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A Lot Like Eve

Page 15

by Joanna Jepson


  The service continued with almost studied lack of intonation; no excitability, no attempt to try and rouse the congregation into some kind of manufactured psycho-spiritual thrill. It was almost as if each nun was saying the words and they all just happened to be in the same room at the same time. I was fascinated, with the kind of fascination you get when something is awful but being done with a straight face all the same and you’re waiting for someone’s face to crack. But nobody’s did, until we realized that we should follow the sisters up to make an arc around the plain, stone altar to receive the wafer and the wine. And then a small, bespectacled sister, with a bleeping hearing-aid in need of new batteries and tufts of grey hair that looked as if it might have been cut with a knife and fork shooting out from under her slipping wimple, turned and broke into a strong, welcoming smile and gestured for me to come and stand beside her. That was all. Her opening arms, her unfussy welcome, her unconcerned return to silent devotion all simply allowed us to take our place in the service, free to get the words or gestures wrong, free not to be able to follow what was going on, to stay standing when the rest of them knelt, or to remain upstanding when everyone else bowed low before the cross. Their welcome was simple, wide and genuine and absolutely devoid of any effort to cajole, correct or impress us. They truly were, in a very ordinary, unotherworldly way, about Something Else.

  It was something I didn’t get, but by the end of the day I wanted to know more. Their lack of frothy spirituality, the realization that they had hung days, years, decades of their life on this simple, quiet unspectacular rhythm of worship, was fascinating and compelling. It spoke of something unseen but undoubtedly deep-rooted in truth, for there was little else to commend this spartan way of life and worship.

  So at the end of the day, when we had finished whittling hand-held crosses on the verandah whilst listening to the quiet, warm observations with which Sister Mary Jean answered our questions, I asked her if I could come back and stay longer. “Well, we have people to come and live with us for three months at a time, as Alongsiders …”, her eyes creased with a smile stretching across her face and lifting her striking, high cheekbones, and her face shifted as if uneasy with one-to-one encounters. “You could write to Mother Gillian and tell her you’d like to explore this … perhaps in your summer holidays?”

  We drove away from the convent down windy, forest-lined roads, Sue and Guy already laughing, singing, “How do we solve a problem like Joanna?” at the prospect of my summer spent in a nunnery. Over the next few months letters arranging my visit went back and forth between Mother Gillian and myself. My twenty-first birthday came and went, and there were only three weeks left of term and a long summer stretching out silently ahead of me. I couldn’t wait.

  Then, that evening, came a phone call from Laura in Cheltenham. It was Joe. He was dead. He’d choked on his vomit; his body was found six days later.

  24

  The Time of Your Life

  I couldn’t go anywere. It was the end of term: valedictory services were being prepared; choir rehearsals were squeezed between services, farewell tea parties and dinners; rooms needed to be cleared and outstanding essays finished. The college was buzzing with celebration and excited families preparing to move to their new parishes. And I watched it all through a blur of free-falling tears. I was sickened: by the thought that Joe was dead, by the thought that I’d not seen him since I’d left, by the thought that he was alone like that when he died. Unseen and unfound. I sat through choir rehearsals letting the music wash over me, unable to open my mouth and sing one note. The words of hymns and prayers sounding around me as the leavers’ futures were gathered up and dedicated and blessed provoked fresh floods of tears as I saw again the loss of Joe’s future. In the end I stopped trying to hide and wipe them away and nobody else tried to either. Even in the flow of a community leaning with anticipation into new futures, students stood still with me and waited with me for the reverberations of grief and loss to be absorbed afresh all over again.

  Someone posted a card under my door,

  “Joanna, I think that God is bigger, much bigger than our human efforts, than our inadequacies. He has to be. So we don’t have the answers, but God is just and loves the weak.”

  I was devoid of answers. Joe dying was not the way it was meant to go. That wasn’t the story I wanted to be part of. It wasn’t the hope I had hoped for him. So how could it have been allowed to happen? If I loved Joe this much then how much more did God love him? But I didn’t have the energy to pound God with my “whys?”; instead I let them wash down my face in tears of disbelief.

  Joe’s funeral was a couple of days after term ended. Rosalind, who had met him several times, offered to come with me and so together we drove out to the town where he had lived. The church was full, the vicar, white-haired and robed, appeared utterly swamped by the rabble of young people, all looking as if they were caught somewhere between grief and shock. We slipped into a row next to Geoff and another couple from the youth work team, and watched as the coffin was carried in.

  It wasn’t just the sight of his coffin that shook me. It was Leon, anorak falling off one shoulder, struggling to take the weight of the coffin as he buckled in his own stunned sorrow. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked worse than I had ever seen him. He looked as if he was about to go the same way.

  I don’t remember much about the service; just the haunting words of Joe’s parents, “If only we could turn back the clock.” And then the clear melodic chords of Green Day’s song, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”, broke into the silence of the hushed congregation, the words following him as he was carried out to the graveyard.

  Outside, next to his grave, I was joined by Leon and James. Leon stood by me mute, watching open-mouthed and red-eyed as the electric guitar of blue flowers disappeared under the shovel-loads of dry soil. And James stepped up in his smart suit and ushered forward his shy girlfriend to be introduced. He told me about the college course he was on, the A-levels he was working towards, having messed them up back at school, and his ambition to become a vet. And then he said, “I hope you become a vicar – so you can marry me and Amy.”

  I stared at him. I didn’t even know the word vicar was in his vocabulary. I looked at him and then at his girlfriend, trying to compute where this idea had just come from. How could he know this?

  I had shrugged and laughed off so many comments from friends at college about being called to ordination. It was easy: I told them I wouldn’t be jumping on their bandwagon. It didn’t mean anything that trainee vicars suggested I think about training to be a vicar; being a vicar was what was on their mind.

  But this was James talking – James who didn’t have anything to do with Anglican clergy. I’d always wanted to come back to these lads. Now I was here – not in the way I’d expected or wanted – but I had come back and I couldn’t shrug off James’s words.

  25

  Tractors and Silence

  There’s a kind of romance that obscures the reality of convent life. Something about the nuns’ silence and their identically crisp, stark, black-and-white habits that makes it really hard not to imagine all the lovelorn desires and tragic secrets and naughty rebellion that are probably being harboured underneath. That is how I saw it anyway. Based on a childhood overdosing on The Sound of Music and occasional visits to a nearby manor house inhabited by labradors and nuns who glided like shadows from afternoon tea to their wrought-iron-gated chapel, I was ill-prepared for the reality that lay ahead of me at Ty Mawr.

  At first it all seemed to be as I anticipated. An ancient sister was on the front lawn tending the roses when Mum and I arrived. She creaked slowly over to us with a trug under one arm and rasped, ‘Hello, you must be Joanna.’ Then turned and led us off to the room where I was going to live for the first month of my stay. It was a charming room, above the front porch, overlooking the roses and front lawns and the fields rolling away from the end of the path beyond. I unpacked my suitcase and saw a card le
ft for me:

  A very BIG welcome Joanna. Just be and sleep and know. Love, Mary Jean

  On the desk lay a sheet of paper. It was a timetable of all the offices of prayer.

  7 a.m.Morning Prayer

  8.45 a.m.Terce

  12 p.m.Mass

  5.30 p.m.Vespers

  8 p.m.Silent prayer

  8.30 p.m.Compline

  At least they weren’t in the habit of getting up for chapel at 3 a.m.

  And so the rhythm of this quiet new life went, day after day after day after day. In between chapel I was assigned to work on the land surrounding the convent, with Martin, the gardener. Mornings were spent cleaning the guesthouse under Sister Veronica Ann’s supervision. This was incredibly fortuitous, first because she was the only other extrovert there, and second, being a good distance away from the convent, we were free to indulge in very chatty coffee breaks on the verandah. I told her stories about Joe, and about nights spent dancing at the Lizard Lounge to which she would rumble ho-ho-ho’s of laughter and exclaim, ‘I mean to say, how gorgeous! How simply gorgeous!’

  And she told me about her journey from South Africa to Wales, and about her 50 years at the convent, and the days when sisters weren’t allowed to go into other establishments, not even fish and chip shops, and how she once had to stand outside a chippy eating her newspapered meal in a downpour. Sister Veronica Ann was a force of nature; the kind of tough nut that would dig through snow drifts to clear the road to the convent in harsh winters and think nothing of mowing a full field of hay between changing the sheets in the guest house and attending to bed-bound sisters in the convent. She was awesome; I wanted to be her when I grew up.

  So when Martin, told me I was going to learn to drive the tractor it looked like my dream might come true. In a cloister hung photos of the sisters stretching back to the first early days in the 1920s and the founding sister, Mother Gwenvrede, could clearly be seen atop the very same grey Ferguson tractor I was about to helm. There was a strange pride in taking my place high up on the little seat that had been sat on by generations of indomitable women. They clearly didn’t dally with an ideal of womanhood that involved validation by husbands or children. Marriage and motherhood might well be a sacrifice but it seemed nothing compared to the breath-taking pursuit of truth to which nuns gave themselves. Climbing up onto the little black seat was like joining a long line of women who had fearlessly battled earth and soul and I pondered whether one had to be a nun in order to follow in their footsteps.

  “The thing is,” I confessed to Martin as we raked up the hay I’d mown, “I just don’t think I could stop talking for long enough to be a nun. Last night, when Sister Susan walked into the kitchen during the Great Silence, she glared at me and said ‘You’re looking very guilty Joanna’ – even though I’d managed to stop discussing hot chocolate with Judith before she came in! Somehow these nuns just know stuff.”

  “Are you thinking about the novitiate then, Joanna?”

  I definitely wasn’t. I had been very sure for the months leading up to my visit never to say “I’m never going to be a nun.” There were too many stories told by ordinands who had once said I’m never going to be a vicar and then ended up with a vocation. I had been more careful than that. The problem was that I had declared far and wide that I was never going to be a vicar. And it had been an easy suggestion to shake off until James suggested it.

  “When James said to me, ‘I hope you become a vicar’, it was like a call I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve got to listen to that, then, doesn’t it” he said, stirring his mug of tea.

  “Yeah, it all seems so planned, as if God has sneaked ahead of me and put everything in place … my stay here, the space to grieve for Joe, the space to listen … at least the space to learn to stop talking …”

  Martin didn’t say anything; he just had a wry smile on his face as he leaned on his rake, sipping his tea, watching as if waiting for me to get the message.

  “Working with Joe and Leon and James made me so restless to go to theological college, I thought I would learn things there that would bring me full circle back to them, that I would be able to work with them more usefully than being a Friday and Saturday evening do-gooder.”

  “As long as it was anything but being a vicar.”

  “Yep. And now James has told me that’s exactly what he needs me to be. I … I just cannot ignore it.” I grimaced.

  “And? What’s so bad about it?”

  “I don’t know … well, I guess it’s just so dowdy and frumpy. I mean, even when James said what he said, the second thing that went through my head – after the stream of pulsing exclamation marks – was ‘I can’t! I don’t look like a vicar! I don’t have a beard, grey hair or a fairisle jumper.’”

  “And what have looks got to do with it?”

  OK, so when it was put like that the answer had to be nothing. It was one of the tenets of faith I now lived by, that looks would no longer bar me from places, people or dance floors. That is, until vicars were mentioned. Then I collided headlong with all the lingering distortions and prejudice that still lurked, unexorcised, in my mind. I would have fought like a wild thing had one fluorescent spike of Joe’s hair been combed down by a po-faced preacher man or if an assailant had dared to spit again at Alastair’s face. But when it came to me the self-image in my head was still held hostage somewhere between 1 Peter 3.3 and the vital statistics of an original 1990s supermodel. Becoming an androgynous vicar would mean the demise of all femininity – and what that really meant was being a spinster. Single; unchosen; game over. In fact the only way I could see to make that situation OK would be by becoming a nun. If I end up a spinster vicar maybe I could become a nun when I’m 30 as a kind of back-up? Maybe. Maybe I’ll have stopped talking too much by then?

  I decided Martin wasn’t the kind of guy I could have this girl chat with. In fact, as I looked around chapel during Evening Prayer, I wasn’t sure there were many people there with whom I could discuss this conflict. But I was wrong. A few days later Novice Joy revealed she had jumper envy. My bright pink, green and blue striped Boden knit had caused a sister to stumble.

  “I love your jumper … it’s so joyful, I love seeing you wearing it in chapel against our sea of black and white.”

  “Really?! Well, you can have it …” Then, realizing the uselessness of this offer, “I mean, you could have it and wear it on your day off.”

  “Oh no, nooo … I like seeing it on you, it’s so you! I just wish we could have brighter habits. Why can’t we have multi-coloured habits? What’s so holy about black?!”

  She was laughing, but I was relieved to get even a hint of sartorial awareness from a nun.

  “Well, I’ll design you a habit that’s made in a colour to suit you. I’d love to do that. You find me the pattern, I’ll make a joyful collection of red, green and purple habits and before you know it chapel will be a brighter place …We’ll be like silent Gay Pride.”

  “Oh my goodness … That would be fantastically subversive.”

  “Do you think it would feel more feminine if you wore colour?”

  “Ooooh, I don’t know … maybe a bit … I think it’s all the glumness that I shy away from and the association of piety with gloom. The skies are grey enough here in winter. But then I don’t suppose you become a nun to wear particularly pretty clothes …”, she mused, still smiling.

  “It’s so funny to hear you express concern about the lack of colour in your clothes.”

  She replied with an ambiguous “Mmmmmm”.

  “I mean you guys are nuns and your expression of femininity is so awesome … it seems to go way beyond what you wear.”

  “Well I suppose it does. But I’m still aware of myself as a clothed person”, she said wistfully.

  By now we’d taken off our trainers and sandals and were stretching our toes into the cold pond at the bottom of the field.

  “Joy, I’ve got such a hang up with clothes
and vocation … I’ve heard a blaring call to the priesthood, like a force of truth I can’t swerve away from … but …”

  “But bad clothes?!”

  “Awful. Becoming a woman vicar …”, I groaned, and wondered how many years it would take for us to drop the gender prefix and the implication that it was a man’s job.

  “Dreadful!” she mocked, chuckling, her eyes scrunched shut against the sun.

  “Surely the fact that my biggest stumbling block is vanity makes me entirely unsuitable for ordained ministry.”

  She laughed again, looking at me expectantly.

  “I suspect that that and all your other reasons are the very things that will make your ministry worthwhile …”

  She was sprawled out, feet dripping with water, flattening the overgrown grasses with her outstretched frame.

  “What’s it going to take, Joanna?” Her voice was so lilting and gentle. “You’ve been looking for a way to return to those guys in a useful way. Now they’ve told you themselves that they want you to be their priest.”

  “But I don’t like the answer: it clashes with the picture of life that I’ve pieced together in the scrapbook of my mind.”

  “Something’s going to have to give … and I just wonder what it is going to take for you to give it …”

  So far it had taken James’s simple request. And now it was my need to be in control that remained, and the decision to trust that God wasn’t waiting for me to grow a beard and become a man. The decision to believe – in order that one day I might come to see what God had been creating all along. Choosing to let go of all the things in my head that I thought I ought to be in order to please false gods, parents, peers, preacher men and potential husbands …

  It would take the giving up of all these things.

  I didn’t know how, but in the quiet, unshakeable dignity of these women I felt I had seen strength of purpose and authenticity and womanliness that went beyond all I knew about feminism. There was no sense that they were reacting to anything or trying to disprove the fearful possibility that men were indeed the preferred half of the population. Nor was there ever any squirm of innate, apologetic behaviour so rife among the circles of girls I’d known. Just their ease in inhabiting the space that was theirs, as if their spirits expanded into the full possibility of any given moment. I found myself constantly and unexpectedly struck by the beauty of these women. They were elderly, with skin that sagged away from cheek and jaw bones, and facial whiskers that hinted at their years, and yet that isn’t what I saw when I looked at them. It was the liveliness: a radiance in their eyes that made you feel you had been drawn into a dance with them, and made you want to join in and see where it would take you.

 

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