And Then There Were Nuns (29 page)

I had read about how one of Merton's friends would pick him up at the abbey under the ruse that they were going to attend a religious function. Merton would have a satchel with him, supposedly containing religious material. A few miles down the road, Merton would tell his friend to stop the car, and while the car idled, Merton, satchel in hand, would dash into the bushes in his cassock and emerge dressed in denim and leather, his cassock stuffed into the satchel. The two friends would then hit the bars, and the monk, the one who craved silence and solitude, would be yakking to everyone and buying rounds of beer. The contemplative contradiction. That was me: the dual personality, the elastic monastic, trying to adapt to a monoculture.

( 6:ix )

“ARE YOU
sure you know what you're doing?” a worried Sister Gillian asked as we sat in the car at a bus depot in Pickering. “You get off at Malton, remember, and transfer to the bus to York. Then at York you have to transfer buses again to get to Bishopthorpe. Oh dear, are you sure you can handle it?”

Who could blame her: I was after all putting myself into the hands of the British public transportation system.

“Yup, I'll be fine. And if I get lost, I can just ask someone.”

Sister Gillian looked dubious.

I gathered my purse and my overnight bag and patted her arm. “Don't worry so much.”

I was off to York. The prospect of traveling on unfamiliar buses and making transfers in unheard-of places had a strange thrill to it. At times I hoped I would get lost.

The previous week I had taken another bus trip (Sister Gillian had been more relaxed about that one since it did not require transfers) north to Dormanstown as part of my job collecting information for the historical update the order asked me to do. Two sisters, Anita and Pam, worked with the poor in this former steel-making powerhouse—Dormanstown steel had built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. During that excursion, Sister Anita and I discovered we were both Bede freaks, so we made an impromptu road trip north to Durham Cathedral to visit the monk's shrine. Standing in front of Bede's tomb was like visiting Graceland.

Sister Anita had been a chatty companion who augmented my fledgling education about early Christianity's formative years in Britain and the Northern saints who shaped it. Hilda was one of them, of course, but so was Cuthbert, Northern England's patron saint. I was always game to learn about a new saint, because invariably they had wonky career trajectories (which made me feel better about my own peripatetic path) and because there was usually something bizarre about them. Cuthbert did not disappoint.

A contemporary of St. Hilda, Cuthbert was a shepherd, a monk, a prior, a soldier, and a priest. It was said that he was a kind and cheerful sort, and this proved as much a blessing as a curse. When he retired to his hermit cave on Inner Farne Island, pilgrims and hangers-on refused to leave him alone, and they would row out to talk to him. Among them was King Ecgfrith, who pestered Cuthbert to take up the post of bishop. Worn down by the request and well into old age by this point, Cuthbert agreed. He was ordained at York around
AD
685 and died less than two years later.

A dozen years after Cuthbert died, monks pried open his coffin and found his body to be perfectly preserved. (It makes you wonder what propels people, aside from lurid curiosity, to open a coffin.) The monks were rather pleased because they had also preserved the head of King Oswald, who had been killed and dismembered in battle thirty years earlier. With two grisly relics in their possession, they fled an imminent Viking invasion and took the remains on the road for—and this is just weird—three hundred years, lifting the lid on their macabre exhibit to curious passersby, pilgrims, benefactors, anyone willing to pay handsomely for the privilege.

The monks finally buried the pair at Durham Cathedral, once the building was completed, in 1130. Cuthbert remained undisturbed—his shrine survived the Reformation—until the 1820s, when the poor fellow was dug up again, probed and prodded, and relieved of his cloak and pectoral cross, which is now displayed in the Cathedral museum. The last (and let's hope final) exhumation was in 1899.

I didn't expect to find a story to rival that one in York, despite York's reputation as the most haunted capital in Europe.

My business in York and Bishopthorpe, as it had been in Dormanstown, was to interview the sisters posted there for the Order of the Holy Paraclete's historical update.

As the bus approached York, I checked my watch and realized I had a chunk of time before the arrival of my connecting bus.

I ambled across Lendal Bridge to a café, a former toll house, ordered lunch and settled into a window seat overlooking the River Ouse.

Whenever I would go out for lunch in my secular life, I would order what appealed to me—a tasty entrée, maybe a glass of wine, and invariably a scrumptious dessert. On the days when I was feeling particularly expansive (usually on pay day), I would take a gander around the shops and maybe splurge on a pair of shoes. There was always the confidence that another paycheck was around the corner. Now, my postulant persona kicked in. I ordered the cheapest item on the menu—a bowl of soup—and a glass of tap water. I was watching my pennies like a pensioner.

In Bishopthorpe, a small, tidy suburb a few miles outside York, I was met by two charming sisters whose mission was to provide a presence of prayer at Bishopthorpe Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of York.

It was a mild March day, and the three of us strolled the grounds of the palace, where drifts of daffodils shone in the late afternoon sun, their nodding blooms resembling yellow-bonneted women having a good chin-wag.

We said vespers in the palace's thirteenth-century chapel, with its floors of black and white marble; its ceiling studded with bosses painted with heraldic shields, and its thick stone walls of blind arcades inset with stained-glass depictions of the saints. It was the prettiest chapel I had ever been in. Edward II apparently worshipped here just before he signed a truce with Robert the Bruce in 1323, following the Battle of Bannockburn. If a chapel like this were located near my home, I would be in it every day, if not multiple times a day.

It made me wish that more people were aware of such stunning spiritual oases but also that they recognized the abundant calm that an office such as vespers affords. Vespers, a mere fifteen-minute office, provides an elegant transition between a frantic day in an office cubicle or on a factory floor and the soothing familiarity of home. It would be a nicer world if churches resurrected vespers and people attended in enthusiastic droves.

There were four of us at vespers—the two sisters, the palace chaplain, and me.

The chaplain was a young woman possessed of a gentle manner that I hoped was an indication of her true personality and not the result of being browbeaten and bullied by those antagonistic to the idea of women priests.

“Ah, Canada,” she nodded sadly when she learned where I was from. “It is so much easier for women priests there. Here, it is...” Her voice trailed away. There was no need for her to finish her sentence.

Not long after I had arrived at St. Hilda's, I had been asked whether I minded having a female priest officiate at the Eucharist. I had chuckled by way of response until I realized that the question was not intended as a joke. It would certainly be a joke in North America, where more than 35 percent of active Anglican clergy are women and fourteen of its bishops are women.

In the U.K., I had to continually remind myself that I had not fallen through a crack in the space-time continuum and been sucked back to the Pleistocene era.

The visceral opposition to female clergy in the U.K. from both men and women is as mystifying as it is scandalous. It made my blood boil, roused the Warrior Nun in me. What's the fear? That women will do a fantastic job? That they will cause far fewer sexual abuse scandals? Bring some humanity back to the church?

Those Christians who scoff at the notion that God sits on a fluffy cloud overseeing creation will assert with a perfectly straight face that female priests don't belong in churches because they weren't mentioned in accounts of the Last Supper. And my response is, how do you know for certain that Jesus had only twelve apostles and that they were all men? The gospels form a highly selective and edited anthology of stories and letters that were handpicked by the burgeoning hierarchy of the organized church centuries later. It might be “the gospel,” but it doesn't mean it's the whole story.

A section of the Bible that often gets overlooked because scholars debate whether it is a true gospel is the Apocrypha, or Book of Wisdom. It contains riveting stories of heroic women who were no strangers to temples or to preaching (even during Jesus's time). It is a shame that the Apocrypha is often left out of editions of the Bible and that it isn't read more in churches, because it contains many terrific female role models. Then again, maybe that explains its exclusion.

There are still many U.K. parishes where churchgoers refuse to accept Holy Communion from a female priest, never mind a female bishop. The Church of England actually suggested a compromise in which female bishops would be ordained but male bishops would be brought in to dispense the sacraments—Holy Communion, baptism, weddings, funerals, and the like—so that a woman could be bishop in name only but not in procedure. It was beyond ridiculous.

There is a Church of England group with the ironic name of Forward in Faith that actively campaigns against the ordination of females. Replace the word “female” in that last sentence with “blacks,” “homosexuals,” “people with disabilities,” or any other such label and you have a human rights case.

The Church of England's two archbishops, York and Canterbury, had handled the situation badly. They vacillated (such an Anglican thing) and played the consensus game rather than assert their unequivocal support of female clergy at every level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and denounce the opposition as both patently wrong and definitely un-Christian. Their dithering alienated people on both sides of the argument, in particular women, who have done the grunt work of the established church for eons.

It was mind-boggling how the same church that preaches the liberation of the poor and the oppressed in Third World countries can't accord equal rights to women in the so-called First World. You cannot be a Christian and exclude others; nor can you cherry-pick those groups you wish to admit and those you set aside while you “study the theology.”

It's not enough to be the smartest man or woman in the room nowadays: you need to be the most compassionate and the most vociferous defender of human rights.

And speaking of “studying the theology,” if we are to be absolutely true to Biblical theology, then all priests should be required to start off as Jewish rabbis before they can be baptized as Christians and then ordained as Christian priests. Of course, the idea is preposterous, but no more preposterous than banning women from ordination and leadership.

The glimmer of hope is this: more women than men are entering the Anglican priesthood in the U.K. In 2010, there were 290 women and 273 men ordained.

I was also detecting a streak of paternalism cropping up in other areas of the church, specifically a kind of slavery among the religious class. Many of the sisters I met had exceptional executive-level skills but were largely relegated to the status of handmaidens. At important church functions, nuns were used as servers and dishwashers rather than encouraged to circulate, offer their insights, participate in intelligent discourse, and at least make their vocations visible. Instead, sisters were trotted out by churches on special occasions and used as spiritual window dressing, only to be packed away along with the bunting after the events. You do not see monks setting tables and drying dishes at church functions, so why is it
OK
to make nuns do it?

That evening back in York, as I sat in the Minster for compline with a full choir chanting and singing the liturgy, I wondered about this attitude toward women and why it has been allowed to go on for so long in the English church. The real theological scandal of our time is not whether God exists but why women have been shut out and in some cases obliterated from full inclusion in the church—both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. Perhaps it was time to establish a new Anglo-Catholic denomination, entirely led by women. St. Hilda—that Celtic trailblazer—would surely approve.

( 6:x )

THE NEXT
morning after finishing my interviews, I found myself with some time to kill before the bus arrived to return me to Whitby.

The term “time to kill” suddenly sounded awfully harsh.

Was “time to waste” better? No, “waste” is so un-Benedictine.

“Time to spend”? Too much of a material ring.

“Time to bum around”? Yes, it had just the right balance of self-effacement and no fixed address. Like Jesus.

I wandered into the old quarter and sat on a bench in the square near Holy Trinity Church. The sun shone brilliantly and the sky was the clearest of blues. Stall keepers were arranging their wares, people were hurrying to work, and young mothers were corralling children who were running and squealing with the delight of their freedom. People ambled into cafés for a morning coffee, then returned to settle around the outdoor tables hastily set up to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather. It was a mundane sight, ordinary in the extreme, but it gave me so much pleasure. I sat on the bench mesmerized by people jumping, running, laughing out loud, squealing with happiness.

Added to this was the profusion of color everywhere. There was such a kaleidoscopic swirl—in the sky, in the clothing people wore, in the shop window displays, in the enormous urns of flowers, in the brickwork of the buildings, in the almost blinding glint of light from the chrome café tables. It made me smile in a way I hadn't for a long time.