And Then There Were Nuns (10 page)

I glanced around at the other women in the room, all visiting their own private deserts: some were staring out the window; some were journaling madly; one sat with tears leaking from her closed eyes.

I got up from my chair and left the meeting room without making eye contact with Sister Sue. I fled to a small kitchen nearby, closed the door, and quietly wept. I could feel all the rage and humiliation from the assault surging through me. I thought I would explode.

Goddamn God,
I muttered as tears streaked my face.
All those years I prayed and pretty much stuck to the straight and narrow, and this is what I get in return? You abandoned me in the desert while the ravens circled and picked at me.

I stayed in the kitchen for several minutes, splashing cold water on my face, trying to cool my flushed face and my anger. Across from me, hanging on the wall like a picture, was a tea towel—one of those souvenirs sold at tourist sites. This one depicted a castle, and beneath it were the words “Sneaton Castle—Whitby.”

As I struggled to pull myself together, I stared at the tea towel, and immediately a clear voice spoke:
You need to go there.

I looked over my shoulder. No one was there.
Did I imagine that?

I froze on the spot and listened again.

You need to go there,
the Voice repeated. There was no mistaking it this time.

Boiling with anger and rage, I sneered back:
Are you kidding me? Why would I need to go to a castle? To be honest, I think you've become a little punch-drunk with your go-here-go-there missives lately. And when I do follow your direction and find myself in a pile of shit, you're suddenly
AWOL
. You know what? You go to Whitby. And have a wonderful time,
OK
? Send me a postcard.

I was certain I was losing my mind. Yeah, that was it. The trauma of reliving the rape had disordered my senses. Besides, Whitby was just east of Toronto, and there was no castle there.

Just go,
the Voice insisted a third time.
You need to go there.

I swatted the idea away with a dismissive wave and dried my tears. Not wanting to linger any longer in a small room with a pushy, disembodied voice speaking to me from a tea towel and dispensing dodgy travel advice, I returned to the meeting room.

Sister Sue was winding up the session. I made a mental note to never attempt the Ignatian method again.

( 2:xiii )

A FEW
days later I sat in a small room off the cloister with Sister Maggie Smith—I mean, Sister Jessica. She had been assigned as my mentor for the program, and although we had had a few casual conversations in the past few weeks this was the first formal one-on-one session.

“How are you getting on, dear? Do you miss your fiancé?”

I paused a long time before answering. It wasn't that I did not miss Colin, but the nature of our six-year transatlantic relationship meant we were more often apart than together. I told her that Colin and I had continued to email, and then I told her I was thinking of becoming a postulant.

It was her turn to pause.

“Tell me a bit of what you've been doing. How's your praying coming along?”

It was a good segue into my meltdown during the class on the Ignatian method. Poor Sister Jessica. I dumped it all on her—my desert, the rape, my silence, the whole shebang.

She gently scolded me for not coming to her sooner—“You should have come to me right after the Ignatian session”—and then she reached out and held my hand and asked me more about the rape. There was sadness on her face. She herself had been emotionally and physically abused during her honeymoon, she said, and understood something about my experience.

“Dear, you must pray about it, pray for strength and for resolution. What that man did was horrible. Oh, you poor wee thing. I'm so sorry.”

We sat in silence, holding hands, trapped in memories of abuse and violence.

I summoned the nerve to tell her about my vision in front of the tea towel and about the voice that had instructed me to go to Sneaton Castle. I needn't have been concerned about her reaction. It was one of the things I loved about the nuns: you could talk about visions, dreams, and intuition, and no one would be privately sizing you up for a straitjacket.

“You know, dear, Sneaton Castle is a wonderful place. It's the home of the Order of the Holy Paraclete. They are in Whitby. No, not the one near Toronto, you silly thing. The Whitby in North Yorkshire. England. Our two communities have a long history. I visited them a few years ago; I'll show you the pictures I took. It was marvelous, and I know you would love it. Look, let me talk to Sister Elizabeth Ann. I'll bet she could email the prioress, Dorothy Stella—oh, she's a great gal, you'll adore her—and see about you staying there. If you've been called by God to go there, then, my dear, you must go.”

The next day, I was in Sister Elizabeth Ann's office. I wanted to throw myself at her feet and beg her to take me in. I desperately needed to belong to something that gave my ragged soul a measure of goodness, where I could hide from the shame of the rape and feel worthy and clean again.

I can't remember if I told her I wanted to be a postulant, an associate, an oblate, or all three—I was grasping for anything and everything—but she steadied me and asked me to think hard about it for a year.

A year? I could be dead by then!

“In the meantime, why don't I email the prioress of the Order of the Holy Paraclete. If God has called you to go there, then you must go. It's a great community, and you'll love Whitby. Let's see how you feel after that.”

( 2:xiv )

IT WAS
the final day of our Crossroads retreat and the last time I would hear lauds for a long time.

I sat with Sister Sue in an anteroom of the chapel while she rang the Angelus: three successive tolls, a pause, then three more, a pause, and a final three, followed by nine distinct bells. It is the monastic world's Morse code to God that the community is worshipping Him. Silently, the sisters prayed:
Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women.
But all I could summon were the lines from Psalm 17 that Sister Elizabeth Ann always said at compline:
Keep me, O God, as the apple of your eye; hide me under the shadow of your wings.

Calmness washed over me, and for a moment life made sense. God was all of us; God was Sister Sue and Sister Jessica and every sister and every member of my family, every friend, every co-worker, every person I passed on the street. If I could treat every person I encountered as a child of God, I would be transformed. Isn't that what I wanted?

The memory of the rape was riding the surface of my emotions. I could no longer hide from it. A few nights earlier I had gone out with Lorraine and had told her about it. I needed two glasses of wine before I could broach the subject, but at least it was a start.

The bells of the Angelus now rang steadily and my thoughts turned to
bells, cow bells, dusty path, pilgrimage
—and I remembered that it was July 25, the feast day of St. James the Apostle. I knew all about James: he was the patron saint of Spain's Camino de Santiago de Compostela. I was on another pilgrimage now, one that didn't come with a map.

( 2:xv )

I MISSED
the convent of St. John the Divine the moment I returned home. Some of the routine there had chafed, but now that I was home it was my freedom that chafed. I would look at my watch and imagine what the sisters were doing: I pictured them in their places in chapel chanting the litany, praying for Bible societies; for peace; for the homeless, the sick, the depressed, the disenfranchised; and for their fellow sisters around the world. I pictured them silently processing from chapel to the refectory and withdrawing into their own zone of silent reflection while eating their meals. I missed my twenty-five new friends.

I molded my newly acquired monastic skills around a full-time job. At work, I stole off to read the psalms (part prayer, part sonnet for my thirsty soul), and sought out prayer meetings and ecumenical services. At home, I said the offices each morning and evening, but it was not the same without a community of chanting cheerleaders.

“Every time you begin something, pray. It marks the start of a new chapter in your day and your life,” Sister Jessica had taught me.

And pray I did. I became a veritable praying machine. Monastic life is about a way of looking at the world, of directing your gaze toward God's creation—the good and the not-so good—of engaging with reality. On my way to work in the morning, I viewed those I passed not as street people or business people or tourists or single moms or up-to-no-good students, but as children of God. On the bus I prayed for the driver, for the old woman struggling with her walker, for the student zoned out on his
MP
3 player. Instead of being irritated by them, I marveled at them. Good heavens, that person across the aisle is a child of God! I prayed silently before meetings started, for co-workers who were off sick, for those I passed in the hallway. I even prayed for my scheming boss.

I did not let on where I had spent my summer vacation. The reaction would have been predictable. Had I said I was at an ashram, a Buddhist retreat, or a kibbutz, people would have said, “Wow.” But if I told them I had been to a Christian convent they would have said “Ew.”

The few friends I did tell were surprised that nuns still existed and even more surprised that there were Anglican nuns. George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once remarked that nuns were “the best-kept secret of the Anglican Communion.” He got that right, but why has the church been reluctant to talk openly about their religious orders?

Three things became clear within a few weeks of being back in the secular world: I could no longer stay in my job; I could no longer worship in a parish church, or rather not the one I had been attending; and I had to find a convent to join and start living a monastic life.

The weekly Sunday church service, a sort of church lite, seemed so watered down compared with the rich monastic version I had come to know. There was no room for prayerful reflection. Hymns were sung at breakneck speed; ditto for the prayers. The intercessions were particularly lazy territory. Instead of praying for the unemployed and the dying, the congregation prayed for the Queen, for the prime minister, for the Anglican primate, and for high-ranking clergy in Canada and around the world. Sure, these people need our prayers, but when your intercessions are loaded up with political and religious luminaries what place do you assign to the common man or woman? I wanted a more creative and more civic-minded approach: to pray for specific environmental problems in the town or city, for the mother who had lost her son in a gang murder the day before, for the children who were battling for their lives in the local cancer wards, for the father who had suddenly found himself out of work, for street people, and for the new immigrants to the city.

The politicization of religion was there, all right; the prayers for peace and justice and other buzz words and feel-good notions. Lorraine would have burst a blood vessel had she been present.

Four months later, I left my job. I teetered in a state of bewilderment; rarely had I been without employment in thirty-five years.

As if called by a siren, I was drawn back to the convent, back to where I knew my equilibrium would be restored. The only place I knew where I fit in. A bus took me from Hamilton into Toronto and then a subway carried me north. Emerging from the subterranean jungle to the blare of street-level traffic, my legs took over, as if on auto pilot, taking me toward the convent.

Sister Jessica was there, and she took me in her arms. So did Sister Helen Claire and Sister Sue.
Yes, I do belong here.

Sister Elizabeth Ann had contacted the prioress of the Order of the Holy Paraclete in England, and my visit was arranged. I would spend three months immersing myself in cloistered monastic life. All that remained was to book my flight and confirm my arrival date.

From there, things proceeded with lightning speed—always a sign that you are on the right path. Incredibly, everything I prayed for was miraculously answered. I prayed that my former employer would give me three months' severance before my pension kicked in: approved. I prayed that a tenant would be found to sublet my condo: done. I prayed that my children would get jobs and placements that would enable them to be entirely self-sufficient while I was away: granted. I prayed for a few freelance jobs to sustain me until my departure for England: check.

Almost overnight I was emptied of everything I had known and refilled with tough, direct questions:
Are you prepared to give up your life and follow Me? Can you rid yourself of material possessions and the distractions of this world and commit your life to Christ? Can you shed your ego, your vanity, your attachments and desires, and disappear into my world?

Yikes!
Would you like fries with that?
I wasn't sure whether I had the attitudinal rigor for such a life, but that was apparently immaterial because, with or without my consent, the transformation was underway.

First, my femininity pretty much packed up and walked out the door. I used to be a fairly fashion-conscious gal: I loved intense colors, jewelry, makeup, and shoes—oh, I could not get enough of shoes.

Now I had completely lost the will to shop. On the rare occasions when I ventured into a shop, I would gravitate to the same color palette: black, gray, brown. (On those days that I felt daring, I'd peruse the rack of navy-colored clothes.) I developed—out of nowhere—a fondness for dull thick shoes with sensible heels. I used to love kitten-heel shoes; now I was lacing up Doc Martens. Docs!

I stopped wearing makeup, cut off my hair, and stopped coloring it. Catching sight of myself in the mirror one day, I wondered,
When did I become a lesbian?