The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (52 page)

I have a feathered friend in Corpus Christi. A nice lady named Debbie at the pet shop in Woodbury wanted to sell a six-week-old African gray parrot worth $2,500 but only to the right people since African grays can live seventy years and she wanted to guarantee that he would be looked after for his lifetime. She thought we seemed a good bet. She knocked the price down by well over half, but that was still way beyond our means
.

At this same time—not coincidentally—Don Robinson was involved in a lawsuit with his neighbor in Los Angeles, the entertainer Madonna, and he requested prayers by the Community for a favorable decision. Don won the case and asked how he could show his appreciation, and I said we wouldn’t turn him down if he wanted to give us the parrot
.

—Mother David and Mother Maria Immaculata both thought the fact that the money came from someone named Madonna was fitting
.

I named the bird Tobiel, but the nickname Toby has stuck. Toby shares Corpus Christi with eight pairs of finches and a canary, and I admit all those cages create a kind of disorder. But, in a purer sense, there is more design than meets the eye. The birds give a context to the space where women come to share personal problems concerning their monastic life. They don’t have to enter a room that is dead quiet. It’s alive. I think it enables one to speak of intimate issues
.

The birds are a handful, and when the neuropathy hit I needed help with them. I hesitated to approach Mother Olivia Frances because she has the enormous responsibility of our kitchen, but she agreed to feed and water the birds on days I was out of the enclosure for medical appointments. To my surprise she began coming every morning! Still does
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Part of my job as dean of education was to aid each woman to find an identification with some concrete aspect of our life—making bread, milking a cow, bundling hay—and to open up communication so that she might relate to others who shared interest in the same elemental area
.

The women and I thought this sharing could take the form of small groups to address specific issues in Community work. We started with a garden nucleus and then a dairy nucleus. Over time, a number of these groups were created, among them a presentation nucleus, which is concerned with taking our traditional rituals out of the shadows and making them more understandable and visible, and a body-development nucleus, which promotes programs to nurture the women physically
.

These peer groups were responsible for bringing new ideas of value to the deanery, but my underlying drive in forming them was to phase out the strict separation that existed between the professed and the nonprofessed. By design, these groups created a shortcut in the bonding process that I felt to my core had to replace the isolation of monastic life
.

From the very first, the meetings of the deanery were not mandatory—never would be—but they were well attended. The younger women responded to coming together in this way. A small core of older women in the Community did not participate. This was a big departure from the classical emphasis on a person’s individual relationship to God, and it did put a stress on them. The ideal of religious life for them was that you went in and you obeyed. You did whatever you were told. It didn’t matter whether you liked it or were good at it—you did it. The obedience was what made the action valuable, not your giftedness
.

“These women were critical of Lady Abbess and, especially, Father Prokes”, Mother Abbess David explained. “Letters of complaint would go to the Archdiocese of Hartford—and, sometimes, to the Holy See—with regularity. No attempt was made to silence these women and, in fact, I was often aware of one of them sitting on the stairs just outside the common room where the meetings were held, furiously making notes on what was going on inside. She didn’t have to eavesdrop; deanery membership was open to anyone in the Community who wished to be there for whatever purpose and for whatever length of time she desired.”

I began to recognize in the charting if a particular reaction was just a passing irritation or if it was significant and could have a positive impact on our lives. By listening for the meaning behind the words, I was able to see particulars becoming universals—that is, someone expressing something that everyone is suffering with or longing for. Out of these insights came proposals and initiatives for change
.

Mother Lucia remembered, “Sometimes you would find Mother in the library until twelve or one o’clock in the morning. She was always available. It wasn’t as if she were just hanging around waiting for someone to knock. But if you knocked on her door, crying, “I’ve got to talk to someone, or I’m out of here”, she would hear you out.

“She is a person who always draws on her own experience. She told about times she pounded the trunks of the trees with her fists—not to show how angry she got but to show that it is all right to get angry. She related Mother Columba’s concern over her broken-out skin to encourage us to ask if we needed something. It was all right to ask, and it’s not vain to want to look good.

“It was hard to get it through my head that you didn’t talk when you were working. I thought that time was a perfect opportunity to share. That became my petition. An announcement was never made that this custom was changing, but gradually, organically it just changed. The silence became artificial. Now it’s so natural to communicate in a work situation. We don’t chatter aimlessly about anything that comes into our heads, but there’s always the good feeling of being able to share.”

Once the Education Deanery felt that a proposal should be put forward, it was presented first to the Formation Deanery. If Formation agreed that the idea warranted consideration, it was sent on to the Liturgy Deanery for confirmation that it fit in with the Rule. Then, if all agreed, it would go to the Choir Deanery for verification that the idea was good and would bring life to the Community
.

Thinking back to the beginning of the deaneries, Mother Abbess said, “Education and Formation were to take two distinct roles in guiding candidates into monastic personhood. As prioress then, I was acutely aware that we were establishing the continuity of the foundation. But as dean of formation, my part was to hold for the
classical
line. My own formation was rooted in classical structures; thus, this half of the complement was very natural to me.

“It was a revolution—the Education Deanery—because that dimension had never been honored. The rationale was that
all
the Community—whoever wanted to participate—was given a
nonjudgmental
place to express herself. Mother Dolores was supremely gifted for this because she gave the task vitality; she has the capacity to be open-minded, and she always wants everybody to get into the act. It is the training in her.

“I did my part to run interference and support the foundation of the deanery, trying to ease the tension this created with those time-honored ways in which older members had been formed. But the women resisted being awakened to another dimension and were suspicious of the young upstart.

“There was so much resentment, too, on the part of the formation mothers because they felt they were being circumvented. They believed they were not getting the first responses from the novices now, that Mother Dolores was the recipient of the instinctual response—which was really the whole point! But we are all
sisters
here. Remember—sisters? women? jealousies? I think the level of frustration was very great for Mother Dolores in those early days.”

—
Yes, I was aware that it was the main cause of conflict. The novices were telling me things they wouldn’t even hint at with the formation mothers. “How do I have the right to be consecrated as a virgin when I’ve slept with guys?” is not a question to be asked of a judgmental nun. I was, and still am, convinced that the work of developing the whole person, including her sexual nature, is indispensable for the process of monastic formation in today’s world, especially if we, as Benedictine religious women, are going to be capable of assuming a true and fulfilling marital response to Christ within the bonded relationships of the Community. Virginity is not only a physical state, but has to do with the fullness of a woman. A woman’s virginity can be restored
.

I was being chided for trying to bring in a program to destroy the pristine vision of classical monastic purity. Some in the Community felt that Lady Abbess and I had lost our minds by dealing in such an open fashion with the young postulants. It was hard for them to believe these “hippies” would ever become monastic persons. Lady Abbess let me do what she knew I could do. She did not interfere or lay down the law. She was humble and giving and was again becoming the target for a small contingent of restless women
.

There is always a lag between the theory and the practice of new thoughts, but resistance by the elders was evident from the beginning; consequently, any change could take years to gel. In meetings with the other deans, discourse was denied. I felt an incapacity to move anything, to affect anything, and I was constantly frustrated because I wasn’t changing anything. I had no sense of inadequacy but no sense of accomplishment either—like an ant nibbling at a fifteen-hundred-year-old granite mountain
.

I would become so angry I couldn’t express the anger in words. Once I ripped up the agenda booklet—addendums to what I was supposed to do—and slammed the pages on the floor before charging out of the room. They said I had an awful temper. I didn’t care what they thought I had
.

—Did you ever apologize?

   
I’ll apologize if I know I’m wrong, but I felt I was justified in correcting something that was out of order and unfair to the Community. Saint Benedict addresses this when he says that “unruly boys should get a severe beating with the abbot’s permission”. He didn’t mention the girls, but I assumed they got the same
.

“We were all aware of the opposition that Mother was facing daily”, said Mother Augusta. “It wasn’t anything under cover. There were complements among the four deans, but there was always conflict, too. Mother Stephen was the dean of choir and my land master. She recognized that Mother Dolores had the instinctual base of the Community with her. But Mother Stephen’s tendency was to beat you into submission. Mother Dolores would help me find my direction through conflicts by way of education. I would never have gone to Mother Stephen with a problem in a million years.”

Mother Telchilde added, “Interestingly, Mother Dolores can also be very strict in support of traditional ways. She does not reject the traditional. What she rejects is letting the exterior stuff—how to fold your napkin, how to hold your book—become the reality. She never settles for the exterior show being all there is.”

“She does not tolerate laxity in attending the Divine Office, most particularly the middle-of-the-night Matins”, said Mother Margaret Georgina. “I can still visualize a furious Mother Dolores striding down the hall between the cells at 2:00
A.M.
, banging loudly on every door and calling out at the top of her voice, ‘You are expected at Matins! You are expected at Matins!’ ”

“I could tell she was in pain”, said Mother Noella. “There was always that pain in Mother Dolores that this education dimension wasn’t considered legitimate.”

On the walks with Mother David, my frustrations boiled over and cued four words at frequent intervals: I have to leave. Once, in a rage, I broke away and headed back to my cell and locked my door. Mother David was fast on my heels and asked me to unlock it. I refused. I then heard a strange sound of metal against metal. She had pulled a screwdriver from her tool kit and removed the hinges from the door. “We do not lock our doors in the monastery”, she stated simply
.

“
Does God have the right to ask this of me?” I implored
.

“
Yes”, she answered. It was a yes echoing Reverend Mother and Mother Placid through the years. I accepted it—again—in faith. But, I wondered, “Where is my bridge to her yes
?”