And Then There Were Nuns (33 page)

It was then that I understood completely, albeit briefly, what it meant to be a nun, how the prayers and chants repeated over the course of a day, every day of every year until they take their last breath, allowed them to experience that profound rush of devotion. It does not come always, nor does it come easily, but it was a taste of what was possible to those who chose the path.

“So? Could you really give up everything and follow me?” Jesus asked.

I was afraid He was going to ask this.

I shook my head. “No, I could not. I can be a faithful follower, and I will try to make sure that it directs my witness and my writing, but could I abandon everything for God? No, not to the extent that your disciples did or that the sisters have. I'm sorry.”

Just then, the bell in the main chapel rang, summoning us to compline. I was disappointed about leaving the vision and Jesus. When I reached my prie-dieu, I realized that my face was wet with tears.

The vision had rattled me but not in a bad way. In fact I was grateful for it. Whether it was God or my subconscious speaking, it did not really matter (though I will always assert that it was God). What mattered was the honesty and the directness of the words, the unmasking of myself and the acceptance of what and who I was.

Even so, I had begun to count the days until my departure. Evidently, so had Colin. A card had arrived from him with a melancholy message, and I could tell he was getting fed up with waiting for me. It had indeed been a long stretch. How many other men would wait a year and a half while their fiancées vacillated between marriage and the nunnery? On the phone the previous week, he had likened it to my having an affair, with him waiting on the sidelines for it to run its course.

( 7:vii )

EASTER DAY.
Never had I been so happy to see the back of Lent. Good riddance to it.

I was already awake, showered, and dressed when Sister
KT
came by my cell ringing a bell at 4:10 a.m. and calling out the words from Luke 24, “Surrexit Dominus vere, alleluia!” To which I responded, “Pax vobiscum.”

As if sensing the tension of Holy Week, the universe had sent an overnight thunderstorm to relieve the pent-up anxiety.

I gazed out my cell window into the pitch-black, silent spring air. The rest of the population of Whitby, and no doubt of the majority of the U.K., were still snuggled in their beds. For Christians, Easter is the big day, bigger than Christmas.

We entered the chapel that morning in a mood of uncertainty. The lights were purposely turned off, and we groped our way in the dark to our stalls carrying unlit candles. The Pascal flame was lit and the chapel flickered with the barest of light. A human chain formed as one candle lit another and another until every candle was lit. It was a surprise to see the chapel was filled to capacity.

The pageantry of the Mass was ancient and moving. Incense suffused the place. Halfway through the service, the electrical lights were flicked on, and the chapel was brought to life again. Alleluia!

After breakfast, in keeping with
OHP
tradition, a group of us walked to the beach, and a few of the braver ones waded up to their ankles into the frigid North Sea.

I hung close to Sister Margaret Anne. She was in a good mood, having heard that her request to be a solitary had been approved. She hoped to be in her hermitage by fall.

We laughed as we reminisced about my awkward arrival all those months ago, and her obvious discomfort at the sight of me sharing her stall in chapel.

“I was only surprised because no one told me that I would be getting a seatmate,” she said. “It's an occupational hazard of being a nun: you learn to expect the unexpected.”

We talked about my decision not to pursue the life of a nun.

“You've fit in so well here,” she said.

“You're kidding, right?” I chuckled.

“No, seriously. You did really well.”

I paused to consider whether being told I had done “really well” meant I would make a good nun after all. But I was done with the self-interrogation. Besides, I understood the deeper reasons for the journey.

“I wasn't sure whether I needed more silence or more God,” I said. “I do need silence, but not to the extent of what a traditional cloistered order offers. Plus, I am a rebel at heart, and I need to fight—not in a violent way, but in a positive way. I need to find a battle.”

I thought for a moment and then spoke again.

“Have you ever had visions? I've had one or two in the last three months.”

“Not visions per se, but I frequently feel a sense of disruption, that things are not right with a person or a situation.”

She mentioned a specific incident involving an international celebrity and said that she could feel the turmoil in this person's life long before it came to the attention of the mass media. She could also, she said, hear the cries of people far away, on the other side of the world; sometimes she was awakened by it at night and would immediately get out of bed and start praying for them.

I had had time to ponder the vision in the Lady Chapel, as well as the creepy events in St. Cecilia's, and the voice from the tea towel at St. John the Divine, and I did not regard them as nonsense or mental illness, nor did I dismiss them as the neural equivalent of the “undigested bit of beef” that Scrooge blamed for the visitation of the three ghosts. After all, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity was inspired by a vision; Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
came to him during a head trip; and Jack Nicklaus's method of holding his golf club was based on a dream.

God turns up in the silence. He doesn't come when we expect or as we expect, and when He does, He gives us more than we can control or handle. That's probably why we so often avoid silence: we fear losing control.

We returned to the priory in time for dinner. The table had been assiduously laid with the full complement of cutlery and dishes, along with baskets of rolls and a variety of condiments.

After so much grimness, the gaiety of Easter seemed almost obscene, but when a plate of roast lamb was passed to me, I dug into it without a smidgen of guilt.

There was lots of happy chatter during the meal, as wine was passed around and people were offered second helpings. It was a celebration that was as much about reaffirming our common faith and the importance of community as it was about reminding us that it is possible to move beyond the dark past and be hopeful about the future.

I helped Sister
KT
in the kitchen, unloading the trolleys of teetering stacks of dirty dishes and transferring them to the dishwasher racks.

“I'll miss you, Ms. Wally,” she said. “The place won't be the same without you.”

“I'll miss you, too, Sister Wally. Promise to stay in touch.”

By five o'clock, the cloister was empty and silent again. As I walked along the main corridor, I noticed that someone had returned the vividly colored primrose plants to the planter. I went over to them and welcomed them back.

I slept with the curtains open on that last night so that I could watch the sky move from vivid blue to subdued blue to deep blue and finally a fade to black. The window was open too, and I could hear the distant swoosh of cars, the barking dogs, the life in the night grass blending together as ambient silence.

I glanced at my bags, packed and stacked, ready to be hauled down four flights of stairs. The journey had been overwhelming; I hardly knew how to process it all. Before I could think too much about it, I fell into blissful sleep.

( 7:viii )

I WAS
in the kitchen staring down a plateful of chocolate digestive biscuits when one of the sisters poked her head in to tell me that two people were waiting for me in the priory reception area.

I raced down the hall. Colin was standing there with my daughter, Zoë. I almost cried at the sight of them. I cupped their beautiful faces in my hands, stroked their skin, and inhaled the familiarity of their love and presence in my life.

I hugged Sister Dorothy Stella good-bye. It was fitting that she, who had been the first to greet me when I arrived at St. Hilda's on that cold, soggy day, was the last to wave me off on a stunningly beautiful sunny day.

There was another peculiar symmetry to my departure from St. Hilda's: I had arrived as a stranger, and in a sense I was leaving as one. In the three months I was there, no one had asked me much about myself beyond the most superficial questions of name and country of origin. It is not that I had expected an interrogation, but I had hoped for a bit more give and take, a bit more curiosity; after all, I had asked some of them about themselves. Maybe it says more about the British reserve than it does about the social skills of nuns in general, but as I discovered during my stay, many of the sisters did not know that much about one another despite living together for decades, some for thirty or more years. Then again, people called to the contemplative life do not enter for the promise of sparkling conversation or in the hopes of finding intimate friends. It would take several months before I understood that the silence of the sisters had played a tremendous part in helping me come to terms with the rape. Had they given me the conversation I craved, I would have fallen into distraction rather than intention.

As we stood in the car park finishing our small talk, I could feel the wind change direction. It felt like the end of a prolonged drought.

I thought it would be difficult to leave St. Hilda's, that I would weep the moment our car began its journey down the long driveway toward the opening in the castle's stone wall, but I did not cry; I felt renewed. Hopeful. And I did not glance back, because I knew I would be back.

( 7:ix )

SIX MONTHS
later, I was in Toronto standing before the altar of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, its chapel infused with a wheat-colored October sun.

The sisters were there in their long royal blue habits and large black and silver profession crosses. So was my Roman Catholic–Anglican mother, who beamed from the front pew. I smiled back, grateful that she and my late father had given me a healthy, catholic attitude toward religion, but more importantly that they had given me a faith.

Sister Anita, who had taken me to see Bede's tomb at Durham Cathedral, happened to be visiting from England, and she was there, too. It was the Feast of St. Luke, a nod to Father Luke who was an ocean away, likely in his choir stall at Quarr Abbey saying vespers at that moment, but aware of the importance of the day to me. In some form, all the religious communities who had helped me along the way were there to support me.

I prepared to take my vows in a clear, resolute voice.

One of the sisters approached me and asked, “What is it you desire, Jane?”

“I desire to be received”—I paused to make sure I would say the correct words—“as an associate of the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine.”

Sister Constance Joanna put her hands over the small silver cross that lay on the altar and blessed it. She handed it to Sister Sue, who brought it over and hung it around my neck.

Before the service, Sister Sue had brought me four crosses from which to choose. I had chosen the most tarnished.

“That's the one I chose for you initially, but I wanted to be sure you were
OK
with it,” she said, as she reached for the silver polish and worked it into the corners where the tarnish was darkest.

OK
, so a lay associate isn't a full-fledged nun, but it was as close as an elastic monastic like me was going to get. And I was fine with it. As a lay member of the community, I would be required to live by a Rule of Life. I might not have been able to live with the nuns, but I knew I could not live without them.

A few months before I had made my associate vows with
SSJD
, I stood with Colin before a priest on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and we exchanged vows. After all the time I had spent discerning a traditional religious vocation, ours was a decidedly untraditional and unconventional wedding. It wasn't held in a church or a convent but in the sitting room of a small hotel. With a
CD
of the Quarr monks playing in the background, we pledged ourselves to a community of two, a community that intersects with many other communities.

················

London, England

THE FIRST THING
I did when I got back to London after leaving St. Hilda's was bake bread. After a long, bread-filled Lent, you'd think I'd never have wanted to look at the stuff again, but the opposite proved true. Before I left, the convent's cook wrote out the recipe:

OHP BROWN BREAD
(Makes two loaves)

43/4 cups strong wholemeal bread flour

1 ounce of lard or butter

1 7-gram sachet of fast-action yeast

13/4 cups of very warm water

Empty the yeast into the water and let sit. Mix all dry ingredients and break in the fat creating a crumbly mixture. Add the yeast and water mixture and mix well into a dough. Knead for 12 minutes. Halve the dough, shape into loaves and place on a greased baking sheet. Cover with greased plastic wrap. Let rise for one hour. Bake in a preheated oven (350 degrees) for 20 minutes.

Making bread from scratch—sans bread machine—is both therapeutic and holy. The gathering, careful measuring and blending of ingredients, the kneading, the leaving-it-alone-to-rise stage, the baking, are like the stages of prayer. Kneading is the heart of the process and therefore the trickiest part because it requires patience and attentiveness, which are not my strongest traits. It would be easy to flick on the radio and lose myself in news or music while kneading, but the convent taught me the virtue of discipline—not the whip-twitching type, but the kind that blooms from serenity. Silence floods into my space and twelve minutes of kneading becomes twelve minutes for prayer and for keeping an ear out for God. Tea towels, pictures, and anything that might serve as a possible spiritual portal are purposely kept out of my sightlines. He hasn't called on me to do anything lately, but I suppose He's already given me my marching orders.