And Then There Were Nuns (2 page)

My father augmented my religious education by taking me to churches of other denominations. This was pretty forward thinking for the times, but my father was a gentle and sensitive man. He had served in the war as a gunner, an experience that had horrified him and left a lasting impression about what happens when people are locked into narrow mindsets about religion and politics.

As a youngster, I enjoyed church—the Bible stories, the Sunday-school crafts, and the anthem-like hymns belted out by the congregation, but when I reached my teens, Sunday mornings became a battleground in our household. I was bored and impatient with church. God felt flimsy, and besides I wanted to sleep in. This latter reason was more inflammatory than telling my parents that church was boring or God seemed flimsy. We were not a family that slept in. Ever. We were expected to be up, dressed, and at the breakfast table by 7:30 a.m. regardless of the day of the week.

Like every other teenager caught in the crosshairs of rebellion, I questioned God's existence. My arguments were half-hearted; I don't know whether I entirely convinced myself of it or whether I simply enjoyed the adolescent thrill of contradicting my parents. Regardless, I was always left with the distinct feeling that God was rolling his eyes at the whole business, much like a parent does when a biological child insists that she was adopted.

Oddly enough, it was during this rebellious phase that the call to be a nun began to flicker. It did not happen suddenly. There was no dramatic religious conversion or stunning epiphany. It grew slowly but steadily, as if the possibility was placed on my tongue, and I was being given a chance to swish it around in my mouth, to get a sense of its taste, its texture, its heat, its sharpness, its sweetness. To digest it or spit it out. I never spit it out. Instead, I began to relax about religion. I treated it more like G.K. Chesterton's characterization: “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” I liked that. And the more relaxed I was about religion, the more intrigued I became. I saw the beauty and the fluidity of it. Faith in God was not about sermonizing and rigidity. It was a complement to life, not an adversarial stance. I could never understand those who insisted on a line of demarcation between science and religion as if it were the Great Wall. Why couldn't people be more like Augustine of Hippo, who said that Genesis should not be read literally, or like Albert Einstein, who said that “science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind”? Frankly, everyone needed to chill out a bit more when it came to the Bible.

I began to pay less attention to religion's glittery ceremonial aspects and more to its outer edges—the attitudes, the politics, the people who toiled in its shadows. That's when I first noticed nuns.

My first real connection with nuns was not entirely positive. It occurred during a hellish year at a Catholic girls' school where the nuns were more intent on converting me than on educating me. When my classmates taunted me about my religion, the nuns did not come to my rescue but rather subtly fanned the flames.

“Now class, take out your rosaries, and we'll say the Hail Mary,” Sister would say. “Of course, Jane doesn't have a rosary, do you Jane? What religion are you again?”

All heads would pivot toward me, my classmates scandalized by how anyone on the planet could be anything but Roman Catholic.

“Um, I'm Angli...”

“Never mind, dear. Just go to the back of the class and you can do some homework.”

From that standpoint, no one could ever accuse me of having a case of the warm fuzzies for nuns, and yet they were mesmerizing creatures. They had an air of secret-agent cool as they glided along the stone corridors of Loretto Abbey. Their floor-length black habits swooshed and billowed like approaching storm clouds, while the edges of their white veils fluttered like angel wings. The black and white, the dark and light, the good and the not-so good—it was this duality that drew me toward nuns. While their heads were bowed in serene surrender, their faces bore smirks of feminist defiance. They operated beyond the boundaries of conventional society, and I felt an affinity, which never went away, with that sort of life.

I cannot explain why the fire of faith burned so steadily and intently in me; it's not like I was the angelic type. Nor can I explain why I chose to be a nun rather than a priest, an archbishop, or a theologian, except that whenever I thought about being a nun, the idea passed through me like an electric current, as if my heart's desire had made contact with a rogue cell residing in my
DNA
. Like a Geiger counter, the signal intensified whenever I approached a church or spotted a nun, a monk, or a cross or heard someone mention Jesus or God.

My tableau of a nun's life was pieced together with literary and historical remnants and richly embroidered with imagination (rather a lot of imagination, in fact), and it became my teenage template for religious life. I wove myself into a fantasy as a way of trying on a virtual habit. In my mind I could hear the Angelus echo through a green, undulating valley and see myself dashing into a medieval chapel and falling to my knees on the cold, worn stone floors, head bent and hands clasped in prayer. I would be dedicated to Christ, to God, and to all His saints. I would do His will. I would be a model of simplicity and goodness. I would never swear or complain. (How far off the track I have fallen from those teenage aspirations!) If I were put on floor-washing or toilet-cleaning duty, I would carry out my chores with industrious humility. I would till the gardens, peel potatoes for dinner, and polish the altar chalice until it shone like the star over Bethlehem. The trade-off would be the provision of plenty of time for lazy contemplation. It would be a dreamy, calm existence, offering the luxury of time to count the petals on a flower or compose poetry. The idea of being silent, unbothered by the drama of life or of trying to fit in with my peers, appealed to the misfit in me.

Frequently inserted into this sunny scenario was a monk from a neighboring monastery who was tall and gentle, with a soft mop of hair and a witty sense of humor. We would arrange secret meetings in the woods and flirt, maybe fall in love. I would be Héloïse to his Abelard.

OK
, so my attraction to convent life back then was neither realistic nor pure, but at its heart was the understanding that monastic life offered a stable, God-centered ethos. I wanted to be part of it, so I waited for a sign.

When I was seventeen, one arrived in the form of those highly unscientific punch-card career tests that were popular in high schools in the 1970s. Frankly, the Sorting Hat in
Harry Potter
does a better job. A week after I wrote the test, the results arrived. I tore open the envelope and stared at the verdict: rabbi.

Rabbi? Rabbi!
I shook my head slowly and heaved a quiet sigh of resignation: like I needed further proof that I was weird. Besides, even I knew that female rabbis were not yet a kosher concept. I scanned the rows of classmates and overheard them discussing their results, the more sensible occupations: doctor, lawyer, engineer, nurse, teacher.

“What did you get, Jane?” a pal whispered across the classroom aisle.

“Teacher,” I replied with a who-knew shrug and stashed the results in the back of a textbook.

I never mentioned my attraction to religious life to anyone. Who would understand? How could I explain my feelings without sounding like a Jesus freak? Some would have laughed or thought my desire was eccentric—positively medieval. Others might have been happy for me, but I worried that even the approving comments might jinx my convictions. I wanted to do things under my own steam without anyone's approval or disapproval.

Another reason for playing my cards close to my vest was that religion wasn't having an easy time in the seventies. What was once a cornerstone of society, even a grudgingly admitted one, was now openly mocked and scorned. This cataclysmic cultural shift occurred right before my eyes: one moment you were regarded with suspicion if you did not attend church or synagogue; the next, you were regarded with suspicion if you did. Religion had lost all authority and almost all respectability. People did not even bother to pretend to tolerate it any- more. When they turned their eyes toward heaven, it was for moon walks and space missions.

This downgrading stung, for even during my nihilistic God-is-flimsy periods, I had felt protective of God or at least the idea of God. Now, expressing an affinity for anything religious left you open to mockery.

One Christmas Eve, a friend and I joined the happy throngs of fans leaving Maple Leaf Gardens after a hockey game. I think the Toronto Maple Leafs actually won the game but I'm not sure. (The Maple Leafs have always been better as a theory than they were on the ice.) Not that it mattered: my friend and I were excitedly reliving the moment a few hours earlier when we had found ourselves walking alongside our heartthrob, the defenseman Jim McKenny, as he strode into Maple Leaf Gardens for the night's game. (There was a time, boys and girls, when professional sports players arrived at a venue under their own steam and not in a chauffeured limousine with tinted windows.) My friend and I were swooning about this thrill as we climbed into the car of the boyfriend of my friend's sister, who had arrived to pick us up and drive us home. As we neared my home, I asked the boyfriend to drop me off at church because I was meeting my parents at the midnight service.

“Church? Church?” he exclaimed loudly, as if it were a ridiculous concept.

When he stopped the car in front of St. Timothy's Anglican Church, he turned his head and stared at me with a smirk that dripped contempt. My hand was already groping for the door handle.

“Hey, make sure you say hi to God for me,” he sneered, putting sarcastic emphasis on “God.” He might as well have said “the Lucky Charms guy.”

My face burned with shame. I would have told him to go fuck himself, but it would be another decade before I developed that kind of courage. Instead, I offered a cheerful “Merry Christmas,” got out of the car, and watched it squeal off into the night.

I had pretended not to care what he had said, but in truth the remark cut deeply. Beneath the beam of a streetlight dappled with falling snow I walked slowly toward the church and let the frigid night air shock my tears into submission.

( 1:iv )

I MANAGED
to hang on to my faith through the vicissitudes of religious attitudes and societal upheavals, but I never did become a nun: I finished high school, graduated from university, and merged into a journalism career, along with marriage, home ownership, motherhood, divorce, remarriage, divorce, and single parenthood.

I was blessed with mostly exhilarating jobs, and I loved the caffeinated rush of working to heart-stopping deadlines amid a cacophony of shouts across the newsrooms, phones ringing, computer keys clacking, and underlying it all the seismic rumble of a printing press from the basement. Nowadays, of course, newsrooms are preternaturally quiet. Like convents. I left journalism just before it got uninteresting, and moved into the gulag to where all ex-journalists migrate—communications and public relations.

By my mid-fifties, the daily grind had turned into a murky decaf slop of office politics that was sucking out my soul and turning me into the worst version of myself. My boss had taken a sudden dislike to me, and lacking the courage to fire me, embarked on a silent campaign of humiliation and bullying. I could no longer smell the coffee; I could only smell change. That's when the Voice Within perked up:
You could be a nun now.
The very idea made me gasp in a thrilling sort of way.

One cold January night, as wreaths of snow swirled outside my window, I tapped a few words into a search engine and was brought to the website for the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine (
SSJD
), an order of Anglican nuns in Canada. I hadn't expected to find Anglican nuns in Canada, but, well, there is no end to the surprises found on the Internet.

The sisters were running a month-long program that summer with the tantalizing title of Women at a Crossroads, “for women who are seeking direction in their lives.”

That's me!
I practically yelled out.

I scrambled together the required documents and called on a couple of friends to provide character references; I filled out the necessary forms, wrote a letter begging to be accepted, and mailed everything off to the reverend mother. I had four weeks remaining of vacation time at work, and I promptly booked it off. (Unaware of my disengagement, my colleagues assumed I was getting married.) Then I prayed like I had never prayed before and anxiously waited out the next two months for a reply from the convent.

In the meantime, I told my minister what I had done.

“Good Lord,” he said. “You're the third woman in two weeks to ask me about entering the sisterhood. What's going on?”

( 1:v )

IN 2010,
there were 2,154 celibate religious in more than 80 Anglican communities around the world and another 3,500 in acknowledged religious communities (as opposed to holy orders). Of the celibates, 1,231 were women and 923 were men, with the majority residing in the Australian and Pacific regions (865), followed by Europe (566) and Africa (343). It was a paltry cohort when juxtaposed with the nearly 60,000 Roman Catholic nuns in the U.S. alone.

Although media reports would have us believe that these are grim times for nuns—what with convents being shuttered and aging nuns being decanted into nursing homes—there are shoots of regeneration. The biggest growth is in Roman Catholic ranks—an order of Dominican nuns in Tennessee had 90 sisters join between 2007 and 2012—but new monastic orders, both Anglican and Catholic, have cropped up in Britain and North America. Some are dispersed communities; others are cloistered. Some are single sex; others are mixed. Some are urban; some are rural.

Interestingly, a religious vocation is not an uncommon second career for women. There are two stages in life when women are drawn to spiritual change—in their teens and twenties, and again in their late forties and fifties.