Authors: Carla Van Raay
THE BOARDERS WERE
allowed out more often as a result of renewal. One day the senior girls attended a concert in a nearby civic hall. A group of German women singers, backed by the Victorian Arts Council, were making their way around the country to present their songs, accompanied by the piano. We nuns accompanied the boarders.
I was not prepared for the power of this music. The women let go a stream of passionate songs: songs of praise for the beloved, songs of unrequited love, and songs of devotion. The pure, fresh energy of the music went straight and unexpectedly to my heart, and cut it, so that my breath was taken away and deep, deep tears started to flow again. I couldn’t stop them and didn’t really want to.
In spite of a couple of huge cotton hankies retrieved from one of my bottomless habit pockets, grief soaked the starched linen under my chin and made its way right under my collar. No one spoke as we moved out of the aisles of wooden chairs and onto the late-afternoon street. Everyone was moved in her own way and nobody said a thing to me; not then, nor afterwards.
It must have been an unusual sight, though, for a nun to be so affected by songs of human love. What could set off such a reaction but a feeling of missing out, of desperately wanting to experience love; a yearning for a trusted, warm, humorous embrace of affection and devotion, of mutual appreciation? I had never been able to imagine such a thing before, not even when reading Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters’ novels. But this music had flowed from a composer in love, and I felt the force of it for the first time.
Was it this pure love of a man for a woman, a woman for a man, that I had sacrificed to God? Such a sacrifice sounded like lunacy.
What
exactly had I given up for God, and
why?
In the normal course of life I had only experienced the kind of love that is easy to do without. Anything beyond that, I had told myself, was all imagination. But how could I now be sure that a life lived for God, in a convent, really
was
the ultimate life of love?
THERE CAME A
last-straw event—though I didn’t recognise it at the time—which set me on a path of no return.
I was called to the head of the large polished table in the common room, where the superior sometimes sat to read her mail and make herself available for requests, permissions and reports. It was almost time for the six o’clock reading, when we would all assemble around the table to listen and do our needlework. I had entered the room with the idea of starting my needlework early, when Reverend Mother Clare summoned me. I went over to kneel beside her.
‘I am taking your art class away from you, Sister Mary Carla,’ she said evenly. ‘I’ve heard that you discussed religion with the students after your class yesterday. I want to ensure that the students are taught
art
when they are supposed to be learning art, and
not
religion.’
She kept busy with the mail as she spoke, her tone somewhere between angry and righteous, and avoided looking me in the face until she had finished.
Rage welled up in me. Yes, it was true: three students had asked me questions after school, sparked off by a discussion about a classical painting of Adam and Eve. I had been reading some of the works of Teilhard de Chardin, and had
presented his ideas in class as an alternative interpretation of the official version of creation. The girls had heard of Teilhard de Chardin, the excommunicated poet-priest and thinker, and were keen to explore more open ideas. They had an emergent feminist streak and had also wanted to know my opinion about wearing hats in church. I had no trouble telling them that I thought it was probably a custom introduced by Paul of Tarsus, who, I had read, looked down on women. We had talked amicably for half an hour or so. Either I had been overheard or one of the girls had betrayed me. The new rules allowed me to speak freely, but apparently not about religion! The hot flush of anger I felt gave me immediate courage.
‘OK,’ I said breathlessly. ‘If you want to make sure that the pupils learn what they’re supposed to learn, you’d better get someone else to teach them. I’m quitting!’
I just had time to take in her complete surprise and the stunned reaction of the nuns who had filed into the room, before leaving to go upstairs to my cubicle bed. And there I stayed.
I came down for meals, making sure Sister Antoinette understood that I would be there, so heading off any chance of my sisters pretending they didn’t know and arranging no place for me at table. I came down for meditation and Mass the next morning, had breakfast and went back to my room, determined to stay on strike unless the decision to remove me from my art class was reversed.
I knew my sudden departure from the workforce would be sorely felt because I had a full timetable and my sisters would have trouble covering for me or finding a replacement. My anger sustained me into the third day, when they sent Sister Madeleine—the little shy one, a friend to me because she couldn’t be my enemy—up to
my room to negotiate. I was begged to come down and help because everyone was overworked; no word about reinstating my class. I sent her down with my commiserations and the message that I would resume work as soon as my class was given back to me.
Several times Sister Madeleine came up to reason and plead with me and, in the end, I gave in. Unprincipled as I was then, I thought I’d better do the right thing as my sisters had suffered enough. I let myself down badly for the sake of their doubtful approval, since I did not get my class back. ‘Never mind,’ I told myself, ‘I’ve got more free time now,’ and devoted it to redesigning my habit. But my heart had been insulted and compromised in a way that was not going to heal.
Soon letters from previous superiors in Australia, England and Brussels, and even from the local bishop, began to arrive on my desk. People had been active during my strike.
‘I am most disappointed to hear that of late you have been missing some of your classes with the children, and that you are not always in the places where duty lies,’ began the letter from my erstwhile geography lecturer at Sedgley Park, Sister Gertrude, who was once so proud of my getting perfect marks in the finals. ‘Sister, this is most unprofessional of you and it is letting Sedgley down badly! Sister, what has come over you that you seem to find it so difficult to act like everyone else? Do you think that if you find life such a strain, you ought to see a psychiatrist?’ And, ‘You must think of your community, Sister. It is most distressing for them to have to live with you if you are not going to live our life properly.’
The worthy Gertrude ended by asking whether it might not be best to ask to leave.
Leave!
That was a red rag to a bull, as was everything else she and everyone else said. They
were taking sides against me while steeped in ignorance of the real situation. I was unmoved by their attempts to intimidate me.
Instead of being apologetic, I wanted to be vindicated, somehow. I sent a statement to my mentor; it read something like a police report, detailing my conversation, word for word, with the three students. I wasn’t just angry; I was outraged. I wanted to show how authority was being misused to blacken the name of innocent people like me. I suggested the creation of a tribunal to deal with injustices. My argument read quite well, and could have worked, except that this was a
convent,
for God’s sake, not a political establishment, a war zone, or a gathering of war criminals being tried for their crimes against humanity. Alas, humility and meekness, the traditional cure for a sore heart, had become foreign, useless concepts to me.
The worst letter, three pages long, came from someone in my community I had thought was on my side: Sister Albion—a short, nervous nun with an attractive smile, striking face and very dark eyebrows. Sister Albion had been practising her public speaking techniques on us: giving talks, moving motions and answering imaginary questions, all to gain confidence and skills in the Westminster system. Was she getting ready to enter politics? Not quite, but she did become my next Reverend Mother, after which her natural shyness disappeared for good, replaced by an unbending personality, ready to break wills and hearts.
She sent her letter while she was on holiday, where she was secretly being prepared for her new role. The tone of the letter was kindly, pleading with me to participate more and not be so much on my own. It was sane advice, but I was unable to hear it because none of my grievances were acknowledged.
‘Make people conscious that you care about them,’ she wrote, avoiding the main topic of my recent rebellion. ‘We can never judge anyone,’ she continued, referring to my complaints about the way I was treated, ‘and if we develop the habit of always suspecting others, thinking that they underrate us or thinking they are always against us, then we shall have no peace of soul. Besides, it is not Christ-like.’
She was right, of course. She was telling me I was being paranoid, and I was. The proof was my continued and increasing distress at all the ‘evidence’ I saw around me that I was misunderstood, mistreated and underrated.
‘When you hold on to your own opinion, pride is at the root of it,’ she urged. ‘Forget yourself, put all your energy into helping others and you will find that you will have no worries, no heartaches, for most often our biggest heartache is ourself. Oh dear, how I preach!’ she admitted. There was no doubt that she meant well, but she didn’t realise that it was impossible to appeal to my good side while so much lay unaddressed. Her letter was an invitation to sweep everything under the carpet and go back to being a good nun, for Christ’s sake. How did she think this would work?
THAT CHRISTMAS I
hung the decorations up as usual, getting happily lost for a while in the creative fun of the job. It was also my task to store them all away a few weeks later, in boxes kept in the attic. Mother Albion, who had taken up her position as superior in early January, came to see how I was getting on. She inspected the boxes, then, to my astonishment and grief, blithely turned them all upside down and started packing them away again herself, insisting that I watch. I was soon in tears, but she took no notice. She seemed to have plenty of time, chatting to people who
came to her for one thing or another as she worked, before finally she asked me to take the boxes away. Her newlyinvested superior power had instantly wiped out her former hesitant manner.
Mother Albion’s power grew over several years, as she was moved from house to house to fulfil a term here, there and everywhere, carrying out her role of stern management. It was due to this that the declining Society eventually regained the wealth it had once enjoyed in the days when many women took up the vocation. Mother Albion came into power at a time when new entrant numbers were in serious decline, necessitating the employment of more and more lay teachers. She understood the importance of hiring only the best teachers—at least for the all-important Genazzano convent—in order to attract the best students (that is, the best payers) and, in turn, secure the future wellbeing of the FCJ order in Australia. For a while, this strategy worked. However, eventually the lay teachers were not content to work under nuns less qualified and so lay headmistresses and a board took over much of the schools’ management.
My father wholeheartedly hated Mother Albion, convinced that she was responsible for the sufferings inflicted upon him by the board at Genazzano.
The members of the board did not appreciate the forty years my father had dedicated to building up a dazzling display of beauty in the convent gardens, nor the expense of keeping them up. And they didn’t think twice about knocking down his garage and workshed when they needed the space for an Olympic-sized swimming pool. My father was a simple man. When he saw trees that he had planted thirty years ago knocked down because they were in the way of a straight path, he blamed Mother Albion, who was
by then the Mother Vicar. She probably no longer had the power of veto over the board, but my father could never understand that. His jaws worked, his eyes popped in rage, his hands and arms, muscled and veined from the supreme effort he had put into his work, felt the lameness of terrible impotence.
ON AN ORDINARY
but chilly morning, I woke up and couldn’t move. It was like being stuck in a bad horror movie. The sister doing the ‘Praise be to Jesus!’ wake-up call should have waited for my ‘Amen!’ before taking off, but as I was usually one of the first to jump out of bed she didn’t bother to listen for my familiar confirmation. The others in the cubicles next to mine (the curtains had been replaced by thin walls) went about their usual routine in bustling silence. I tried to call out, but the small sound that came out of my dry mouth was muffled by the noise of shoes on floors and the thump of bedding being piled on chairs. With a big effort I reached to knock on the wall next to my bed, but still there was no response.
After breakfast an annoyed infirmarian entered my cubicle. She had been called by Sister Madeleine, who had missed seeing me around and had poked her head in to find me when she came back upstairs. Sister Marian’s face made it clear that she suspected me of pretending to be ill, but as she couldn’t make me get up, the doctor was called in. He prescribed anti-spasmodic tablets to persuade my muscles to give up their catatonic state. My body had literally seized up, somehow matching my feelings of being in a straitjacket.
After a few days I was well enough to resume duties, for which everyone was grateful. The boarders greeted me
with, ‘Glad you’re better, Sister,’ and smiled when they saw me back in the refectory where I served them dinner. That little human touch did a lot to relax the clench in my back.
ORDERS FROM THE
bishop made sure there was more human diversion in our lives. One of the best innovations that trickled down from Vatican II was the extra fun in our holidays: they were full of talk and laughter, guitar-playing, tennis, group dances—we danced in circles like the fairies might have done in Ireland—and
swimming.
The society had purchased a forty-acre section of the Peninsula Golf Course at Frankston, a beach suburb not far from Melbourne, for a new school. Its guesthouse was easily transformed into a convent and I spent a vacation there in 1967. We went to the beach early in the morning, dressed in black cossies that were meant to be inconspicuous but were anything but, accentuating give-away white skin everywhere.