The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (55 page)

“As soon as we had a committed date, everyone at Dzieci became terrified because this is a very daring piece, a disturbing piece in some ways, and we didn’t want to risk the nuns telling us to get out.
Fool’s Mass
is set in medieval Europe during the plague years. A group of village idiots are forced to enact their own Mass when their beloved pastor dies suddenly. Although there’s a great deal of improvisation, the basic structure is the Mass itself, but a Mass full of wild buffoonery and comic audience participation.

“The actors, in full costume and makeup, were already in character as the nuns arrived at the Jubilee Barn and immediately began to improvise with them. Their responses were at once touchingly eloquent and of such depth of understanding that it brought us new insight that we had no inkling of. We actors felt more entwined with the piece than we had ever experienced before. Since then we’ve been invited by a number of churches to bring
Fool’s Mass
to their parishes. It’s become our signature piece.”

In the forties, before the word itself was coined, Anita Colby was a supermodel. She was known as “The Face” for her beauty and had multiple careers as actress, author, advertising executive, even host on the
Today
show. In her later years, after her husband had died, she was introduced to Lady Abbess through a friend who felt she might find some solace at the abbey. Lady Abbess, in turn, suggested she meet with Mother Dolores.

Anita, who was going through a really bad time, made numerous visits. One day she mentioned that her good friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had played the leading role in the London production of
The Pleasure of His Company
and was exactly the kind of person I would like
.

Anita urged me to drop Mr. Fairbanks a note, and she made him sound so fascinating that I did, mentioning that I hoped his experience with our play had been as happy as mine had been. He replied very quickly, and our correspondence continued until his death. He was always asking questions regarding religious life. He didn’t even know what the habit is called
.

Mother Dolores has kept his letters and notes—all predictably charming and, insofar as they never met, unpredictably intimate. Fairbanks even revealed his long-lasting affection for Joan Crawford, who was his first wife. “Joan forced me to stand up to my parents,” he wrote, “and made a man out of a boy.”

He never visited Regina Laudis, but I’ve included him among our visitors because there is an observation in spiritual life known as “consolation without cause”. This refers to a feeling of warmth and comfort that comes for no apparent reason. You don’t ask for it. But out of nowhere, you instinctively have this marvelous feeling of well-being that comes from—somewhere. That was Mr. Fairbanks
.

Another “consolation without cause” was the movie actress June Haver. I hadn’t known June in Hollywood, but her brief time as a nun was the reason for all the secrecy demanded of me before my entrance into Regina Laudis. She wrote to me because she had met Sister Theresa, who remembered me from Corvallis, my high school. God bless Sister Theresa, because knowing June Haver was a precious experience
.

Initially I was surprised that she was so open about her life as a nun and her return to Hollywood—not to her career but ultimately to a happy marriage and family life with the screen actor Fred MacMurray. June wrote to me often, and with such firmness of spirit, always urging me never to lose hope about anything—referring, of course, to the fact that, after years of longing and deep spiritual communion, she had been at last allowed to receive the sacraments again. “Never, my friend,” she wrote, “never take the sacraments for granted
.”

When June first visited us she discovered our dairy was in need of a semen storage tank. Her highly unusual gift of this apparatus, as one can imagine, got some interesting reactions from our congregation
.

—
Her letters and visits and generosity continued through the years until her death in 2005. Her daughters, Laurie and Katie, remain good friends of the abbey. To this day, I treasure their personal gift of a crucifix that belonged to their beautiful mother
.

By the late eighties, the Community was looking toward an educational involvement—in the sense of formal education. This coincided with the arrival of Iain Highet, a Canadian student who was pursuing a master’s degree in environmental studies at York University in Toronto. He was motivated to come on the barest suggestion from someone in his philosophy seminar that an abbey in Connecticut needed help with the hay. He had never been to an abbey and was not Catholic or particularly interested in religion. But he was genuinely interested in the land and joined the land program, working hard that year, learning everything he could from Father Prokes and Mother Stephen.

Ian had a certain charisma. His presence drew other young people to come and explore. It was really with Iain’s coming that we started to formalize the whole structure that evolved steadily into our present Monastic Internship Program
.

We knew that we had a tremendous resource in the land program that could be a practical educational base for young persons if it could be set up in a more recognized way. Mother Lucia was indispensable in structuring an educational program in which college students can learn something and we can be accountable for what they learned. For example, each intern adheres to a unique program created to reflect his particular interests. Thus, interns might learn to weave the wool of the sheep they have raised, develop the theological implications of cheesemaking or discover the meaning of a chant piece at the blacksmith’s forge
.

We have been able to give classes in Latin and what we call Ritual and Creation—monastic customs, history and the liturgy that we follow. If students are interested in art, weaving or pottery, the nun they work with gives them reading materials and assignments to help them develop the theoretical measure of what they are doing. Some interns, both American and French, have received academic credit for what they’ve done here in agriculture
.

Mother Lucia added, “We ask them to stay for a year in order to experience a whole cycle on the land. One needs all four phases: preparing the soil, planting the seeds, tending the plants, harvesting. If the interns don’t stay through the four seasons, we feel they don’t experience the totality of the process or see the fruits of their labor. The program is surviving, and I would say now that at least forty young people have passed through it.”

Through the internship program, we have even had a hand in pest control. Our fruit trees were hit by a massive invasion of gypsy moths. The larvae of the gypsy moth is one of the most notorious pests of hardwood trees in the Eastern United States. Because we raise our crops organically, we were opposed to using commercial pesticides to control the infestation. Philippe Mennesson, now an engineer in France, was then a young intern working with Mother Perpetua in the land program. They learned about a natural way to stop the plague: spraying the trees with the ground-up bodies of the larvae. All the Community was mobilized to collect the creatures, picking them up with—thanks to Sister Ida Nobuko—chopsticks
.

“It was a challenge, but we really did well”, Philippe Mennesson recalled years later. “There was only one unpleasantness. During the grinding operation, we perceived a very bad smell. Those caterpillars stank worse than the compost.”

The Education Deanery also helped to open the Community to the world of dance. Lady Abbess was always after us to stand up straight so that we wouldn’t get what she called the “nun’s hump”. She thought that dance, specifically ballet, would make us all more able to move with grace and dignity during liturgical processions
.

—
I think it was mainly to keep us from “the hump”
.

She found Miss Evelyn Jantzer, a retired New York-based teacher, who agreed to conduct a class in dance movement one hour a week, and the Education Deanery set up her program. Dance was a springtime explosion in the Community. It had been germinating in the hearts of the younger members, and it blossomed like the brilliance of new life on our land in April. Even Mother Ida, who was in her eighties, insisted on being part of the corps de ballet. We all wore black leotards under a sheath of black cloth, like a scapular. We even built ourselves a barre! Miss Jantzer taught us for five years, and when she finally had to stop coming, a lovely English lady, June Christian, came for a two-day visit and stayed for three weeks. June was a highly trained teacher on the staff of the Royal Academy of Dance in London for fifteen years, and in later life has been an examiner for the Royal Academy, traveling the world judging competitions. She picked up the dance program where Miss Jantzer left off, and it was a fruitful experience for us all. Mother Perpetua was particularly responsive to body movement and shone as our star ballerina; I supported her as her danseur
.

June visits whenever she is near the United States and, in 1986, became a monastic scholar and was given the name Maria Salome
.

—Monastic scholar?

   
Monastic scholarship is an honor granted by the Community in recognition of the professional gifts of persons relating to us. Father Prokes pointed out that when we receive an hour of a professional’s time it is a considerable gift that should be acknowledged. We gave a lot of thought to how we could do that and set up the monastic scholarship
.

Is this something that pertains to the Benedictine Order?

   
It doesn’t pertain to the Benedictine Order. It pertains to Regina Laudis
.

As a postscript, June Christian and I shared a poignant moment a few years ago when we were visiting the abbey at the same time. She and Mother Dolores were reminiscing about the dances June had created for the nuns, when Mother Dolores sadly informed June that her prima ballerina, Mother Perpetua, was now an Alzheimer’s victim.

On past visits, I had always found time to stop by Mother Perpetua’s pottery studio. Watching her work with such precision and skill was fascinating and just looking at that face—she bore a strong resemblance to the film star Linda Darnell—was a pleasure.

Her studio then was a ramshackle section of the barn at Saint Martin’s—it had, in fact, a prior life as a chicken coop—so Mother Perpetua was overjoyed when a new studio was built for her in the year she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. From then on, she spent every moment she could getting all her recipes for glazes written down while she still remembered them. In 2006, her work as a potter would be finished, but her special gifts were passed down.

I invited Mother Perpetua to a meeting with Maria Salome and Dick in Saint Benedict’s parlor. Mother was by then much slower in speech but still agile, and I had the hope that we might repeat a pas de deux. I would have been so grateful if she could make just a movement or two
.