The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (12 page)

Given zero tolerance for sexual activity in the sisterhood, everyone wonders what happens with all the sexual energy. How can sisters stand a virtual lifetime without sex? How come we don’t explode (or maybe you know some who have)? Strong external supports are absolutely essential and two of the biggest and strongest are community and service, sisterhood and work. Gertrude Stein understood celibacy perfectly when she wrote, “Sex is a part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all.” Two of the other parts for me are also community and service, best friends and creative work. That’s where I find sublimated sexual energy made so “sublime,” so divine, and so full of everlasting kinds of life.

It’s not hard to understand how a celibate life without sisters and soul mates can easily become meaningless and unbearable, and how a celibate life without a commitment to sisterhood can slowly but surely wear down. The only way we can bear the depth of solitude that we embrace in vowing celibacy is in knowing the
depths of its sisterhood. As sisters, we are never as alone as we sometimes have every reason to feel. There’s always a community of women who are as soulfully solitary as we are, and just as soulfully together. There is no greater comfort to any woman than the divine comfort found in true and lasting sisterhood, both in and out of the convent.

Creative work is the primary divine path that sexual energy in the sisterhood takes to naturally. Not just any work, although it could be just any work, depending on how creatively and lovingly it’s done. The most important part of everything we do is how much we love doing it and how much it expands our ability to be more loving and compassionate, more creative and fun to be with. When Gandhi discovered the call to celibacy, his divine insight was similar to that of Gertrude Stein’s. Sex isn’t just physical energy. More than anything, sex is the energy behind love and creative work. Sacred sexual energy can be channeled anywhere. Sex is one of its manifestations. Writing is another, as is all creative work. In the sisterhood, sexual energy becomes transformed into the creative part of everything we do, part of the prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of our days. That’s how much sex is a part of our lives in the sisterhood. And in that way we can’t live without it, either.

So prepare yourself now for something entirely different in looking at celibacy in the sisterhood. The vow is treasured, experienced, understood, and lived quite differently by women called to religious life, which is why we do not read in the news about the deviant sexual activity of nuns. It’s not happening today because it hasn’t been happening for centuries. In looking at the church’s priesthood from its beginning, we see a history of celibacy despised, ignored, and lived so consistently wrong. And in looking at the sisterhood from the beginning, what we’ll see is an entirely different history. A liberating history of what religious
life was like among the Church Mothers, and most important of all, a history of women divinely capable and committed to reforming themselves and changing the misguided thinking of their medieval ways.

In the sisterhood, celibacy has everything to do with being touched by God and called to lives of service, and nothing to do with sexual activity or the lack of it. Among the sisters I know, our celibate lifestyle comes from an extraordinary experience of God, a liberating way of loving, and an independence that frees us to do the work we’re called to. That’s how much celibacy in the sisterhood has more to do with God and a life of prayer than it ever does a lifestyle with no men or sex. With all due respect to both, we’re simply not that interested in either—at least not in the way the rest of the world seems to be. In looking at sisterhood from the beginning, we will see in every age how celibacy emerges as a great liberator of women, inside and out—altogether contrary to how we saw celibacy emerge in the priesthood, as the great oppressor of men, inside and out. The history of the Church Mothers is not that of the Church Fathers, no more than women’s experience of life is the same as that of men. It’s no surprise, then, that our experience of God and religious life would be equally different, and nowhere is that difference revealed more clearly than in the religious experience of celibacy.

You will never see in the sisterhood the scandal and hypocrisy that are characteristic of the Catholic priesthood. It’s simply not happening, and if it was, that silence would eventually be broken. The 40 percent of nuns who have reported sexual abuse have only begun to speak, and all of those silences can’t be kept much longer. The power of truth has grown too strong. What we see in the sisterhood, throughout its medieval history, is how scandal among nuns became nonexistent. Slowly but surely, the
sisterhood moved toward the zero tolerance it has known for centuries.

Even though today there are only a handful of sisters (as we’ve known them) left, what’s happening in the church will surely transform the sisterhood, just as it’s doing to the priesthood. The gods who have been calling women to sisterhood for thousands of years have not lost their voice, and women all over the world, if anything, are just beginning to waken to the divine energy within, to rekindle those sacred fires, and to hear the call of women to sisterhood. Mountains of oppression are beginning to move because we are beginning to see them. The gods have begun to waken all women, and since the very beginning that’s all the sisterhood ever needed: a handful of women and Thee.

4
Sisterhood in the Beginning

I
N THE BEGINNING, SISTERHOOD
was a religion in itself. “No institution is older than this sisterhood.”
¹
When goddesses were worshipped (as well as gods), it was the vestal virgins who left home at an early age (some as young as six), cut their hair short, dressed in a white robe, wore an ornamental headband, and promised the Goddess Vesta at least thirty years of virginity. Vesta is one of three Virgin Goddesses who lived on Mount Olympus along with Artemis and Athena. Of this Holy Trinity, Vesta is worshipped as the divine guardian of home and hearth fire, the holy keeper of home fires burning and hearts yearning. It’s the Goddess Vesta who first called an order of women into priesthood and sisterhood, first called women into her holy service as vestal virgins, religion’s first nuns.

A sacred fire burned in the Temple of Vesta, home of the Goddess, and it was the exclusive job of the vestal virgins to ensure that it continued burning uninterrupted. Living communally within the temple, these virgins were society’s keepers of the eternal flame. Their single-hearted work was that of tending its sacred fire day and night, never taking their eyes off the eternal flame within the Temple of the Goddess or within the temple of their own virgin soul. In the same way that Christianity made our souls Temples of the Holy Ghost, in the eyes of the Goddess Vesta our souls were made Temples of the Sacred Fire. That’s why in service of the Virgin Goddess the most important work becomes that of keeping soul fires burning and sacred hearts
yearning. It’s the exclusive work of the vestal virgins to keep the hearts and souls of everyone awake and fired up, so to speak, full of divine life and extraordinary experiences.

So mysteriously and powerfully important was the contemplative work of vestal virgins to the well-being of all Roman society, that sisters would be scourged mercilessly in public, even buried alive if the sacred fire went out during their shift. So powerful is the temple fire for ancients that they believed terrible darkness and destruction would befall Rome if the flame were extinguished, even for a second. The safety and security of Rome lay literally in the celibate service of the vestal virgins. As long as the sacred fire within the temple continued to burn, all manner of things would be well. The contemplative work of these vestal virgins, these very first nuns, is the life or death work of the sisterhood throughout history. Keep the sacred fire burning within our souls and the soul of Holy Mother Church; never allow soul fires to be extinguished. But scourged mercilessly in public by city officials? Buried alive with a little bit of bread and water? What is it about tending the sacred fire that becomes a life or death matter for the poor vestal virgins who nodded off? And why does the fire being extinguished, even for a second, have such dire consequences for the whole Roman Empire? Power doesn’t get any more powerful than that, and its divine secret lies in the sacredness of the eternal flame. Quite clearly, this was no ordinary fire. Nothing in the temple was as it appeared. Everything was charged with the presence of gods.

For our ancestors, fire on the altar was a sign that the Goddess was right there with them. And every time a candle or bonfire was lit in religious rituals, those gathered around its flame entered into its divine transforming energy. Alice Sebold writes about that kind of sacred fire in
The Lovely Bones.
The story is told from the afterlife by a fourteen-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, who
was brutally raped and murdered in a cornfield. On the first anniversary of her death, she noticed, “In my heaven I buzzed with heat and energy as more and more people reached the cornfield and lit their candles and began to hum a low dirge-like song….” The fires we light in prayer buzz everyone in heaven with heat and energy: That’s a powerful way of thinking about fire, a way that goes far beyond what we see—so far beyond that it seems we’ve lost sight of that kind of sacred fire completely. Somehow between then and now, nearly all the sacred got taken out of fire, the divine buzz of heat and energy seems long gone.

In the Temple of Vesta, the sacred fire is the Goddess’s dwelling place. As long as the eternal flame burns, the Goddess is at home with her people. In fire, ancients see the presence of deities. Hebrew Scriptures describe God as “a consuming fire,” and God speaks to Moses from a burning bush. But we look at fire and don’t think twice about it. To us fire symbolizes nothing other than what it is, and does what we see it do—light a cigarette, warm a room, cook a meal, destroy everything in its path. Most of us see nothing sacred in fire at all (except for firefighters who must see the face of God in every flame). But our ancestors looked at fire and fell to their knees before the deities burning within. No wonder the Romans believed disaster would strike if the eternal flame ever went out. The absence of the Goddess, even for a second, was experienced literally as a matter of life and death. We need to go beyond what we see when we look at fire and note the presence of deities. We need to look that far in order to see how sisterhood was created in the beginning.

The virginity of the Goddess Vesta and that of the women called to her service is unlike anything we know or understand when we think of celibacy. Everyone’s first reaction is “no sex,” and then
comes a joke. Celibacy is mostly made a joke of in our thinking, jokes that usually make me laugh. For example, there’s a memorable episode of the 1980s TV sitcom
The Golden Girls
in which Sophia (Dorothy’s live-in mother) decides to join the convent at the age of eighty-something. The girls are sitting around the kitchen table eating cheesecake and discussing Sophia’s laughable decision. Blanche (“the slut”) is the first to speak her mind: “Nun? I can’t believe anyone would want to be a nun. I mean the name alone says it all!” Even I jokingly describe the sisterhood as “nun of this and nun of that” and tell everyone who asks that I give up sex for Lent. But joking aside, something totally different is going on here in the virginity of the Goddess. The Goddess Vesta invites women to a divine experience of virginity that has absolutely everything and absolutely nothing to do with sex.

How can that be? How can virginity have everything and nothing to do with sex? If celibacy has nothing to do with sex and not having any, then what is it? A divine mystery, according to Catholic teaching. The virginity of Jesus’ Mother Mary has nothing to do with sexual experience, not even marriage and childbirth. Catholics believe that the Virgin Mary (like all Virgin Goddesses) remains ever virgin before, during, and after the birth of Jesus Christ. She is somehow mysteriously able to remain virgin throughout her life, including marriage and childbirth. Mysteries don’t get more unfathomable than that.

There is nothing about the virginity of goddesses that is understood literally at all. Regardless of sexual experience and childbirth, virgin souls remain untouched. No matter what happens to their bodies, they remain mysteriously virgin. There is far more to the virginity of the Goddess than meets our eye. But we need to see that far now, way beyond what meets our eye, because therein lies the sacred soul of all Virgin Goddesses (including the Virgin Mary), and therein lies the virgin soul of
the sisterhood. Married or not, every woman in every age needs to know how to remain virgin.

The first thing we see if we go beyond what meets our eye is that celibacy makes sense to women in a way it never can to men. One of the divine experiences virginity offered to women in the ancient world (and now) is a lifestyle free from the sexual expectations of men, the sexual demands and abuses of husbands, and the decades-long burden of childbearing. In our world, men are born free of all forms of submissiveness and enjoy the full liberties of the unmarried (married or not). What virginity gave to women in the beginning is the same divine equality celibacy offers to women now, inside and out: the opportunity to experience the fullness of equality and the fullness of life that goes along with it.