And Then There Were Nuns

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Copyright © 2013 by Jane Christmas

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Greystone Books Ltd.
www.greystonebooks.com

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN
978-1-55365-799-6 (paperback)
ISBN
978-1-55365-800-9 (epub)

Editing by Nancy Flight
Copyediting by Catherine Plear
Cover design by Peter Cocking and Jessica Sullivan
Cover illustration by Talent Pun

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

I will lead her out into the desert
and speak tenderly to her there.

HOSEA 2:14

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( 1 )

In the Beginning, There Was a Proposal

( 2 )

At a Crossroads

The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine

( 3 )

Battling Demons

Quarr Abbey

( 4 )

An Invalid Religion

St. Cecilia's Abbey

( 5 )

The Cloistered Castle

Order of the Holy Paraclete

( 6 )

The Winter Desert

Order of the Holy Paraclete

( 7 )

When Silence Knocks

Order of the Holy Paraclete

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

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Essex, England

THE TIMING WAS SO
unbelievably awkward, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I did neither. I just said, “Yes.”

I had dreamed of this moment for six long years (very patiently, I might add, because six years in female terms is like, what, fifty years?). A marriage proposal. Who doesn't love that? Despite having two failed marriages under my Spanx, I remain intractably optimistic about wedlock.

I was visiting my beau, Colin, over Christmas. Our six-year transatlantic relationship had evolved into a contented pattern of visiting each other every three months in our respective countries: England (him) and Canada (me). The subject of marriage had been broached several times in the intervening years (by me), but it had hit a sticking point—specifically, a complete lack of interest (by him).

So here we were in a guest room of a seventeenth-century village pub in rural Essex. It was a bright Boxing Day morning, and a thin crust of frost shimmered on the surrounding fields. I was absorbed in a near-commando-type mission to find a missing earring.
How does an earring so easily disappear? It was on this table a minute ago.

Colin was gathering up our bits and bags in preparation for check-out. From the corner of my eye I saw his lean, lanky frame methodically checking drawers and closets to ensure nothing was left behind. He is a quiet man by nature, but he was more so this day, and I assumed he was perturbed that I was taking so long to get organized.

Ah, there it is!

“Found it!” I said triumphantly, as I plucked the earring from its hiding spot beneath the corner of a clock radio. I whispered a prayer of thanks and hooked it into my lobe.

Suddenly, Colin grabbed one of my hands.

“I'm ready now; sorry to have taken so long,” I said, trying to wrench my hand from his so that I could get my coat. But he wouldn't let go. When I turned to face him, he was on the floor. On bended knee.

Oh dear, has he stumbled?
I yanked on his arm to help him up, but he resisted, pulling me toward him instead. This tug-of-war went on for a few seconds until I noticed his smiling blue eyes gazing up at me through a fringe of gray-flecked ginger hair.

Uh-oh!
My heart raced, my face flushed. I saw a small velvet box bloom from his unfurling hand as Colin said softly, “Will you marry me?”

I stood in a state of ecstatic disbelief, one hand holding his hand (more for balance now), the other covering my mouth as I blubbered like a schoolgirl, “Yes!”

And this is where the awkward-timing aspect came into play, because moments earlier I had been rehearsing in my mind how to tell Colin that I had decided to become a nun.

( 1:ii )

I DON'T
want to give the impression that I am one of those nut jobs who listens to the voices in her head, but in all honesty I
am
someone who listens to the voices in her head.

Like most people, I hear the voices of my children, my parents, past and present partners, friends and acquaintances who babble away and bounce off the walls of my head.

But there is another voice—the Voice Within—that originates not from my head but from my heart. A kind, soulful, authoritative voice, a sort of Dumbledore-meets-Peggy-Wood-when-she-played-the-mother-superior-in–
The Sound of Music
. The voice of God. And for a big chunk of my life the Voice Within has been steering me toward a religious vocation: the Voice Within has been calling me to be a nun.

At least, I am pretty certain He said “nun.” God is a bit of a low talker and from time to time He gets drowned out by some of the louder, more excitable voices.

Did He absolutely say “nun”? Or did He say “run”? If it was “run,” then wouldn't I be gravitating toward spandex and marathons rather than habits and convents? Bun? Done? Fun? Gun? Pun? Sun? Oh, sun. I could so get behind “sun.”

But no, there were no sibilants in what He had said. It was definitely “nun.”

If that was the case, then what sort of nun-to-be accepts an engagement ring? It was like two-timing God.

During our courtship, Colin's laconic attitude toward marriage had always pulled me up short, and in the long stretches of solitude I alternately nursed my bruised ego and reassessed my future. If he didn't love me enough to marry me, who would? If marriage wasn't in the cards, what was? Did I need to be married again? What would I do with the rest of my life? Subconsciously, I was writing a new chapter for myself.

What I was absolutely certain about was that I was done with what Isak Dinesen referred to as the business of being a woman; in this case, the type of mature woman that society was funneling me toward: a tepid, somewhat infantilized character obsessed with appearance, dithering about whether to consign every wrinkle to a syringe or a surgeon's scalpel, mulling over dubious fashion advice, and sprinkling in light amusements such as gardening and cooking. The world seems in an awful hurry to scoot midlife women into a pre-retirement stupor.

By contrast, I had an urge to explore, question, prod; to belong and yet to set myself apart and take up the challenge Carolyn Heilbrun passionately declared: “We should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”

Oh, it is easy to be unpopular these days. You just have to mention that you're in your fifties to feel the slap from the media, society, and governments for not looking or being twenty, for not responding to their coos to retire early and hustle into the cocoon of a retirement home, for not making way for the stampeding generations behind you. You can hear Western society's toe tap with impatience as it waits for us to shuffle into the shadows. It used to be the churches that railed at us from the pulpit about our unworthiness; now it is the media that preach and tell us we are too fat, too old, not attractive enough, not rich enough, not smart enough.

After two decades of juggling single-parenthood and deadline-driven jobs, I didn't need any preaching, not that kind anyway.

There's a natural inclination as you age to draw toward the spiritual, but the restless energy and the itch in my soul that needed to be scratched had nothing to do with joining a church group or attending religious conferences. It was a stronger and deeper tug that had a note of urgency to it. So when the Voice Within piped up for the umpteenth time with the suggestion
Become a nun,
it was a perfectly logical and sensible proposition.

Of course, I did not heed the call at first. I said yes to marriage.

Then, a few days after Colin and I became engaged, as the plane returning me to Canada sliced through the atmosphere dividing Heaven and Earth, I had a change of heart.

I loved Colin, and I did not want to hurt him, but by agreeing to marriage, I would be firmly closing the door on the nun option and tossing away the key forever. The idea of ending my days without ever responding to this persistent call to religious life broadsided me. I saw the opportunities of life, rarer as you get older, trickle away; saw myself on my deathbed, encircled by a Greek chorus of wailing ex-husbands and ex-boyfriends and being asked about “regrets,” and my response would be,
I had the chance to see if I was nun material, and I regret not testing that vocation.
That's how I knew I had to do it.

As soon as I got home, I phoned Colin and poured it out to him.

“I'm thrilled that we're engaged, really I am. But there's this... thing. I had been thinking of looking into religious life.”

“You want to be a priest?” he ventured.

“Um, no. A nun.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone line.

“Look, it's probably a silly idea,” I said quickly. “Maybe just something I need to get out of my system. But it has been on my mind for ages. Like, since I was fifteen.”

In the ensuing long, awkward pause in the conversation, I scrambled together some reassuring words, something that would prevent him from thinking
What kind of a lunatic is she?
But bless him, he said, “Well, it's not like we have a biological clock ticking. If this is something you feel strongly about, then you have to go off and see if this is what you want.”

He didn't even ask for the ring back.

He did ask if he could come and visit me in the convent, but I told him that visits from boyfriends were almost certainly frowned upon.

We quietly disengaged our engagement, and I set about searching for a place where I could find out whether I was meant to be the bride of Colin or the bride of Christ.

( 1:iii )

LIKE MOST
families in the fifties and much of the sixties, ours went to church on Sundays. Mine was not an overly religious upbringing but it was certainly unconventional. I was raised an Anglican, but because I was the product of a mixed marriage (as it was called in those days)—having an Anglican father and a Roman Catholic mother—I learned to move comfortably between both faiths. I attended an Anglican Sunday school and learned hymns, Bible stories, and the Lord's Prayer, and I sometimes attended Catholic Mass with my mother. My parents ensured that I said grace before meals and prayers before bed. I figured everyone did this.