And Then There Were Nuns (34 page)

The second thing I did was to join an organization fighting for female bishops within the Church of England. The battle had been long underway, so all I could offer was my name to the growing email list of supporters, write letters of outrage to newspapers, and attend occasional meetings. I met many inspiring, dedicated, and learned women priests through this association. And I also met a number of male priests who were apoplectic about the treatment of women by the church.

I had once regarded the church as a lover who seduces with lyrical prayers and liturgies, heart-tugging hymns, and mystical art and architecture, and whose goodness is evident in its hand-wringing pleas to aid the poor and the outcast. But as I became better versed in the issue of women bishops in the U.K., the church appeared more like a controlling husband who excludes certain people from your circle and who will not tolerate discussion or dissent.

The way women are treated by the church reminds me of my rape. Like rape, exclusion and bullying are emotional violations intended to punish, to subdue, to “teach a lesson,” and to assert the oppressor's domination. A harsh metaphor perhaps, but maybe it needs to be articulated in those terms for people to understand the deep hurt it causes.

In the summer of 2012, during the U.K.'s General Synod (a sort of big
AGM
for Anglicans), the proposal to accept women as full-fledged bishops was routed.

“Women will become bishops with full parity eventually, but perhaps not for a few more years,” sighed one female priest as we gathered in a church hall to discuss the verdict. I flopped and thrashed about in my seat like a sea lion on dry land. I didn't exactly want to suggest we transform ourselves into a foaming-mouthed rabble and march on Lambeth Palace with blazing torches, but I did want to turn up the heat.

I wanted women to use tougher tactics, withhold their money, their support, and their volunteer labor until satisfactory change is made. Or maybe the time has come for women to start their own female-centric church. After two millennia of scorn by the church, isn't enough enough? Our group did not opt for the kick-ass approach. Instead, we faffed about and wordsmithed yet another amendment we hoped would find favor with the male-only house of bishops.

As I write this, a new Archbishop of Canterbury has been elected, and his first order of business is to reconvene synod in July of 2013 to deal with the matter. There are still vast tracts of opposition throughout Britain, so victory is far from being in the bag.

An interesting remark about power and religion jumped out at me when I was transcribing the speeches of Mother Margaret, the founder of the Order of the Holy Paraclete. In the early 1950s, a committee had been struck to work toward reunification of the Anglican and Roman Catholic faiths. Wise Mother Margaret saw it as a hoary exercise. Unification, she said, would never happen for the same reasons there would never be unification of all Christian denominations: the church's desire for power and its leaders' tendency toward self-interest. That sort of frank admission needs to be aired more and responded to by church leaders.

As for that other howler of hypocrisy—the attitude toward gay clergy—I cannot be the only person to notice that the church is the gayest sector on the planet. I'll bet it surpasses the fashion industry in the gayer-than-thou stakes. Yet, to hear the church speak, you wouldn't think there was a gay person in its ranks.

Accepting gays and women on equal footing with the current patriarchy is not about being populist or “moving with the times”—this never guarantees a rise in church membership—it's about doing the right thing.

The institutional Christian church has survived on a long wave of entitlement. A spiritual reformation is overdue to recalibrate its values and purpose, and to apologize to a long list of people. Does it possess the humility to do that?

On the other side of the Communion wafer, my attitude toward priests in general has softened. The bloody hard work being done by the church's middle management,
AKA
the parish priest, is a testament to the faith of those who are drawn to that vocation. They sure aren't drawn to it for the money. Parish priests work under demanding conditions to keep their churches buoyant and relevant—and, yes, happy—and integrated with the larger community. They are up against time crunches, scarce resources, frayed emotions, the usual workplace tensions, but with the additional workload of visiting their flock and praying with them through times of crisis; they organize committees to help parishioners out of debt and the homeless off the streets; they galvanize soup kitchens and drop-in centers and homeless shelters; they liaise with other social services to find ways of improving the community. They stay up late at night figuring out how to save a person from losing their home, or to find someone a job. Frequently, they help those who don't even go to church or might not even share any form of faith. On top of all that, many have families of their own to look after. I have a lot of time for parish priests now.

There are good churches and not-so good churches. If you happen to be blessed with a wonderful and supportive church, consider yourself lucky, but if you have been burned by a church and are skittish about returning to church, then seek out a convent or a monastery. Make it the physical home of your faith.

If not for monks and nuns, I would have bailed on church. I simply would not be interested. But a religious journey allowed me a peek under the rock of institutional faith, and it matured my attitude toward it. I clawed back some of the power I had vested with the church, and began to accept it with more compassion, less deference.

Which brings me to another thing I did when I left the convent: After marrying Colin, I moved to England and to a new church. Initially, I was frustrated in my attempts to replicate the monastic schedule I had lived by for so long. The nearest convent would have taken half a day to reach by public transport. A happy discovery was that the local church had a midweek service. The Wednesday morning circle was welcoming, and in short order, I was asked to assist with the sacristan duties (Sister
KT
would be proud), which involves laundering and ironing the soiled altar linens and preparing the bread and wine for Communion. On the rare occasion that there are Communion leftovers, I have to dispose of them reverentially, which basically means I have to consume them. Every job has its perks.

( ii )

SPEAKING OF
Sister
KT
, she left St. Hilda's, as I had predicted. The last time we emailed, it sounded as if she was adjusting well to secular life. Similarly, Sister Margaret Anne appears to be happy with her new life as a solitary. Two other sisters asked to be released from their vows. About six sisters died in the year and a half since my time at St. Hilda's, including, quite suddenly, dear Sister Gillian, whose funeral I attended.

SSJD
in Toronto, too, lost four elderly sisters and then gained a few postulants. Life in a religious community mirrors the secular world in this regard, with its unavoidable loss and gain of cherished individuals. The Sisterhood has also begun testing an alongsider program. For a fixed period of time, women can live with the community but also move between the convent and the outside world. It is a brilliant, progressive idea. It allows women to deepen their relationship with God, learn about monastic life, and take some of those lessons back to the wider world. It gives the sisters a pool of women to assist them in running the convent and responding to the needs of the secular world.

In Bruce Chatwin's
Anatomy of Restlessness,
one of his characters talks about her plans to retire to the bush. “Some people die in a convent, and I shall die in the bush. I have seen many jungles, and the worst jungle is a convent. Very unhealthy place. In a convent people hate each other all the time. In the jungle they hate each other sometimes but not always.”

It is sad that most people's image of convents leans to the negative. Yes, there are no doubt monastic communities that are dysfunctional, but they are human communities, and like our own families and workplaces they, too, go off the rails. If I have learned anything from nuns and monks, it is their humanness. They bear the same emotional wounds and scars from difficult upbringings, rejection, abuse, and bereavement as the rest of us, and they wrestle with demons like we do, too. What sets them apart is that they have found a way to use faith and sacrifice to transform scars and imperfections into something less burdensome.

Life was so ordinary until there were nuns in it. My inbox now pings with their newsy updates, their grumblings about their work load, their insight into something they heard or read or witnessed. That vow of silence vanishes pretty quickly when we visit one another in person. During the summer, I spent an exhilarating week in Paris with Sister Helen Claire—tidy, poised Sister Helen Claire. Who knew I'd be traveling with nuns?

Father Luke is among my new religious friends. When he visited Canada the summer following my time at Quarr Abbey, we spent a few days together, during which he managed to convert me into a fan of Leonard Cohen.

( iii )

MY OTHER
new monk-buddy, Thomas Merton, the temperamental Trappist, once wrote, “One has to leave the world to discover it.” Which is another way of saying that we don't appreciate what we have until it is taken from us.

It takes leaving the familiar to really understand the familiar. We get jaded about life; we get caught up in our routines and prejudices; our minds slovenly default to old but comfortable sentiments and practices. Our alarms go off at the same time each morning, we get up, get dressed, grab a coffee, and go out the door to repeat what we did the day before. Most people will live blissfully without ever knowing what life would be like without their creature comforts and the people who populate their lives.

I would take Merton's aphorism further and say that one also has to leave the self to discover it. At some point—and it can happen a few times in a lifetime—we are called not only to try something new but to
be
something new. In my case, that's what happened. I could not cope with being who I was while the trauma festered inside me. I had to physically remove myself from my life, had to take up the cross (literally in this case) to travel into the heart of my own darkness.

Maybe that's why Merton liked to deke into the woods, shed his monk's cassock for denim and leather, and head for the bars. He didn't want to sink into complacency in the monastery. He wanted—he needed—to take his jagged-edged self into the public arena and connect with other jagged-edged folks.

( iv )

LET'S TALK
about rape for a moment, shall we? Because it needs a public airing, and it doesn't help that when we speak about rape, the conversation is more about shame than outrage. I don't know how we can move beyond this, I just know that we must.

While writing this memoir, I assiduously avoided mentioning the rape aspect when people asked about my book, because I felt more shame than outrage about my own attack. But I discovered something interesting when I eventually opened up to a few people: Of the six I told, two confided that they, too, had been raped and had not reported it; a third person told me his mother had been raped. That's 50 percent of my tiny random focus group that had an experience of rape.

In Canada, as in the U.S. and the U.K., about 90 percent of rapes go unreported. Rape statistics defy the economic divide. The so-called “civilized” countries have nothing to be proud of: a woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than of learning to read; 5 percent of the female population in the U.S. are raped each year; in 2006, 85,000 women in the U.K. were raped—that's about 230 cases a day. What's more, women who report a rape are considered liars until proven otherwise. Unless they've been literally raped to death.

Silence is the reason rape is so prevalent. For every woman who has been raped, there are children, parents, and friends whom she is protecting by her silence. Most women know their attackers; I knew mine, and I still know where to find him.

When the rape memory invaded my discernment period, blame and shame were my immediate responses. Gradually, a serenity as subtle as the whisper of God settled over me, and that could only have happened by being among the nuns. I never wanted the experience of rape to turn me into a Trauma Queen; but what I didn't know then, but know now, is that when you don't forgive yourself, you keep gnawing—even subconsciously—at your own scar tissue.

( v )

I DIDN'T
know how my experience would turn out or where it would take me. It was never going to be the type of journey that comes with a map and reservations (though there were plenty of reservations of another sort). Faith is not for sissies. Then again, the best journeys are the ones that scare you a little and provide the opportunity to examine your direction and reset your compass.

Maybe the call wasn't to
be
a nun but to
serve
the nuns or
be among
the nuns. Whatever it was, I have found the nuns, and that was probably His point. If I can't be a full-fledged nun, then I can try to behave like one. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if we all tried to be nuns of the world.

You know that moment in a tense round of charades when, after a series of frustrated guesses, someone finally shouts the answer just as the time-clock buzzes and the person acting out the clues collapses with relief into her seat, completely spent from the effort? That's how I imagine God feels about me at the moment, flopping with exhaustion into His big comfy cloud chair, patting His broad damp brow with a handkerchief, and saying, “Well, she sucked up a small eternity of my time, but at least that's another one sorted.”

Let's hope. And pray.

Though the Lord may give you the bread
of adversity and the water of affliction,
yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore,
but your eyes shall see your Teacher.
And when you turn to the right, or you turn to the left,
your ears shall hear a word behind you saying:
“This is the way; walk in it.”
ISAIAH 30:20–21