I wanted to sit with Sister Cara soaking up the intelligence of this woman who had worked to help break the Enigma Code. I was intrigued by all that had led Sister Gillian here. I could have stood doing the washing up all evening just to spend time listening to beautiful Sister Clare, or to watch what Sister Mary Janet would do or say next. When the global beauty brands declared that “Beauty comes from within”, these nuns were what they were talking about. And yet here they were, living lives that gave no opportunity to test their sense of self against the approval of men. Their strength was in surrender, not to patriarchs or illusions of ego, but to something else. I couldn’t yet tell what or how, but it was obviously a gazillion worlds away from cover girls and cultural myths about woman’s worth resting in the hand of the man that chooses her.
Soon after my arrival a new Reverend Mother had taken office, and this time it was to be the nun who had led our retreat day in February. The newly elected Mother Mary Jean epitomized this magnetism. She was ageless, compelling and fragile. Her eyes seemed to shy away from you but her presence opened up a place of complete safety and compassion; complete enough to hold anything. I wanted to have time with her more than anyone, I wanted to hear how she had thrown off her doubts, and the shoulds and oughts of subservience to false gods. I wanted to know what illusions she had relinquished. But it wasn’t clear how I would get an opportunity to talk to her. The only talking times of the week were Thursday supper, Saturday tea and Sunday lunchtime. I waited for a chance to bump into her, to explain the entangled muddles of my soul and ego and have her wisdom piece me back together.
The days went on, a rhythm of work, prayer and meals, and I waited for an opportunity. A mass was said for Joe and through the storm of tears I believed once again that – wherever It was and whatever It was like – Joe was held and loved and free.
* * *
Then life carried on and I got on with my chores. I painted the inside of a tiny chapel in the woods. I sat in silence and darkness before Compline each evening. I hoped for interesting visitors to arrive. I waited for something to happen, something to break the monotony. The waiting became boring, and then turned into a growing restlessness; like having itchy blood.
Within days it had manifested as the need to run. Anywhere. Anywhere where there was normality, chatter, fast food, shops, TV and inconsequential decisions to be made. My nun impersonations continued but behind closed eyes I was thinking up devious plots to get away. Offering to take the community car off to fill it up with petrol in a stealth bid to fill up my bag with magazines, snacks and cigars and a bottle of port. Hijacking interesting guests at the retreat house and demanding they share cheese and wine with me and tell me things about the world outside; or better still give me a lift Out Of Here.
I found my sights straining towards anything in the week that would be different, eventful, sociable. Things like driving Sister Jeanne to a dentist appointment where I could sit reading magazines in the waiting room became the highlight of my week. I counted the days until the next Thursday evening, when we would be able to talk at supper and round off the meal with chocolate and beer. I longed for Monday recreation evenings when we would go down to the print house and sit looking out at the view whilst listening to a classical CD chosen by Sister Gillian. I could feel all my expectations and energy being pent up, ready to seize and consume both cake and conversation alike at tea on Saturday afternoons, just to assuage the loneliness and boredom for an hour. Then, hearing the 5.15 p.m. bell toll, I would realize it was over and whatever I was really waiting for and looking forward to hadn’t happened and now there would just be silence again. And another chapel service.
Another chapel service in which I would sit and wonder what I was doing, and feel tears over Joe falling once again, suddenly and easily. His picture was propped up in my stall next to my prayer books. I looked down at him: gone. Everything felt empty and depressing. Joe’s unfinished life; this searching, gnawing, boring, empty existence with nothing to look forward to; this silent, bare chapel with all its bad singing and holy ordinariness, watched over by the carved, dead figure of Jesus. There was nothing even slightly romantic about it. No wonder there were so few extrovert nuns. There was nothing here. The silence and stillness just reminded me of the emptiness, like a diet reminding you of your hunger.
I took the bike that Sister Clare had lent me and, after Compline, when the Great Silence had begun, I would creep out to cycle round the lanes exploring in the late light of the summer evening. But nothing silenced me. This silence that I was watching, pacing through daily, trying to surrender to … despite all its power, it couldn’t silence the noise in my head. My mind swung between grief, longing and the demons that rose up in between. It was so confusing. I had come here because these women so powerfully reflected a God I actually believed in. A God who wasn’t frothy, or in need of our jumping and shouting or pretence. A God who was big enough to hold everything; our shadow side, our incompleteness, our pretences. A God who welcomed everyone and everything we brought with us. Of course I thought I would find peace here … a convent is where people go for peace, right?
And yet, against the backdrop of all this silence I wasn’t at peace: my brain was winding on an unstoppable roller-coaster of wretched thoughts. An endless loop of longed-for escapades or imagined dramas in which I would tell Cliff to repent of his misogynistic theology and go and get some proper theological training for himself; I would chide Janet for colluding with evangelical patriarchy and not being the role model we girls had needed her to be; I would line up every preacher man from my childhood and lambast them for the blasphemy with which they had used the Bible to subjugate women, patronize non-Christians and frighten Christian youngsters into submission with threats of hellfire and damnation. And, when my mind had exhausted those fantasies, it would lurch on to torment me with moustached images of myself, aged 30, cassocked and surpliced in tent-like robes, a wedding ring nowhere to be seen.
The worst thing about feeding on a mental diet of blame, resentment and fear is that you can begin to enjoy it. These things become companions. Like a dog with a juicy bone, my mind relished the seduction of these dramas. Alone, wishing I wasn’t quite so addicted to this company of inner demons, I tried to concentrate on the words of the psalm in front of me; or the banister I was polishing; the bed I was making. Or the fruit I was picking. But I couldn’t switch off the stream of thoughts and I returned to the scullery with bucketloads of rhubarb, and saw Sister Joan try to stifle her alarm at the sight of an entire patch of picked rhubarb laid out in mountains across the counter space, wondering where on earth to freeze it all.
Finally, weeks later, Mother Mary Jean knocked on my door. She came and sat on my bed and asked me how I was. I told her. She clasped her hands and looked off to the side as she talked, as if she was listening to something else and relaying it to me. Her warm rasping voice was accompanied by a compassionate smile every now and then.
“The silence can feel terrifying, I think. We feel our defences and hear the voice of our monkey mind scrabbling between worry and fear … but that’s the gift of silence too … it creates space for us to listen and to be.”
“But I’m so frustrated by what I’m seeing about myself. It’s all I can do to stop myself escaping to the pub for an evening just to get some TV and mindless distraction from myself.”
“Keep listening, keep listening … the gift is all there. What you’re coming up against are your false comforts; you have to see those so that you can be freed from them.”
Her voice was so calm as if the grip of one’s ego was something to be gently shrugged off, but then she continued:
“This pain is the only thing strong enough to shift the masks and defences we have around ourselves. Our ego is afraid to be without all these comforts, it’s afraid of that kind of nakedness. It can feel like it’s you failing, but these things are all in the mind. It’s just the voice of your monkey mind, they’re not actually you.”
Sh
e watched me for a moment, waiting for the words to settle within me.
“God’s brought you here to begin revealing what you are, to allow all the stuff that gets in the way back at home and college to fall away. It’s uncomfortable, but let the silence hold you.”
I didn’t speak.
“Just stay present to it all, you don’t need to overcome or stop these thoughts or the desire to escape … just sit with it.”
As she got up to leave I asked her how she’d known to come and see me.
“Oh, I heard a whisper.”
“Who? Who told you?”
She fluttered her fingers up next to her ear. “Oh, nobody … I just heard a little whisper.”
The next day a cassette player and tapes of Mozart’s piano concertos were left outside my room. Alongside them was a framed picture of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and a note from Mary Jean: I thought these might be good companions for you.
In the company of a prodigal son, 13 nuns and a gardener, I promised God that I wouldn’t bolt. I stopped trying to fill the emptiness, or trying to achieve anything out of it. Instead I felt it. I allowed myself to rest into it, letting myself be, no matter how clanky or hollow that felt.
When it all felt like a monumental waste of time, I thought “So let’s waste time.”
When I found myself mentally throttling preacher men, I let go.
When I got twitchy and felt hidden away without any measureable props of success, I thought “Yes” – and relished the apparent insignificance of it all.
When temptation to imagine a better version of myself overtook me, I looked down at the holes in my trainers and the soil under my nails. I felt my back pressed against the wooden stall, the thin cushion padding my backside and the sound of my quivery voice not quite managing to follow the tune of whichever hymn we were trying to sing. This was how I returned to myself and made myself at home in the present moment.
This was the only place I could truthfully encounter God or anyone else. Not in memories and reactions to past pain or in thoughts about the future, but right here in this place, among these women who got jumper-envy and had their own brand of unacceptable bits: like bad tempers and impatience. Like loud tutting at the sister who had wafted obliviously past a note of instruction that had been left for her by another sister. Or the huffs and puffs of annoyance when Sister Cara failed yet again to tune her hearing-aid in to the correct loop and subjected the rest of us to 30 minutes of high-pitched whistling. Or the look of fury that one sister gave another when she overlooked the large sign saying “Chalice Bearer” left in her stall for immediate attention. Novice Joy’s mouth would ripple with a smile, her gaze directed safely away from mine, and I suspected there were chuckles in the heavens too.
The quiet wasn’t spoilt by irritations and jealousies; the nuns’ humanity made it strong enough for everything just to be held and loved. These women were willing to be honest about their humanity and they lived expecting God to dwell within them anyway. They weren’t trying to create the magic of silence in order to appear holy; they were saying Yes to it. Day after day, year after year, their whole lives were a great Yes to the silence; to allowing all things to be heard and held in it; to being stripped bare by it; to discovering that underneath it all there is only love.
And so, when I stopped being so frightened by the silence, I saw that it was the only thing that would peel back enough layers to help me see the truth that underneath it all is love.
And I saw that the silence wasn’t frightening: it was strong, it was Love. A vast Love revealing my nakedness and emptiness, my insignificance and poverty, so that I could be covered and clothed at last.
26
Stealth Nettle Farming
“Into your hands I commend my spirit
For you have redeemed me Lord God of truth.”
“Into your hands I commend my spirit
Keep me as the apple of your eye.”
“Hide me under the shadow of your wing
Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
The words arched across the space in chapel each evening, gently sent out from one side before being responded to by the sisters on the other.
Into your hands I commend my spirit.
The words had started to sound rhythmically in my mind, becoming a prayer that I didn’t so much think as just hear, rising up over and over again. When my mind swung from worry to fear to doubt like a boat bobbing up and down on the water I returned to those words, letting them anchor me.
Into your hands I commend my spirit.
It struck me that these were the last words Jesus prayed as he hung on the cross. I looked up from my stall at the carved figure of Christ, his head falling forward: dying. These weeks of silence, of facing my fears, efforts and grievances, were a kind of death, a letting go of all the important things I’d thought life was about. It made me face the anxious unwanted thoughts that goaded me to react to them, triggering me to busy myself with schemes to avoid the dreadful fate they suggested. What would I become if I didn’t fight them off by proving that I was a success – whichever image of success I chose? It was like spiritual vertigo; a feeling of falling, without knowing if there was a harness or arms to catch me.
But when I looked up at Christ, up on the wall in the dimming light of the evening, I saw the ultimate in epic fails.
Into your hands I commend my spirit.
That Christ who died and rose again to save us – I was so familiar with the words and the bit about being saved that I’d skipped the bit about dying. That’s what faith was for us: about believing that Christ had died and risen for us so we could get into heaven. But in all my efforts to Be Saved and Avoid Hell I’d missed the fact that something has to die before new life can blossom – something in me. Now here it was: the picture of Jesus surrendered, out of control, undefended, dying. It wasn’t a piece of correct doctrine to be spouted; it was the way to follow, the surrender of all my agendas and control and self-images. I stared up at the cross with the figure on it, gathering me into its story. What I’d always taken for some Anglo-Catholic ornament was now finding me, drawing me in with its whispers of life and hope.
And I heard the whisper of my reply: whatever that new life is, I’ll say Yes to it.
It was a moment of surrender: a significant moment but just another moment of surrender all the same. It was becoming clear to me that I didn’t just do it once aged five in Glories and tick the box; it was to be a life-long journey. Letting go in order to be made a little more whole, again and again and again.
That particular evening I knew that it would mean returning to college with a view to begin discerning with my tutors and my Bishop whether I had a vocation to the priesthood. I knew that it would be a rigorous process, which might take a couple of years. But all this procedure and testing seemed like a matter of course, because these moments of surrender were a coming home to myself: being a priest was simply an expression of my truest identity. It wasn’t the end-point, or an ambition in itself, but a vehicle that I sensed would be liberating; letting me maybe lose and probably find myself in something much bigger than me.
Fears of frumpy spinsterhood lost their grip as I stopped wrestling with the image of a vicar in my head and said Yes to life instead. Yes to this way that would allow me to speak to people of a God who brings us home to ourselves. A God who gently unearths our deepest identity from the crustation of pretence and illusions we try to keep in place. I wanted to be part of something that says Yes to all the bruised, broken, flawed bits of our humanity and clothes those vulnerabilities in love, not in rejection and judgement. I wanted to be part of a church that wasn’t stuck in the respectability of Sunday services but went out and affirmed the creativity of God in the whole of life, not just in the bits that got labelled holy.
I stayed in chapel a long time after Compline was finished and the candles had been blown out. In a little corner of the wall behind the altar was the light of a candle that was neve
r extinguished; it carried on flickering as I finally got up to leave and climb the stairs to the attic floor where I was now staying.
At the top of the house, down the long corridor leading to the sisters’ rooms, I noticed all the trays of nettles, herbs and plants that Novice Joy was growing along the windowsill. She called it her apothecary. I called it her nettle farm. It looked like the enthusiastic hobby of a nursery school child whose appetite for home-grown cress had given way to the need for more hardcore flavours.
Catching her tending these nettles one afternoon I had asked her what they were for. She had told me these plants were ingredients that she mixed up as herbal remedies to heal her inflamed and blemished skin. I hadn’t thought much more of it except to ask if they worked. I hadn’t anticipated their significance.
“Well they’re for my skin you see. It’s becoming so problematic.”
Which made it undiplomatic to look directly at her skin and see what she was talking about – but I couldn’t help myself. I had never noticed that Novice Joy had suffered from acne, only that she had the most exquisitely defined jawbone.
“Every now and then my skin just flares up and my stomach bloats horribly and I can feel this tension in my tummy … Sometimes I just can’t bear to touch or look at my face … I can’t bear it. I don’t want anyone looking at me; I don’t want anybody to see me. I know it’s a stress thing … but I feel by doing this I’m finding a creative response, being part of the healing.”
A Lot Like Eve Page 16