The Cloister Walk (42 page)

But for Benedictine women, the new situation proved a dilemma. The American church had long ago forced them into a mixture of contemplative and active religious life—the first Benedictine women who arrived in this country had been told that they would be cloistered nuns, as they had been in Bavaria, but soon found that they were expected to serve the growing immigrant population as teachers, catechists, or nurses. The women adapted, and like many other groups of Benedictine women who followed them, they served the church well for many years. But Vatican II and its aftermath led to an identity crisis. Were they monastic, or not? Contemplative nuns, or more active sisters? As one woman told me, “In all the ferment of meetings and talk of the late sixties and early seventies, we all too often got caught up in the fervor to be ‘with it,' and let a lot of our living monastic traditions—somehow distilled in the habit—fall by the way.”

When Benedictine women speak of those days now, it's often with bemusement. I can scarcely imagine the situation they found themselves in; having been made to dress uniformly for all of their adult lives, they were now, as one sister put it, “free to be me, at all costs.” She says of a friend in graduate school, “Her first fling was to make herself a kelly green habit, complete with veil.” Other sisters have told me about the confusion of shopping for clothes for the first time. One woman was seduced by an expensive, lavender silk slip in a store window, but having bought it, felt too guilty to wear it. Years later she finally gave it away, glad to have it off her conscience.

Unfortunately, the habit came to symbolize for many Benedictine women one's political stance with regard to the Vatican II reforms. “The politics and conflict between factions in the early renewal period was something else,” one nun told me, adding that because the habit had symbolized so much of the old order, it quickly became a pawn in these political struggles. “This is what makes it difficult for sisters to discuss the habit without rancor, even today,” she said. In 1969, she wore the full habit as a graduate student and a part-time cab dispatcher. “In New York City,” she said, “anything goes, so I never felt out of place.” But when an older sister who was visiting told her that the community back home had essentially split into two factions, labeling people as liberal or conservative over whether or not they wore the habit, the younger woman said, “ ‘A plague on both their houses.' We were on a noisy subway,” she explains, “and my sister was hard of hearing. I shouted out,
‘A plague on both their houses!'
just as the car screeched to a halt and everyone could hear me.”

Great diversity of opinion with regard to monastic dress still exists among Benedictine women. One former prioress dismissed the habit by saying that she felt it had become a crutch, a prop for many women in her community. “They were not mature enough to stay in monastic life without it,” she said, adding, “It had become a form of protection.” Another prioress—who believes that distinctive clothing is “an essential part of the monastic archetype, in Buddhism as well as in Christianity,” and that “to take it off diminishes the monastic impulse”—also says, “We had to take it off and dump the medieval baggage that went with it.” A nun who does wear a habit—a plain long-sleeved dress with a long skirt, scapular, leather belt, and simple veil—says, “I believe that sisters who work for a secular agency, such as a school, are better off in lay dress. The sweet, stupid nun look had to be radically thrown off. But as for a monastic life, I think serious monks wear a habit.”

The history is compelling. One sister wrote to me, “In the ancient world, to ‘take the habit' meant to become a monk.” Benedict received a habit from the hermit Romanus, and habits were worn by the earliest monks known to us, such as Anthony and Pachomius of Egypt. The scholar Peter Brown notes that in the early church monastic dress was so recognizable that small children in Egypt had a game of “monks and demons,” with one child dressed as a monk in black being harassed by other children playing demons. What people today think of as the traditional Benedictine women's habit comes not from this early era, but from the medieval period. As one sister explained it to me, “It was the dress of the poorer classes, adopted precisely because it did not distinguish monastic women from laywomen.”

For her, and for many other Benedictine women, the motivation behind wearing distinctive monastic dress is of prime importance. They're wary of the romance of the habit that still attracts women to more traditional communities. When I showed her what one such woman had said about her clothing—“the cord reminds me that I am bound to my Redeemer in poverty, obedience, and purity, the veil echoes my choice to be sanctified for God's purposes, and that in my life I am to be modest and obedient to God's Word”—she sensed without my telling her that the woman was new to the religious life. The younger woman's statement, “I have made a radical choice of lifestyle, and believe that I am responding to a call from God to live this way,” did not surprise the older woman. “This is exactly the danger,” she said. “Clothing ceremonies and the habit help to form a person in monastic life—for instance, the prayers said over each piece of clothing as you put it on—and some symbols and rituals are essential in binding us to a community. But they can also give younger members a dangerous sense of security, of being special, separate, elevated to a new level of holiness automatically without doing the long, hard, tedious work of conversion.” In monasticism it's always a struggle to maintain a balance between the symbols and practices a person needs to be formed in the life and those that tend to become ends in themselves.

One Benedictine woman summed up for me the reason why the subject of the habit remains important, even for women who have never worn one (this would include women entering most Benedictine communities from the early 1970s on). “I suspect that behind the issue of the habit,” she said, “are different, perhaps even warring, theologies, worldviews, and understandings of monastic life. Different assumptions about how one follows the gospel. Is holding to traditions like a medieval habit always an authentic reflection of the gospel?” Like many Benedictine women I've talked to, she feels that while some form of religious garb might be appropriate, it should not be something as “totally alien” as the old habit. “I think we can express our identification with the rest of the body of Christ,” she says, “and with the poor of the world, in other ways than as an elite group receiving special treatment by virtue of our dress.” She and others have said that in their experience what was meant to be a symbol of renunciation frequently was its opposite in the pre-Vatican II church, and they and other sisters were using the habit to get special favors, such as free movie tickets and ice cream cones. “That's when I decided to change,” one said.

But wearing a habit was always a renunciation in that it publicly identified you as a nun, forcing you to give up any sense of privacy. As one sister told me, “The habit totally objectified you. You became all nuns. Some men would be turned on, and sexually proposition you. Or a drunken businessman on a plane would slobber all over you, and say, ‘You sisters are so good, you made me what I am today.' Someone who was beaten by a nun in third grade might call you a sadist.” One woman told me that when she was a novice in the 1950s, she'd been asked to escort an older nun to the doctor. As they boarded a bus in their Minnesota city, a man, his face contorted with rage, his fists clenched, came up close to the women and hissed, “Lesbians!” The older woman, who was hard of hearing, hadn't heard the remark, and, the sister told me, might not have comprehended it if she had. But she had seen the hatred in the man's gesture and it frightened her. Perhaps this incident, and the anonymous hate mail and obscene phone calls that Benedictine women sometimes receive, indicates that when a woman stands for anything in this culture she makes herself a target.

I've long been interested in the fact that most monks I know wouldn't dream of wearing their habit for travel, and many who are priests won't even wear a clerical collar. “I grew weary of hearing so-called confessions from drunks,” one monk told me. Some women who wear a habit in public are resigned to the more troubling aspects of the experience. “I think I would be recognized anywhere as someone consecrated to God,” one wrote to me. “I may not get a positive response,” she said, “but that's what I stand for.” Another woman, a member of an urban monastery, feels strongly that the public witness of the habit is important, as it offers her possibilities for ministry that otherwise would be lost. “The airline ticket agent who asks me to pray for her and her husband. The young father on a city bus, deeply troubled by burdens he cannot voice. The well-dressed woman on Madison Avenue [who] looks around as she asks for prayer, hoping no one she knows sees her doing this odd thing, and yet aching for some companionship and support in her trouble. Two teenagers dressed in the latest fashion, who want to know why some people who work in the church do unkind things, and what they can do about it.” She said that while she'd been active in her church before joining the monastery, “No one ever stopped me on the street to ask me for prayers. This was not because I was not a woman of prayer, but because no one could tell that I was a woman of prayer.”

To be accepted in public as “a woman of prayer,” must a woman cover her entire body, head to toe? It would seem so, given the sexualization of women's bodies in our culture, the bizarre idolatry of body parts. But many Benedictine sisters feel that the asexuality of the old habit contributed to unhealthy attitudes about the body, both among themselves and in the broader culture. “We are no longer embarrassed to be recognized as women,” one sister said, “with women's bodies, made in the image of God.” But as always, with the issue of the habit, there is a double edge. One sister told me that “some sisters feel that to express themselves as women, they need to wear bright colors, make-up, and jewelry, but I have a hard time with this. Even if we're not spending much money, the fact that our nice clothes are hand-me-downs or from the second-hand store isn't obvious to others. I wonder if we've bought too much into what society holds up to us as beautiful and acceptable in a woman.” As for herself, she said that she found herself increasingly drawn to simple, inexpensive clothing, denim skirts and dresses, more black and white and fewer colors. This seems to be something of a trend among Benedictine women. One order of contemplative nuns has adopted, at least for the younger members I've met at conferences and at the St. John's graduate school, a form of dress that strikes me as extremely sensible for monastic women. For situations that demand it, such as ranch work, hiking, canoeing, or touch football games, they wear jeans and a sweatshirt. Otherwise they dress simply in black and/or white, in modest dresses, skirts, blouses, and jackets. They wear a ring and stylized cross designed for their community that marks them as religious women, but their clothing does not disguise the fact that they are women.

A Benedictine friend, a college professor who hasn't worn a habit in many years, recently spent a lengthy retreat with a cloistered community of women who wear the traditional floor-length habit and head gear. Her comments summarized the ambivalence many contemporary monastic women seem to feel. “I see lovely women . . . looking like many of the holy women of the past. There is something beautiful about that connection with the past, and something inaccessible and mysterious about them in their habits. They really do convey another world. At the same time, I also see the hiding of the body, as if they are asexual beings, and I sense denial in this. I see continuity with the way those holy women of the past were confined by their gender.”

There seems to be a groundswell of feeling among many Benedictine women that they need some form of habit, if only for use in liturgical celebrations. One women's community in which most sisters gave up the full habit years ago (although many women still wear a simplified veil and black or white clothing) recently added a brief clothing ceremony to their “Rite of Perpetual Profession.” Along with other traditional symbols of monastic life, the prioress hands the sister a cuculla (literally, “little tent,” so called because it is a mass of pleats falling from a yoke). This long, black robe, ancient monastic dress, is the ancestor of all pulpit gowns, and the women wear it for Sunday liturgies, major feasts, profession ceremonies, jubilees, and funerals. Several women in the community have told me that they enjoy this restoration of a link to their monastic past and the visible sense of communal identity that it gives them. I wouldn't be surprised if other Benedictine women adopt a similar practice. “We need something,” one sister says, “but we can't let it become something to hide behind.” Another woman wrote to me, “There seems to be a deepening sense of what it means to be monastic, of the life force in a tradition that has perdured through the centuries. We've talked so much about simplicity and now we ache to see it more deeply realized in our everyday lives. And, I wonder, if as individualism wears a little thin, this movement to reclaim monastic dress may strengthen. Not a ‘going back to the habit' but a going forward to reclaim it.”

I've long been aware that the subject of the habit generates in Benedictine women an emotional response that, before I understood more of the history, seemed out of proportion to the subject at hand. In a way I find it reassuring that monastic women have not been able to escape the dilemma all women live with. No matter what they wear—a traditional habit or a simplified one, blue jeans or a professorial navy blazer and pleated skirt—they, much more than men, are defined by what they wear. People will take them seriously, or not, based on matters as slight as the length of a skirt or the height of a heel. I am most interested in monastic dress as a form of renunciation, a sign that one is not preoccupied with fashion and possessions. And I recognize, as one sister said to me, that monastic women “can accomplish this without resorting to an outlandish form of clothing,” or as she put it, “an elaborate, expensive, cumbersome habit that is time-consuming to maintain.”