And Then There Were Nuns (9 page)

“Well, just remember that vocations come from the heart, not from the head,” smiled Sister Elizabeth Ann as she returned to her handiwork. She was working on an Anglican rosary, braiding sapphire blue thread and tying it into thick knots to resemble beads.

My eyes were drawn to her hands, which were strong but delicate.

Nuns have extraordinarily beautiful hands. I first noticed this as we exchanged the Peace during the Eucharist and I felt their soft skin slide against mine. I watched their hands during mealtimes as they deftly and elegantly manipulated their cutlery, their long, slender fingers showing patience even while struggling with a stubborn piece of meat. In chapel, their hands were folded serenely on their lap, or clasped in prayer, fingers wrapped lightly around the cups of their palms. One sister who sat a few seats away from me in chapel had hands like white marble. These were not idle hands: they gardened, cleaned, cut meat, and chopped vegetables and fruit in the convent and washed dishes and worked with the sick and the sad at the nearby hospital. They were busy, productive hands but entirely without blemish. How did they manage that?

I looked down at my own fidgety hands: lines and wrinkles around the wrists, backs showing signs of crepe along with a few faint age spots, cuticles ragged and raw, nails bitten. No, they were not a nun's hands, but they were hands that had baked and assembled birthday cakes, dug trees and planted gardens, painted children's rooms, and even installed duct-work; hands that had at times slapped in anger and other times soothed away the tears on a child's face. My life was written on my hands.

( 2:xii )

SISTER SUE
walked into the room where we met for class to teach us about the Ignatius method of prayer. Her lips were turned into that little Mona Lisa smile. A few days earlier I had heard her use the F-word in conversation with another sister. Noticing my shocked second-grader expression, she had said, “Oh, c'mon, we're nuns, not angels.” Weirdly, the year I gave up saying the F-word was the year in which the only people I heard use it were nuns.

Sister Sue began her lesson by telling us about Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.

Ignatius was a Spanish noble and knight. While recuperating in hospital from wounds received in the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, he scrounged around for reading material one day and picked up
Vita Christi
—presumably because another wounded knight had grabbed the last copy of
Hello!
It changed his life.
Vita Christi
was a collection of essays by Ludolph of Saxony, a German theologian, who believed that to truly understand Christ's teachings, a person had to imagine himself as part of the actual scene: for example, standing before the manger at the nativity, or walking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, or being in the crowd when Christ walked toward his Crucifixion. Ignatius was so impressed with the concept that he hung up his armor, dedicated his life to Christ, and spun Ludolph's idea into a series of his own
Spiritual Exercises.

It certainly sounded simple enough.

“It's a good method for discerning where God is calling you,” said Sister Sue. “But sometimes it takes you places you weren't expecting, so be careful; it can be pretty heavy.”

For our introduction to the Ignatian method, she had chosen the story of Elijah in the desert when he fled from Jezebel. We all flipped to 1 Kings 19. If you're not familiar with the story, here's an abridged version:

Elijah was a prophet who lived in ninth-century-
BC
Israel. There was a power struggle at the time between northern and southern Israel: the Kingdom of Israel (located in the north) was muscling for religious reform and trying to steer religious attention away from Jerusalem (located in the southern Kingdom of Judah). One of the reforms was to reintroduce worship of the god Baal (the god of thunder and rain). Israel was in the midst of a severe famine and drought, so Baal was the ideal idol to offer the rabble. But reintroducing Baal was also about keeping things peaceful on the marriage front because the King of Israel, Ahab, was married to Jezebel, who happened to be a Baal priest. Nepotism and politics—they're like death and taxes, aren't they?

Elijah wasn't impressed with Ahab's reforms or with Ahab and Jezebel, for that matter, and he told them so. He also told them that if they did not end their idolatrous ways there would be hell to pay. Ahab and Jezebel challenged Elijah to a contest to determine who was mightier—Baal or God. Two teams were assembled and told to slaughter a bull and prepare it for sacrifice but not set fire to it. The god who responded to the call of his team and lit the fire would be declared the winner. There are some humorous bits in the passage: The Baal team leaps around all morning trying to summon their god, and Elijah—I pictured him behaving like Russell Brand—taunts them from the sidelines, “You'll have to shout louder. Maybe your god is sleeping or going to the bathroom, or he's left on a trip!” But no matter how much Team Baal cried out, their god would not be roused.

When it was Elijah's turn, he asked Team Baal to gather around his altar. He slaughtered his bull, laid it on the altar, and then asked the Baal guys to dump water on the whole thing, not once but three times. They gladly obliged. Then Elijah dropped to his knees and prayed to God. Come on, baby, light my fire. Bingo! Fire lit.

It was a tremendous victory for Team Elijah, but then Elijah did something stupid: he rounded up all the Baal priests (there were 450 of them) and killed them. Well, when Jezzy heard the news (and you've got her number at this point because she had cannily decided not to join her fellow priests for the contest), she went ballistic. “If the gods don't kill me first, I'll kill you!” the Bible quotes her as screaming.

Elijah high-tailed it to the desert. Exhausted and scared, he sank to his knees and begged God to kill him because he was done with running and preaching and trying to score points for the Almighty. Then he fell asleep. But God sent angel after angel to keep Elijah fed and awake, and eventually Elijah escaped from the desert and evaded Jezebel.

It is the quintessential story about perseverance but also about our humanness. We tend to regard ourselves as superhuman, but the moment we detect a flaw we crash and lose confidence. We'd rather die than admit failure. Yet God compels us to dust ourselves off and fight another day. Like he does with James Bond.

“Read the passage over,” Sister Sue instructed us, “and after you've thought about it, ask yourself: ‘How does God minister to me in the desert?'”

This is easy,
I thought.
Sit in a chair, close my eyes, and turn a Bible passage into a soaring Spielberg production. Roll camera. Action!

Which is what I did. I felt the desert heat, the scorching sun, the burning sand. I imagined being in Elijah's sandals, drenched in perspiration and fear, wondering whether this would be my last day. I imagined staring longingly at a clot of shade trees on the far side of a canyon, trying to muster the energy to reach it. I could feel Elijah's dejection, even when the angels showed up. They came with food and drink, but neither angel ever sat down with the poor guy and commiserated with him along the lines of, “Yeah, that Jezebel. What a bitch, eh? Here's an idea on how to escape her.” There are times when an actual solution is more useful than food and drink.

My mind lazily circled back to Sister Sue's question: How does God minister to you in the desert? And my surprised and immediate response was
He leaves me alone to solve my problems. He doesn't send a knight on a white horse or drop a gun into my lap so I can protect myself; He leaves me to fend for myself.

The response shocked me, but not as much as what followed.

Up sprang an intense and frightening episode from my past. I thought I had done an admirable job of suppressing the memory all these years, but now it blew open with the force of a geyser.

The year was 1983. I was still working for the record label, and that April the annual awards ceremony for our industry was being held. Mucky-mucks from head office in
LA
were flying into Toronto for the glittering festivities. We were all being put up for the night at the hotel where the gala was being held. I didn't particularly want to attend, but my boss, a nasty little Englishman, had ordered everyone in our department to attend.

It turned out to be a rather fun event. I had splurged on a Wayne Clark design, a sort of iridescent pewter gray mid-calf–length taffeta dress with a wide matching sash that tied in a bow. Everyone said I looked stunning, and a compliment like that always helps you raise your game. At the post-awards party in one of the hotel's hospitality suites, I circulated with remarkable poise and ease, chatting to a range of people—some I knew and some I didn't. For the first time in my fledgling career, I felt truly professional, in control, polished, and suffused with a certainty that life would work out for me. The beverage in my glass was water, ice, and a slice of lemon masquerading as a gin and tonic when anyone asked. I specifically did not drink that evening because my colleagues were all doing a smorgasbord of drugs (drugs were never my scene) and I wanted to be stone-cold sober so that I could make a fast getaway before people started getting out of hand. Just before midnight, when the coast was clear, I slipped away unnoticed from the party and made a triumphant dash to my room. I changed out of my party clothes, packed my bag for an early morning departure, and went to bed pleased with myself for having survived the party and gotten away unscathed. It is my last memory of feeling truly and unreservedly confident.

An hour or so later I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was one of the executives I worked with, saying he had to see me right away. He asked for my room number, and in my half-awake state I grabbed the key from the bedside table, peered at the number on it, and repeated it into the phone. I hung up the phone and promptly fell back to sleep.

The next thing I knew the executive was pounding my door, urgently calling my name. Had there been an emergency? I wondered. As the company's publicity manager, I was required to craft news releases and respond to the media or else find an appropriate executive to respond to a crisis. Was this a crisis now? Or maybe I was in trouble because I had left the party early. It always irked my bosses that I wasn't more like one of the guys (they were all guys): stoned, drunk, or in various stages of hangover recovery. Anyway, I flew toward the door, guided by the strip of light seeping in from the hotel corridor. I opened the door a crack, and the executive barged in. He quickly bolted the door, pushed me onto the bed, unzipped his trousers, pushed up my nightgown, and raped me.

It happened so quickly that I didn't even have time to gasp out my shock. He was a large, fleshy man, and when he collapsed on top of me I felt smothered, and could feel my bones crushing. I squirmed slightly as his sweat dripped onto my skin. I did not know if he was under the influence of the
drug de soir,
but I was scared that if I put up a fight he might hurt me more.

I lay still, silent. It felt like I was being murdered. My only act of self-defense occurred when he demanded that I tell him I loved him; instead, I told him I hated him, and I tensed my body so that it would be wooden and unyielding.

As his body continued to rip into me, I immediately disassociated myself from my physical self, drifting into a sort of altered state in which—this sounds bizarre and even strikes me now as an odd reaction—I imagined my hand reaching into my chest and pulling my soul from my body because it was the only part of myself I could rescue. The soul hung in the air, arm's length above my head, and while I was being raped, I did not take my eyes off it for a second. It was a small, golden orb, a little smaller than a tennis ball onto which was superimposed a holographic face whose hands were pressed together in prayer.

When my attacker was finished, he zipped up his trousers, slapped me across the face, and called me “a dead fuck.”

I remained where I was, afraid to breathe, until he left the room. When the door shut and the lock clicked, I ran into the bathroom and threw up. Too stunned to cry, I turned on the taps of the bathtub and sat in it, scrubbing myself frantically as if trying to erase a disease.

I waited out the night standing by the window watching for the sun to break the horizon. Then I checked out of the hotel and drove home.

There was no way I could tell my family or friends what had happened. I was too ashamed to reveal my stupid error in judgment, afraid that someone might think, “Maybe she was asking for it.” If I went to the police, the case would hit the newspapers. If I reported it to human resources at my place of employment, I would lose my job.

I did, however, confront my attacker privately the next day at the office.

“That was rape,” I sputtered angrily.

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.” And the big fat brute shrugged it off.

In the days, weeks, years, decades that passed, the shame of the rape would not lift. As I lay in bed at night, the episode would play over and over in my mind; during the day, an innocent comment by a friend or co-worker would send me spiraling backward in time to the event, and I would escape to the nearest washroom before a flood of tears erupted. I never knew when the memory might pounce and for thirty years I remained in a state of constant high alert. It remained my awful, little secret, the Achilles' heel that undermined and sabotaged relationships, work, and happiness. I even considered suicide as a way to escape the shame.

Now, in the convent's meeting room, I began to seethe as I focused on Sister Sue's question about how God cared for me in the desert:
Was He in the little orb praying for me while I was being attacked? Well, thanks a bunch. Really helpful. Could You not have given me the strength to fight back, or the presence of mind beforehand to not answer the phone or the door? Or how about giving me the courage to speak up in my own defense after the attack?
Trauma has a way of misdirecting your emotions. In blaming God, I sought to shift the blame from myself.