The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (54 page)

The traditional form of Christian Lectio Divina is a solitary or private practice. Now, however, different forms of group Lectio have been followed. At Regina Laudis we find the Sunday evening Lectio period an excellent time to explore subjects of particular interest to members of the Community. Often our aspirations and our concerns interconnect with our meditations on the Scriptures, thus making our day-to-day experiences apt matter for study
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I encourage all members of the deaneries with any ideas that concern the Community—be it renovation of the monastery or meal preparation—to go to Education and put it out there. Part of the work of Education is to get to what we call the love response—to feel united with everyone around you. That’s the ideal
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The range of topics that the Education Deanery has been able to incorporate into our Lectios is surprising. We’ve had Lectios on Shakespeare thanks to Deborah Curren-Aquino, a scholar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, who visits us annually. She is brilliant and leads us through a different play each year. We’ve had a Lectio featuring the music of the South African Zulu choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which related to a specific experience then taking place within the Community—a renewal of our understanding of the psalms at Matins. Whatever the topic, Lectio can be one medium to help the Community grow on a human level
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Regarding the news of the day—which was one of my pet peeves—the Community now has much more access to media than we had before. In the past, only Lady Abbess and maybe a couple of other nuns had some awareness of what was going on in the outside world. Portions of newspapers were read every now and then, but there was nothing like a general presentation of current events
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The Community is far better informed today. Now there is no one person who brings news to the Community. News can come into the monastery from various sources: radio, television and the Internet; our portress at the door, Mother Debbora Joseph; and Mother Catherine of Alexandria, who is in charge of the art shop. Both women are constantly speaking with visitors from the outside
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Mother Catherine was Kathleen Talbot Steif, a professional chemist and married with two children before her entrance in 1983. In addition to the responsibility of the art shop, she is the abbey herbalist who grows and creates the legendary teas sold there. My personal bond with Mother Catherine began years ago because of the herbal throat tea she invented that never fails to hasten the end of a Connecticut cold.

Before she became Mother Debbora Joseph, Josephine Buck had been a New York debutante whose affluent family had a summer home in Southampton, where as a teenager she played tennis with neighbor Maria Cooper at the Cooper’s summer house. Their adult lives went in different directions, Josephine becoming a Wall Street investment manager, until they met again years later at, of all places, Regina Laudis.

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Mothers Catherine and Debbora Joseph represent the face of the monastery to our visitors and guests. They exemplify the Rule that instructs us to behave toward each one as if he were Christ
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A crisis happens in the life of a cloistered nun when she comes to a point in formation where she feels judged. In the past, this could make it impossible to continue. The old monastic stand was “If you don’t like it, leave.” During the years before the Education Deanery, you wouldn’t know when someone left the monastery. You would wake up one morning and her cell would be empty. That no longer has to be the case. Moreover, a woman who leaves religious life doesn’t need to face the cold shoulder, as did Sister Luke in Kathryn Hulme’s
The Nun’s Story,
nor must she end the relationships she has formed with other sisters. Relationships can and do continue after a nun has left Regina Laudis
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Mother Macrina is a case in point. She left this Community over twenty years ago—but not surreptitiously. She knew she did not have a contemplative vocation and left to enter an active Franciscan order. She comes back from time to time to renew her spiritual life with us. Likewise, Mother Nika and Mother Bernadette went to other orders
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Some, like Valerie Imbleau and Nobuko Kobayashi, go back into the world. Valerie’s departure was the first significant one for me personally, but the emotional impact of it diminished over time
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It was no secret that Nobuko left because she could not really do the life. All of her sisters here sensed the pull she felt to go back to Japan and take care of her father. Now a successful clinical psychologist in Tokyo, Nobuko engenders a far closer relationship between Regina Laudis and Japan than we would ever have had. She comes back to us often and was instrumental in our introduction to Hatsume Sato, a Catholic woman in Japan who for many years has been helping people in need—physically, emotionally and spiritually. When Hatsume’s dream of building a place to lodge these suffering people came true, Nobuko learned that she had one remaining wish—a bell for this refuge named Ischia in the Woods. Nobuko asked for our help
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Nobuko remembered, “The abbey responded so quickly and kindly, offering as a gift to Hatsume the lovely old bell that was hanging in Mother Dolores’ carpentry shop. There is a Japanese expression describing such a quick response: ‘On stroking a bell, instantly comes a beautiful echo.’ ”

—This story is included in Jin Tatsumura’s 1995
Gaia Symphony II,
his ecological documentary that features Hatsume Sato as one of the remarkable figures of the twentieth century. Our bell echoes on
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There have always been notable visitors to our monastery. Clare Boothe Luce, the former Connecticut congresswoman and US ambassador to Italy, was an early and frequent visitor, as was the actress Celeste Holm, who starred in the film
Come to the Stable.

Dorothy Day, the prominent American journalist and social activist, came a number of times at the invitation of Mother Prisca Dougherty, whom she knew from the Catholic Worker movement. The Austrian philosopher Ivan Ilyin Illich was a close friend of Mother Jerome. Theologians Ewert Cousins, Henri de Lubac and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose books I kept at my bedside as a teenager, were all friends of Lady Abbess. Opportunities for the study of Scripture and theology were afforded through the visits of priests and theologians who shared with us the wisdom of their experience, study and prayer
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Buckminster Fuller, the architect, inventor and philosopher, offered a seminar on the environment. Colonel Charles Lindbergh, who came with his wife, Anne Morrow, gave a seminar on, of all things, the earthworm
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The Education Deanery has no powers of decision in the matter of guests, but we can recommend a subject and then aid in finding a master in the field. Experts in archeology, medicine, ecology, engineering, business, geology, botany and even seismology have offered the abbey their skills and knowledge
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The guest list is rich and varied and has included my historian brother, Dr. Martin Gordon; environmentalist René Dubos of Rockefeller University; New York City mayor Ed Koch; Vice Admiral Jean Betermier, former commander of the French Atlantic Fleet; Rabbi Richard Israel, director of the Hillel Council of Greater Boston; Enzo Fano, a UN water-resources specialist; Sir George Christie of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera; the great twentieth-century theorist and founder of integral humanism, Jacques Maritain; head of ABC News Roone Arledge; and nutritionist Andrew Weil
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With Mother Dolores as the moving force, professional artists from the stage, film and concert worlds visit Regina Laudis regularly—on retreat, like Lois Nettleton; to give a talk, like Broadway manager Lew Wilson; or to entertain and teach, as Gloria DeHaven and Veronica Tyler have.

Gloria DeHaven, a musical star at MGM in the forties and fifties, performed her one-woman show
, The Spirit of Vaudeville.
Veronica Tyler, whose career has taken her to opera stages all over the world, originally came to Regina Laudis to do some soul-searching. Lady Abbess invited her to give an informal concert for us, and Veronica decided to stay on and give us a seminar in polyphony. This generous artist has returned to the abbey often to participate in concerts and productions and to continue to educate us in workshops
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Vanessa Redgrave has visited at the invitation of Mother Dolores. Permission had been granted for Mother Dolores to accompany me to a Broadway matinee of Eugene O Neill’s autobiographical drama,
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, featuring Redgrave as Mary Tyrone, the character based on O Neill’s mother. Miss Redgrave invited us backstage after the performance and thoughtfully offered a bit of information about the real-life Mary that she thought would interest Mother Dolores. In the last act of the play, Mary wanders through the house in a morphine haze, bemoaning the loss of something that she knows would finally bring her happiness if only she could find it. That something, said Vanessa, was her Catholic faith, which she did, indeed, regain.

Vanessa was extremely interested in the abbey and asked if she might visit sometime and perhaps read some poetry for the Community. Mother Dolores invited her on the spot. But it was not until a few years later, when Tim Ridge of the abbey’s Act Association escorted Mother to the revival of
Driving Miss Daisy
with Vanessa Redgrave, that the friendship was renewed and a date for the visit was set. The Community was treated to an afternoon of Shakespeare sonnets read by Vanessa and the Redgrave clan. Vanessa brought sister, Lynn, and brother, Corin, for a rare ensemble performance.

Performance artists have also been welcomed at the abbey. Dzieci—the Polish word for “children” and almost impossible for an American to pronounce—is an experimental theater group in Brooklyn that is as engaged with personal transformation as it is with public presentation. Dzieci’s director, Matt Mittler, explained, “Everyone in the group feels a calling to serve something higher. We really don’t perform before audiences. We have groups we interact with—call them witnesses—that actually change the dynamic, and we create community. What we do is evolving always. Always reborn. Always renewed.

“The company combines work of performance with work of service. We’ve worked a lot in hospitals, detention centers, hospices. We believe that helping others generates a profound healing effect that not only serves the patient but also strengthens the ensemble’s work. But we do perform in more traditional venues such as New York’s well-known experimental theater, La MaMa, where Maria Janis saw our production of
Fool’s Mass
and insisted upon introducing us to Mother Dolores.

“We felt such a compatible vibration with Mother Dolores that we spent four days at the abbey, working with the Community in the hay fields and attending the Offices.”

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Including Matins!

“After many months of enjoying the abbey’s nurturing,” Matt Mittler continued, “I felt the need for Mother Dolores to know our work, and I asked her about doing
Fool’s Mass
for the Community. She agreed.