And Then There Were Nuns (23 page)

I was too tired to think about it. All that mattered was to stay out of everyone's hair and do as I was told.

( 5:vii )

SISTER HEATHER
Francis was off to York for the day and invited me along for the ride.

We set off after lauds under moody skies across the scrubby moors, our small silver car navigating an undulating landscape of dense fog like a small tugboat rising and dropping in choppy water.

There is a disturbing beauty to the North Yorkshire Moors in February. With its clots of brown prickly shrubs studded across a vast no-man's land, it seems ideal for two things—getting lost, and being able to scream without disturbing anyone.

Sensing my thoughts, Sister Heather Francis piped up, “You can't tell now, obviously, but later in the year, this becomes a blanket of purple when the heather blooms. It is a marvelous sight.”

Her hands gripped the steering wheel as the car hugged a sharp turn.

Sister Heather Francis was a tall, thin, precise type with a degree in biology. She was unnervingly quiet but always perked up when the conversation came round to plants. On our way to York, I made an admiring comment about hedgerows, and she proceeded to give me a master class on their care, their uses, their ecological value, as well as legislation relating to them.

I am fascinated by hedgerows and how decades, sometimes centuries, of careful cultivation and grooming have managed to create these enormous foliated fences, giving the British countryside a look that seems sprung from the pages of a storybook. There is much to know about hedgerows. From Sister Heather Francis, I learned that hedgerow maintenance is expensive, that pruning requires tractor-mounted cutting equipment, and that in some regions there are bylaws concerning hedgerow stewardship. Cuttings are harvested and used to construct and repair thatched-roof buildings; hedgerows protect the fields from flood damage and erosion, and they provide shelter and nesting places for birds and small critters such as the great crested newt and the dormouse. And here I thought hedgerows existed merely to make the landscape pretty.

When we arrived in York, Sister Heather Francis continued my education by taking me on a walking tour along the top of the ancient city walls and then down through the park bordering the River Ouse.

We stopped in front of the strange, reptilian-looking monkey puzzle tree—“
Araucaria araucana
is its botanical name,” she said. “You probably noticed lots of shops in Whitby selling jewelry made of a black stone called Whitby jet? Well, it is from the compressed and fossilized wood of the monkey puzzle tree that Whitby jet derives.”

I felt as if I should be taking notes.

We gravitated toward the Old Quarter and meandered through the narrow, winding cobblestone streets where Elizabethan timber buildings teeter overhead. And there were shops. Lots of them, all with tempting window displays of vibrant and colorful clothing like I had never seen: long multi-textured and multi-colored scarves, tailored velvet jackets, long, gored skirts, and almost all of it on sale to make way for spring wear. I thought of my 2011 Winter Nun Collection and felt a pang of—what was it? Longing? Regret? Desire? Greed? And yet it wasn't as if I could tug on Sister Heather Francis's arm and say, “Hey, let's check that out! There's a sale!” She was enviously free of the world of skinny jeans and chunky jewelry.

I liked the feel of York. It was a proud city, not arrogantly proud but proud in a genteel and protective way.

When it was established in
AD
71 as a Roman fortress and given the name Eboracum, it was a trade hub, but over time it became a key player in ecclesiastical matters.

During the Anglo Saxon period, Edwin, King of Northumbria, made York his seat of power, and re-introduced Christianity to the region with the help of Paulinus, a priest who served Edwin's very religious wife. Whether Edwin's conversion was due to faith or politics (or pressure from his wife) is a question still batted about by historians, but what is undisputed is that it was a seminal event. Edwin was baptized along with members of his family and court on Easter 627, in a small frame church. The occasion proved auspicious on several fronts: that small frame church was the genesis of magnificent York Minster; Paulinus the priest became the first bishop of York; and among Edwin's family was his thirteen-year-old niece, Hilda, who would play a pivotal role in Christianity's rise in Britain and become one of its major northern saints—the same Hilda whose statue graced the reception area at St. Hilda's Priory and who the Order of the Holy Paraclete had adopted as its patroness.

There was so much about York I wanted to know, and I had an urge to hop on a tour bus and get the lowdown on its chocolate history (Rowntree and Terry's both started here), its Viking roots, and its reputation as the most haunted capital in Europe, but Sister Heather Francis was several paces ahead of me, her black veil fluttering in the breeze. She was one of only a handful of sisters in the order who continued to wear the veil.

“I like people to know who I am and what I do,” she replied matter-of-factly when I asked her about it. “The veil is instantly recognizable. People say they never hear about religious orders anymore, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we do not make ourselves visible. I wear it to promote religious life.”

It seemed to be working, at least in terms of making her visible. In the streets of York several people did double-takes when she passed by, and a woman in a café pointed her out excitedly to her companion as if Sister Heather Francis was the Queen of England. Maybe nun-spotting was the new thing.

Again I was reminded of the remark by former Archbishop Carey about nuns being “the best-kept secret of the Anglican Communion.” Which prompts one to muse, if a nun doesn't wear a habit, does her vocation truly exist?

We walked to the order's branch house, a smart-looking townhouse across from the Minster, to have lunch.

Most religious orders have branch houses where sisters live when their work and ministry makes it impractical to live at priory
HQ
. The Order of the Holy Paraclete had eight branch houses—five in England and three in Africa.

The two York sisters were engaged in duties connected with the Minster such as serving as tour guides and helping run the Sunday school.

They had prepared lunch for us, and over salmon sandwiches, a bag of crisps, fruit, tea, and a Kit Kat bar (a York invention, by the way, that pumps out a billion bars a year locally) we chatted away. It did not feel as if I was among a group of nuns; it felt like a neighborly coffee klatch with women who had extraordinary experiences.

Joining us at lunch was a woman visiting from South Africa, and that got the sisters reminiscing about their work in that country.

From 1950 to the mid-1990s, the Order of the Holy Paraclete had a branch house—it was called St. Benedict's—in the Rosettenville district of Johannesburg. At the height of the apartheid era, St. Benedict's was a locus for hospitality and refuge. The sisters adopted a passive-aggressive resistance to the apartheid law, and fed, comforted, treated, and advocated for those who were being terrorized by the regime. Desmond Tutu and Trevor Huddleston, both priests during the struggle, were frequent visitors. Not surprisingly, St. Benedict's was subjected to midnight raids, random searches, intimidation, arrests, and phone tapping. At the time, Huddleston was surreptitiously working on the manuscript for
Naught for Your Comfort,
his excoriating critique of the regime, and the sisters took turns hiding the manuscript under their mattresses. One of them ultimately risked her life to smuggle it out of Africa and deliver it into the hands of Huddleston's English publisher.

Huddleston's book had taken aim at the apartheid regime but it also took a strip off Christians who used the shield of patriotism and religion to defend odious government policies. He felt Christians should be held to a higher moral and ethical standard. I wondered how the experience he related in his book squared with his fellow clergy today and the barriers their own regime had erected against women and gays.

As memories were excitedly traded around the kitchen table the sisters' eyes lit up. It was clear that their work at St. Benedict's had shown the order at its finest, living its calling to the fullest. When the order had handed over St. Benedict's to another religious order, the termination of its work and the loss of connection to the place had been traumatic for the sisters, as well as for those in Johannesburg who were recipients of the nuns' courage and kindness.

After lunch, I wandered across the road to York Minster, a monster cathedral of soaring pillars and mammoth tracts of stained glass. The stories reverberated in my head of the sisters' descriptions of life under apartheid, the muddy overcrowded squalor, the horrific treatment of blacks, and the emotional brokenness that swept through the shanty towns like a plague. I tried to reconcile those images with the Minster's glittering interior.

A cathedral can be as distracting and as gaudy as a shopping mall, and pilgrims can easily get as swept up by the artistic and architectural wow factor as shoppers do over displays of handbags and housewares.

I was just as transfixed by the Minster as everyone else, but when I tore my gaze from its splendor, I noticed brokenness amid the perfection. While the tourist throngs had been admiring the ornamental ceiling bosses, other souls had slipped through to tend to their world of big and small traumas. Some stared ahead at the altar; others buried their faces in their hands; a few were weeping.

My strident attitude toward the church's organized structure softened, and I became appreciative of the silent and largely unsung service churches provide to those who come not to worship or to gawk at majestic architecture but to sit and come to grips with the pain and the muck of life. If not for churches, where would people go to safely unburden their souls? Where would I go to confront the memory of my rape?

( 5:viii )

A CELEBRATORY
mood rippled through the priory as the sisters fussed with flower arrangements and prepared for the first profession of Sister Samantha.

There are several steps in a woman's journey toward becoming a full-fledged nun: aspirant, postulant, novice, first professed, and life professed. There are generally three years between each of those last three stages. Theoretically, you could become a doctor faster than you could become a nun.

Sister Samantha was young, in her early twenties, and as I observed the ritual along with the rest of the congregation, I wondered how I would respond had it been my daughter, of similar age as Sister Samantha, making her profession vows. Would I have been overjoyed that she had found a passion for this life, or would I have been sad that she was cutting herself off at such a young age from experience and discovery?

The Anglican ceremony is far more low-key than the Roman Catholic tradition, in which the profession ceremony involves a bridal gown and mimics a marriage to Christ.

Dressed simply in the order's habit, Sister Samantha fearlessly approached the presiding priest and made her vows in front of her community:

Priest:
Do you believe that you are called by God to serve Him in this way of life?

Sister:
I do.

Priest:
Do you promise to live by the Rule of this Order and to observe its customs for the next three years?

Sister:
I do.

Priest:
This life to which you are called involves a steadfast intention expressed in the three-fold vow of Poverty, Celibacy, and Obedience. Will you undertake to be bound in this way during the period of First Profession?

Sister:
I will, God being my helper.

After signing the register, Sister Samantha held it open, displaying it to the congregation, and repeated the verse from Psalm 119: “O stablish me according to Thy word that I might live, and let me not be disappointed of my hope.”

She knelt before the priest to receive the first-profession gifts of the silver cross of the order, the black girdle or cord, and the veil. Only at life profession does a nun receive a gold wedding band and have three knots put in the girdle to signify that her three vows are being made for life.

It made me think what a sensible arrangement this might be for secular marriage: have the partners pledge to love, honor, cherish, and live responsibly for three years, after which they can renew their vows for life if they wish. (St. Francis of Assisi is reputed to have remarked that “if marriage were an order having a Novitiate, not nearly so many would enter it.”)

After the ceremony, we adjourned to the refectory for cake and wine.

A few days later, the chapel was decorated for a different celebration: the funeral of one of the sisters. For those in religious life, funerals are not sad occasions but a time to rejoice because the deceased has transcended the earthly realm to rest with God.

Six tall, thick candles stood sentinel around the coffin, the blazing reflection of their flames shimmering off the walls of the chapel like beating angel wings while clouds of incense billowed from a censer.

We trooped out to the small cemetery behind the priory, huddled under umbrellas against the cold drizzle, and watched the coffin being lowered into the ground.

And once again, we adjourned to the refectory for cake and wine.

( 5:ix )

THEY HAD
chocolate digestive biscuits by the cake tin–ful. I could not believe my luck.

Nor could I believe I had reached the stage of life where this was all it took to make me happy. There was a time when I wouldn't have thanked you for a chocolate digestive biscuit. Now I wasn't sure I could live without them.

I fell in step with the priory's busy but ordered life. My usual frantic and chaotic state had been transmogrified into one of serenity and balance. The stress from that horror show at St. Cecilia's was well behind me.