was my job to offer comfort and practical support, not questions. So I listened as medical staff and family members struggled to make meaning out of the unavoidable tortures that abound in a hospital for children. I kept my skepticism to myself. Maybe, still, I could shore up my belief in an all-loving, all-powerful God and find comfort in those beliefs.

  Through many years of sermons and Bible studies, my Christianity had offered two justifications for what some call “the problem of pain.” These justifications of suffering had been part of my spiritual arsenal for as long as I had been old enough to find myself troubled by nature and humanity. Now I tried on the first of them: Suffering is because of sin. Someone, somewhere has done wrong—either the person who is suffering, or his parents or our collective parents Adam and Eve, and so we (implicitly) deserve to be punished. The wages of sin is suffering unto death and eternal suffering thereafter. We all deserve to suffer, and any reprieve is simply a sign of God’s mercy.

  I looked at the small beings around me, the peaked faces, some with fuzzy postchemo hair; some with wan smiles and dark circles under their eyes, hooked to IV drips; and I saw them in a way that I had never been able to see my child-self. Innocent. Hurting. Deserving more than this. Justification One wasn’t working. To my mind, it excused abuse. It made God contemptible. It let Him off the hook by making a mockery out of justice.

  I tried out Number Two: What seems bad to us is actually good. “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28, NKJV). My pastor would say things like: Pottery must be fired to become beautiful; metal must be forged—suffering has a higher purpose, even when we cannot see it. God’s ways are beyond our comprehension. The thought had offered some comfort when I battled with headaches.

  But now the words rang hollow. These children were dying. There was no way to argue that their suffering would bring benefit into their own lives. Nor was it moral to make them suffer without their consent for the benefit of someone else. All the justification in the world couldn’t make it just. Nor could it fix the problem—the illness and injury that wracked those little bodies. Unlike the eternal lake of fire that I had been taught awaited the unrepentant sinners, a simple prayer couldn’t make this kind of real-world hell go away.

  A kind chaplain at the hospital tried to patch up what was left of my crumbling belief. He offered me a copy of a best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The author, Rabbi Michael Kushner, suggests that there is suffering in the world because God is not all-powerful. Even God is constrained by the rules of nature. He grieves along with us when cancer strikes a two-year-old. Sometimes, Kushner said, tragedy has no meaning. It just is. That part sounded right, the “it just is.” But I couldn’t accept the benign-yet-limited deity that Kushner offered as a replacement for my own dubious God. Kushner’s argument seems to be grounded more in a need to believe than in any real-world evidence that a tender, heavenly Father grieves with us. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, “The spinal cord tumors we observe have precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

  Over the course of a few weeks, things got worse. After two decades of warping my feelings, my perceptions, and my intellect in order to defend the absolute goodness of the Christian God, I was mad. As I walked the halls of the hospital or bicycled home, arguments erupted in my mind. “His eye is on the sparrow.” What in the world does that mean anyway? Sparrows live short, hard lives. “Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” So we shouldn’t harm little children, but God can? Even the most benign passages of the Bible appeared in a new light. A Jesus who would make one lame man walk or one blind man see? Was that the best God could do? They were impressive tricks for a magician, to be sure, but not at all impressive for a deity who with equal ease could simply do away with all blindness—or with all cancer that leaves two-year-olds paralyzed and dying.

  One day I found myself struck, viscerally, by the contrasts of the hospital—the part that humans controlled and the part that was the domain of God. Outside, thanks to the labor of patient gardeners, flourishing beds of hosta and iris and hydrangea soothed anxious parents. Inside, in the waiting rooms tanks of bright tropical fish distracted achy children, and the elevators offered glimpses of whimsical art balloons and whales for those riding in wheelchairs. Through it all moved men and women who had dedicated their imperfect, finite life energy to the well-being of children, to having there be a bit less suffering in this world. All this stood against the deeply imperfect handiwork of my perfect God: genetic disorders, birth canals that damaged little brains, cell division gone awry, and worse. God was visible in the hospital in the silences, in the small soft bodies with faces staring or whimpering or buried in pillows, waiting.

  Abruptly, I said to the god in my head, I’m not making excuses for you anymore. I quit conjuring a long-dead spirit in the swirling smoke of my own mind, and just like that, God was gone. All that was left was the empty frame of tape and wire: excuses, rationalizations, and songs of worship that sounded oddly flat.

  And me.

  I walked away and didn’t look back.

  Nun Hands

  Mary Johnson

  The other day, after a reading, I was signing a book when a woman t
old me, “Nothing about you is nunnish anymore—except your hands.”

  That stung. I’d taken care to set my curls, had applied a little makeup, had my toenails polished, and had even chosen my most colorful silk tunic. I’d consciously cultivated my “I’m not a nun anymore” look—and I’d been betrayed by my “nunnish” hands?

  Hadn’t the woman noticed my decidedly unnunnish wedding ring? Sure, my fingernails were short and unpolished, but at a certain point I just can’t be bothered.

  Even if I’d lavished hours on my nails, the wrinkles on my hands might still have given me away. Twenty years of laundry scrubbed by hand, twenty gloveless winters, daily wringing of an old potato sack in cold water so that I could then squat and pass the wet sack over the floor in the Missionaries of Charity’s version of mopping—in the fifteen years since I’ve been out, I haven’t yet found a lotion that can soothe that history from my hands. Or from my heart.

  THE SISTERS INTRUDE MOST frequently when I’m most defenseless. Nuns invade my dreams, and it’s not usually the friendly ones who show up.

  Usually, I appear first, and it’s like those time-travel movies where the actor looks down and is startled to find herself in unfamiliar clothes—except that the white sari with a blue border is all too familiar. I know I’m not meant to be wherever the dreams put me—church, convent, bus, train. I want to get out, but the sisters won’t let me, repeating that I don’t have permission to leave until next week or next month or just simply “till later.” In my dream I do all the nun things—say the prayers on the bus, do the chapel housework, wash my clothes, eat in the refectory—but my heart isn’t in any of it. Some nights I try to run away. Sisters chase me, several at a time, sometimes twenty or thirty of them, down long corridors and through secret tunnels and on staircases that go up and up and up and end nowhere.

  When Mother Teresa appears, she is nearly always alone, and silent. She doesn’t give chase. She just looks at me. She seems to want to say something, but I sense that she still doesn’t know how, that she’d like to speak to me as a peer but can’t lose the sense that she’s supposed to be my mother and has failed. I want to hug her and tell her it’s okay, but one doesn’t hug Mother Teresa, even in dreams.

  NOW THAT I LIVE in the world, I wash my clothes once a week, in a machine in a little room off the kitchen. While that might not seem remarkable to some, to me it’s a welcome reminder of how far I’ve come. No more daily scrubbing of clothes by hand in a bucket on a stretch of concrete under the open sky. No more chapped hands during winter, no more futile attempts to stretch the weekly ration of laundry soap. I am now a twenty-first-century woman with a washer and drier—at least until the drier broke and we decided to go green. For the past month or so, I’ve lugged my wet laundry to the backyard, where I hang my clothes on a clothesline.

  I pull a blouse or a pair of jeans from my laundry basket, fix it to the line, and the feel of the wood, the snap of the clip, recalls other clothespins, each etched with a cross and an ID number—mine was 985. After a while, most pins sported a wrapping of twine or a smidgen of glue because each sister was allowed only six clothespins and it wasn’t easy to get a replacement if you lost or broke one. You had to “speak your fault” for destroying the property of the community or for being careless and having lost the property of the community. Then you had to write in the garment book, “Please, sister, may I have a clothespin? Thank you, sister.” Then you waited until Thursday to see if the superior thought you really needed a clothes-pin, if you deserved a clothespin, if you’d expressed adequate sorrow for not having taken care of the pin you had abused or neglected, and maybe she gave permission for you to be given another clothes-pin, or maybe she decided to make you wait.

  All that returns to me now as I clip skirts and socks to a line in New Hampshire. I haul the empty laundry basket inside and the sisters climb the back stairs with me. Sometimes they stay all day.

  Perhaps it’s true that memories return to everyone, memories summoned by little things like laundry or the smell of baking bread or the way a stranger’s shoulders slump as you pass her on the street. Perhaps my memories of the sisters seem particularly pernicious because I so yearn to be free of their taunts, their unspoken accusations, my unfinished business.

  Perhaps the sisters miss me when they sing one of the hymns I wrote or study the notes I left. Perhaps.

  A FEW WEEKS AGO I met with several women who had read my book. We gathered in the cafeteria of our town’s Catholic college, invited by a sister in a veil and orthopedic shoes. We were a small group: three sisters, three former sisters, five women from the community, and me. I knew only one woman, from her flower shop downtown.

  I was nervous about the nuns. What would they think of my tell-all tale? How could I let them know that I considered their work and their lives valuable, even though I’d turned my back on their lifestyle?

  Our discussion was intense, but not hostile. One of the women congratulated me on writing such a readable book. One of the sisters interrupted: “That book was hard to read, painful.” She didn’t elaborate. Others commented on how mean the sisters in my book had been—and I tried to explain that I hoped readers wouldn’t dwell on anyone’s faults but could see how, by denying simple human pleasures to its members, even a well-intentioned system could produce monsters. Another of the sisters said, “If only you’d joined a more liberal congregation, one that believed in education.” After an hour, the sister with the veil called intermission and we broke for tea and cookies.

  Round two began with one of the ex-sisters, who’d already said quite a bit, but whose look of determination and absence of cookies led me to suspect that she’d spent the break steeling up the courage to say something important.

  “There’s nothing like the life of a sister,” she began. “Nothing to equal the camaraderie, the devotion, the sense of purpose.” This woman had to be at least sixty-five, and she spoke with so much wistfulness that it broke my heart. She told us that back in her twenties, she had left the convent—more than once. A year after her first departure, she’d returned, then left again. She’d even joined a third time, determined to stick it out, but before too long the sisters sent her home, claiming she wasn’t suited for the convent. “I wanted it so badly,” she said.

  I’d wanted it, too, had never wanted anything so badly in my whole life: to dedicate myself completely, to be of service, to share my life with those good women. I’d envisioned a life where each sister’s gifts were respected and nourished, where we encouraged and challenged each other, all working together for a common goal. I hadn’t bargained that two power-hungry sisters would enmesh the Missionaries of Charity in right-wing church politics, that they would substitute intimidation for inspiration, confuse loyalty with integrity, and pull the group so far to the right that I would hardly recognize it. I hadn’t imagined that my own human needs for intimacy would clash so dramatically with rules demanding the denial of every human desire. I hadn’t realized what a toll obedience would take.

  I still stumble to find words with which to think and talk about my leaving. Had I failed, betraying God and my vows, or had I simply outgrown a tragically stunted community? When I left, I had the audacity to believe that God was calling me out. I’d heard the words of Jesus, “I came that you may have life, and have it to the full,” and I knew that my life in the convent was not full.

  But I’m not sure my present life is full, either. I’m not sure I even know what full means. I do feel freer to search for fullness and for purpose, if they’re to be found.

  I want to stop chasing phantoms.

  AT ANOTHER BOOK DISCUSSION, a woman reminded me that I’d done a lot of good for the sisters, that I’d been a positive influence while in the convent. She asked why that hadn’t been enough for me. She seemed to imply—at least in my mind—that it should have been enough for me.

  Sometimes I think of the sisters and I get this hard, tight feeling in my chest, like I want to cry. But I don’t cry.
I tell myself that crying would be foolish and ungrateful. It’s good that I left the sisters and their nunnish ways. It’s good that now I can think for myself, that I’m in a wonderful marriage, and that I’ve created communities of various sorts where people can be themselves. I feel that tightness in my chest and I defy it. I shouldn’t miss the sisters. I shouldn’t regret not having been able to tough it out. No regrets.

  But I do regret.

  Why couldn’t we have had it all? What stopped us from being a group where both community and individuals mattered? Couldn’t we have created something truly beautiful? Couldn’t we have been allowed to think for ourselves and make our creative contributions within that system?

  But you can’t change one part of a system without affecting the entire system—and Mother Teresa had always made it clear that we didn’t enter the Missionaries of Charity to change the community, but to accept it. She told us that if we didn’t like the MC way of doing things, we should pack up and go home, right now. That’s what she said: Right now. She wagged her finger at us and she told us that if we didn’t want life in the convent exactly as it was, we should go through the door—because she wasn’t changing anything.

  For Mother Teresa, a sister proved her fidelity to God by accepting things as they were and doing things exactly as they were meant to be done, according to the Rules. Why couldn’t she see that living creatures grew, that as they grew they changed, that institutions only remain vital when free to respond in new and creative ways to the challenges before them?

  I’ve heard that Missionaries of Charity these days, when faced with a decision, ask themselves, “What would Mother do?” I’d like to tell the sisters that answering that question will never result in more than a guess anyway, that they need to take responsibility, that they might consider asking, “In this situation now, what is the most loving thing to do, the action that will bring about the most good?”