And Then There Were Nuns (5 page)

It was also clear that we were at different stages in our faith and had different ways of approaching God. One older woman with short brown hair and glasses perched on the end of her nose quoted heavily from modern writers such as Jean Vanier and Philip Yancey; a youngish, skinny woman with long red hair referred to her “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” a phrase that makes me cringe and want to blurt out, “Really? That's not what He told me.” (There is a smug, evangelical ring to that phrase. The other phrase that rankled was “the Good News,” as in “Let's pray for the Good News of Christ on Earth.” Wasn't it all “good news”? What was the “bad news”?) I pegged her for a relative newbie to the faith scene. Like former smokers, they are quick to proselytize in order to expiate their sins, which can be endearing as well as pain-in-the-ass annoying. I dug my fingers into my thigh to stop my cynicism, and to remind myself that I was at least in a place where the words “God” and “Jesus” could be said without the room erupting into scoffs or someone huffing that her human rights were being violated.

The talk that first day wasn't all religion: there were practicalities to go over.

Sister Elizabeth Ann asked us to take out the grid-format schedules that had been tucked into our thick folders.

When Benedict of Nursia was setting up his monastery at Monte Cassino at the turn of the sixth century, he recognized that even religious folks could be consummate lazybones. It was one thing to chat all day with God, but someone had to run the place, and Benedict had no intention of getting stuck with all the cooking and cleaning. He came up with a brilliant and sensible schedule that has been adopted by almost every Christian monastic community since. The days were organized around eight periods of communal worship, called offices, during which prayers would be recited, psalms chanted, hymns sung, and the Bible read. The offices—vigils, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline—were the pillars of the monastic day, while the periods in between were for work, study, meals, and recreation.

The Sisters of St. John the Divine had scaled back Benedict's version to four daily offices: morning prayer or matins, Eucharist at noon, evening prayer, and compline. I was not familiar with compline, but as I was to find out, the term comes from the Latin
completorium,
or completion, which is rather apropos for the final office of the day.

I stared at the schedule in my hand. Oh dear. Convent life was more regimented than I expected. There were no blocks marked “free time” unless sleeping was considered free time; no segments marked “Swan around cloister.” And what were these bits marked “chores” and “work”? A rest period was indicated, but it was only one hour and fifteen minutes. Classes were in the morning, but the timetable did not specify what they were about.

Our day looked like this:

I hadn't had a schedule that rigid since I gave birth to my first child. However, I chalked it up as all part of the obedience vow. Besides, after half a lifetime of single parenting and being in the driver's seat, I was happy to let someone else make decisions.

( 2:iii )

AT FIRST
the silence felt extreme. I had forgotten how much chatter filled my day, and if it wasn't the chatter of my own making, it was the voices of others on the street, on the bus, on the radio, on
TV
, in hallways, in shops. Noise is the aural wallpaper that decorates modern life. Silence, on the other hand, is the interloper, the disturbing element that can be as torturous in its sensory deprivation as noise can be at its most ear-shattering. I began to appreciate why so many people plug into their headphones or mobile phones to avoid it.

In the corridors of the convent, silence was expected; indoor conversations were conducted
sotto voce
in designated areas. You did not chat in the library, and you most certainly did not chat in chapel. This ensured that everyone's peace was respected and that idle gossip was discouraged (though I was under no illusions that gossip never occurred).

Where silence was particularly unnatural was at meals. After all, long communal tables filled with forty women and food just beg for conversation.

“In monastic practice the refectory is an extension of chapel,” explained Sister Elizabeth Ann. “In chapel, your spirit and soul have been fed by God through prayer; in the refectory, it is the body's turn for nourishment.”

It didn't help. The silence made me feel self-conscious and exposed. Without the distraction that talking creates, I didn't know where to look except in my plate or at others going up for food and returning to their seats. Under so many watchful eyes, I took extra care with how much food I took so that no one would think I was a pig, and with how I handled the serving implements so that they didn't scrape loudly against a dish or drop and clang on the table. I became hyperaware of my posture, my table manners, how I chewed my food, slurped my water, the speed at which I ate (always too fast), and even the way I held the cutlery. It was unnerving.

As I acclimatized to the routine and the social nuances, the self-consciousness gradually fell away. We were all awkward beings; get over it. Besides, I wasn't supposed to be thinking about my discomfort; I was supposed to be thinking about God. But all I could think of was how different this was from the workaday world and from everything I had ever known.

In my secular life, if something pinged, rang, chimed, buzzed, or vibrated, I was all over it. In the convent, however, no one rushed to answer the phone or the doorbell. It was like living in “whatever” world or being on Mexican time.

While it was a nice change not to worry about grocery shopping and housekeeping, that brought on its own anxiety: I kept thinking that I was forgetting something or that I needed to make a list. I worried how my local grocery store would cope with my absence.
Gosh, if I become a nun, I might never have to make another list again.
The thought was as delicious as it was panic inducing.

The toughest challenge was trying to exchange my competitive nature for a contemplative one. A brain accustomed to being in overdrive can't help fueling itself with critical observations and superior thinking. I was in chapel one day waiting for the Eucharist to begin when I began to scan the rows of sisters, heads bowed submissively in prayer behind their little prie-dieux, their sweet faces aglow with gentle smiles.
Passive? For sure. Naïve? Perhaps. Feeble? Many of them.
My arrogance shot to the surface like a jackal sensing weak prey in the vicinity:
Yeah, I could do this, I could become a nun. And I'll bet in five years' time I could make reverend mother. Easy.

Well, that sort of arrogance wasn't going to go unnoticed by God. And when God knows, He either lets you off easy or He turns off your dog-poo radar and allows you to step right into it.

The next morning, having lingered too long over email, I raced down the hall toward chapel, my sandals clattering on the bare floor and echoing disturbingly through the cloister corridor. I practically skidded into my prie-dieu. At least I got there on time. As soon as I sat down, I realized I had forgotten to pick up the numerous handouts needed for the service. I got up, shuffled along the row of sisters who were deep in prayer—“Excuse me, excuse me,” I whispered—and went to the back of the chapel, retrieved the necessary handouts, and returned to my seat, disturbing the still-praying sisters with a second round of “Excuse me, excuse me.” All the sisters were gracious and did not appear the least bit annoyed, but I knew what they were thinking behind those forgiving smiles: “Bimbo.”

Our Crossroads group was assigned specific seats in the choir stalls among the sisters. Mine was next to Sister Helen Claire, a petite and poised woman who always sat erect with a dignified, graceful bearing. She was immaculately groomed and was always dressed in a pretty skirt and blouse. Beside her, I was a yeti. She bristled at this invasion of her spiritual privacy.

That morning in my prie-dieu, as my clumsy paws scrunched the haphazard mass of handouts printed on colored sheets of paper, a few fluttered to the ground and landed on Sister Helen Claire's feet. I glanced at her, embarrassed, but her eyes were closed in prayer. Phew. I edged my foot toward hers to see if I could snag the errant sheets and retrieve them without disturbing her, pivoting my foot so that the toe of my sandal would catch the paper. One sheet was stubbornly caught on the edge of Sister Helen Claire's sandal, so I shifted out of my seat and surreptitiously lowered myself to the floor in order to grab the paper with my fingers. As I tugged gently on the piece of paper, I glanced up. Her eyes were wide open now, staring down at me with a look of perturbed alarm that could only be interpreted as “What in the name of all that is sacred are you doing with my feet?”

I smiled sheepishly. Without moving a muscle or changing her expression she closed her eyes, and resumed praying. She was likely praying that the clown beside her would be moved to another part of the chapel.

( 2:iv )

FORGET ABOUT
making reverend mother in five years; I wasn't sure I could make nun in five years. We were only several days into the program, and my unsuitability was glaringly apparent. As streaks of sunlight snuck between the vertical blinds in the classroom, I mentally calculated my sins, large and small, certain I had been grossly deluded about my religious ambitions.
What was I thinking?
I slumped dejectedly in my seat.

And then in walked Sister Jessica.

Toronto had just issued one of its numerous heat advisories—it had to be 140 degrees Fahrenheit outside—but Sister Jessica clearly did not monitor the Weather Network. She was dressed in a long-sleeved turtleneck sweater, a long wool tartan skirt, and black tights. Gray-peppered cropped hair framed a careworn face.

She sat down with a notebook jammed full of loose papers. A few slipped from her clutches and slid over her tartan skirt to the floor. She cursed softly. We loved her immediately.

“Dears,” she began in a Scottish brogue that was somewhere between Maggie Smith and Mrs. Doubtfire, “we're going to talk today about
lectio divina,
a marvelous form of contemplative prayer.
Lectio divina
means ‘divine reading'—I'm sure some of you already knew that—and it's as old as the hills but oh-so effective. Society bombards us with so much information that we speed-read everything and retain nothing.
Lectio
is the opposite: it is the slow, reflective reading of Scripture.”

Lectio divina,
she said, was practiced by the early monks and nuns not so that they could gain knowledge but so that they could directly encounter Christ. They memorized the psalms and read the Bible in small bites, meditating on the passage and whispering it to themselves throughout their day like a mantra so that their bodies were engaged in a continual conversation with God.

“Prayer,” said Sister Jessica, “deepens your relationship with God, and the only way to get the most out of it is to show up and do it. In time, your life becomes a continuous prayer.”

Teresa of Avila once said of prayer that it wasn't merely about spending time with God; it was an opportunity to take off your mask. When you are engaged in deep prayer, you expose to God and to yourself your deepest fears and concerns.

There are a gazillion prayers out there: some prayers leave you dry, others leave you yawning, but certain prayers resonate so strongly that you can almost feel your chemistry change as you say them. You might not even understand why they resonate; they just do.

As Sister Jessica spoke, my mind latched onto those prayers that spoke to me. One was the Anglican Collect for Purity:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.

The words
cleanse
and
secret
seemed to speak directly to me.

Sister Jessica closed her notebook. “Can I give you some advice? Don't go out and buy a bunch of books about prayer. There are as many ways to pray as there are people, but no one can teach you to pray, dears. It has to come from here.” She knocked softly on her heart. “Find a quiet place, close your eyes, and listen for God. That's it. Some people will rave about a new book about prayer like it's a bestseller, but you don't need that.”

She paused, looked at the semicircle of women staring at her, and smiled broadly. “Are you having a good time here? We do keep you awfully busy; I'm sorry about that. But life is busy, even here. Let me tell you a few things about what it's really like in a convent.”

All nine of us leaned forward in our chairs. You could have heard a pin drop three rooms away.

“Sometimes the pace of life here is a bit more hectic than people think. We nuns get stressed out—oh yes!—and we need to take retreats. Oh, don't be surprised. We're not all floating around in a state of serenity with shimmering halos—you might have already figured that out. Life in a convent is much the same as life outside a convent. We drift off during chapel, just like you drift off in meetings; we get bummed out about not concentrating on prayer, just like you might have difficulty concentrating on writing a report or not paying attention to the sermon or the liturgy. We're human. And we have to be reminded to go easy on ourselves and try not to be super-whatevers. Nuns have the same crises of mind and soul as you workaday dears.”