Authors: Carla Van Raay
‘Dispensations are not always granted, Sister,’ he said, ‘but if you could find a way to state your
unsuitability
for sisterhood, you would have a good chance.’ I noticed his
emphasis and at this late stage was politically astute enough to realise that he was trying to head off the kind of report that might incorporate my views about my order’s failure to comply with the dictums of renewal, which might have caused unnecessary trouble for the FCJs.
So I tried to make it sound as if the reasons for my leaving were all my own doing. ‘I have never before been conscious of my motives for entering the convent,’ I wrote. ‘I have discovered that they were not purely to serve God, but were based on insecurity and a mistaken idea of what it meant to do God’s will. At the time of my entering, I had no clear idea of why I wanted to be a nun.’
I wrote a few more sentences like that, but it didn’t feel quite right. I couldn’t stop myself from adding: ‘Holy Father, as a result of my desire to bring about renewal, tensions within my community have become unbearable. I cannot stay and be happy. I cannot stay and expect my community to be happy.’
The letter was approved and sent off, sealing my fate in the eyes of all concerned. After the briefest of goodbyes, I was removed from the scene, away from the turmoil that my continued presence would have caused among my sisters, and sent to the convent of my secondary school days,Vaucluse.
I enjoyed my stay there. Here was a new community, though many of the faces and names were familiar to me from my time as a student. Vaucluse had a distinct and intimate identity of its own. The convent even had ornate toilets, like some I had seen in England, with peonies and roses painted on the bowls.
‘I would like to welcome Sister Mary Carla among us as our guest for a few weeks,’ was the brief formal announcement at breakfast by the tall, wizened Reverend Mother. She wore a wise and weary look, and dabbed at her
mouth with a hanky before she spoke. ‘Sister Mary Carla is on holidays and therefore not obliged to hold to the schedule.’
There was a murmur of welcome. If anyone was curious as to why I was ‘on holidays’ in the middle of a working season, nobody asked. Only a few suspected the real reason for my stay, which was to await the reply from the Holy See.
No one knew exactly how long this would take, and it never occurred to me—rebellious as I was—to leave without official permission. In spite of all my posturing against authority, I was deeply obedient and wanted to do the will of God.
And so I whiled away the time at perfect leisure. Sometimes I helped with the washing up, but I was given no regular chore that I would have to suddenly drop when I left. I was given the use of an empty room and filled it with a table and a chair, a borrowed sewing machine, a record player and all the paraphernalia for making clowns. I sat on the floor mostly, making the clowns from many colourful scraps of material, playing Spanish music that my sister Liesbet had sent me a short time ago.
La Paloma
filled the room and my heart. I was happy, much happier than I would be in a few weeks’ time, out there in the cold of Melbourne’s winter, feeling like an orphan. I made the clowns for the Vaucluse community to sell at their next fête, and kept one as a gift for my mother. It was dressed in a golden jacket with ruffles at its wrists. My mother treasured the clown and kept it in her parlour, where it appeared to chat cheerfully to invisible company. It was offered to me after she died, but I declined, and now my sister Liesbet owns one of the world’s strangest clowns. It has Spanish blood in it, I told her, and that’s why she likes it.
THERE WAS THE
problem of what I would wear to face the world. This was only the second time that a sister had left the order. The first was four years ago, in 1965. Due to the prevailing rule of silence, it hadn’t been a talked-about event. The sister had once been the headmistress of Genazzano, and decided to leave after a lot of controversy about her handling of the pupils. My leaving, on the other hand, would cause a lot of talk—and would spark a veritable exodus. Before the end of the year, six more would leave.
My mother was asked to take me shopping, using $200 authorised by the Vicar at Genazzano for my new wardrobe.
It wasn’t easy for my mother because she didn’t drive, but she wasn’t ready to give her husband the news that his daughter was coming home again. She feared the scenes that would ensue as my father asked questions she had no answers to as yet, and his agitation as he protested the loss of the halo he envisaged around my head. She hired a taxi at her own expense. I was overjoyed to see her, and to see that she was pleased to see me; more pleased than puzzled or distressed at my imminent departure from religious life. It was May and very cold. I needed a coat, which cost $45. There was enough money for a hat, gloves, shoes and underwear, and one dress.
My family lived in Kew, so that’s where we went shopping—not the cheapest place, but I wasn’t to know that! My mother must have thought that a department store or an op shop was no place for a nun to be taking off her habit and veil to try on clothes. So instead of shocking the hoi polloi, we gave boutique proprietors nervous attacks by exposing the flesh and short hair underneath my hallowed black, pretending that we did this every day of our lives.
The dress I chose was a heavenly blue with a white collar and belt. Unconsciously, I had chosen the colours of the
Children of Mary that I wore as a girl. The material was a thick, rather stiff polyester and the hem reached just below the knee.
The Vicar at Genazzano asked to see our purchases, with the receipts. The sour woman berated us, making no distinction between my mother and me, for spending so much money on one item, the coat. She made it clear that there was to be no more financial assistance for clothes, or anything else. ‘Please say thank you, Carla, and get out of my sight, because you have destroyed my belief that this could never happen. Goodbye, Mrs van Raay, goodbye.’
THE LETTER FROM
the Vatican said, ‘Go, Carla, go!’ It arrived six weeks after mine was posted and was written in Latin, which to this day I haven’t bothered to decipher. I was sent upstairs to my room to take off the habit. I left everything behind except a few toiletry items and prayer books.
The ritual of taking off the habit moved me unexpectedly. For the last time, I laid down the veil, noticing that my hair had grown to a boyish length. I packed my prayer book and, on the spur of the moment, the sturdy, faithful whip that was showing signs of wear. I had no intention of using it, but nobody else would want it!
When I came down the broad winding staircase usually reserved for convent royalty, dressed in my civvies and carrying my little brown suitcase, all the Vaucluse nuns were lined up to say goodbye. It was a scene to remember: those faces turned up to me, hoping to be seen for the angels that they were. I was touched by their wish to see me off with their hearts open, even if I wasn’t a member of their convent. Each one took my hand warmly and said something
encouraging to me as I passed. Only Sister Anthony, my maths mistress of years ago, couldn’t help herself. ‘May God forgive you!’ she blurted. ‘See what comes of disobedience!’
Others murmured their disapproval of her outburst.‘Take no notice, Carla.’
The feelings that enveloped me took me completely by surprise. I wasn’t used to being the centre of such friendly attention. The kindness of their farewell that day was a blessing I sorely needed. It prevented the sorrow of rejection from taking up all the space in my heart.
FREE AT LAST
! I relaxed in the back of my father’s old Chevy, feeling like singing something silly, if only my father and mother hadn’t been so serious about it all. I was on my way back to my parents’ cottage, my old home. It was 1 June 1969, and my mother’s bittersweet fifty-sixth birthday.
My poor parents. My mother, who had shown such optimism when we went shopping together, seemed to have come down to earth under the barrage of my father’s loudly spoken incredulity. I remembered one of my father’s extremely rare letters, composed in a fit of pride. ‘
We feel secure and happy when we remember that our eldest daughter is praying for us
,’ he had written. To him, my prayers had been more powerful than his own. I had been a sort of insurance policy with God; now cashed in way too early and with serious losses. But their sweet bubble had to burst some time, and that time was now. They were coming to terms with the fact that the daughter they had worshipped had feet of clay. I saw the pain in their eyes, a deep sense of having been betrayed.
My father, who no doubt smarted from having been kept in the dark about my imminent defection, was also surly. ‘Will you explain what happened,’ he began with his characteristic forthrightness and impatience the moment
we walked inside the familiar cottage. ‘What’s wrong with you that you couldn’t stay put where you were? What wasn’t good enough for you there?’
That was my cue. For the very first time I had the strange, wonderful and cleansing experience of telling them the truth of the last few years, what I had been aching to say. ‘I was so miserable and unfulfilled that I was willing to die.’
They looked at me open-mouthed and with wide eyes.
‘What sort of talk is this?’ said my father, knuckles on hips. ‘You didn’t tell us that when we visited you, or when you came over for your holidays. You’ve been lying to us!’
His face was a mixture of derisive accusation and genuine puzzlement. He looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh at me or whether he was stopping himself from crying. I looked at my mother. Her expression was hard to read. She was barely breathing, intent on trying to understand me. Their pain finally hit me and it broke my heart. I sobbed terrible tears, bent in half with the sorrow I was causing, and we all finally sat down.
What my father had said was true. It was galling, the way I had never confided in them. I had to try to explain, even if it didn’t make sense. ‘Dad, you never heard a word of complaint from me, because I had to be loyal to the order.’ My voice faltered; where, then, had been my loyalty to
them
? Or to the truth? ‘It was one of the rules we had to keep.’
Loyalty was the first and foremost tribal rule of the sisterhood. It was an unwritten rule, but, ironically, one that I had been well schooled in from childhood: never betray the family by talking to others about what really goes on. Do not air the dirty linen to people who do not belong to the tribe. My convent community had become my most immediate tribe, at the expense of my blood family.
I told them how I had wanted to bring in changes, and how my sisters had resented me for going ahead by myself. How extremely frustrating it all had been for me. It was like opening a sluice gate, freeing water carefully dammed for years. Tight muscles in my face that had worked so hard to keep my mouth silent could now soften and let go. Fresh, clean energy filled my body as I confided and confessed.
They listened with total attention. My father swore and uttered loud ‘Tch! Tch!’ sounds interspersed with incredulous guffaws. My mother’s breathing was rapid now and shallow and she made occasional guttural sounds of acknowledgement, her hands held tightly to her chest in a ball. She finally spoke up.
‘I knew something was wrong when we didn’t get a letter from you for a long time, and then all you wrote about was how beautiful your surroundings were in that English place.’
I saw her pitiful look; a mother’s helpless love and sorrow. And now what did she have? A beloved daughter whose tales were destroying her images of convent life and threatened to turn her own religious beliefs upside-down.
Her intuition had been correct, especially when she had visited me in Brussels. I had lied to her there, when she asked her questions. It had seemed the best thing to do at the time. Now, I could explain to her hurt face the allegiance to the convent that had been demanded of me, and she seemed to understand. I drove the knife deeper as I went on to explain the vow of poverty and how I had been required to give away all the things they sent me as presents.
My mother reminded me of one especially valuable gift—an irreplaceable set of Reader’s Digest records of classical music, sent to me during my third year at Benalla. ‘What happened to that, Carla?’
‘The trouble was that sometimes we were allowed to keep gifts, and at other times not. We never knew in advance,’ I said. I had been too miserable to warn my parents. ‘Sorry, Mum.’
My poor mother suppressed a sob. Those records had been bought from her own personal savings and were no longer available.
The immediate upshot of my confession was that both my parents became so disillusioned about nuns and the religion they represented that they stopped going to church for a time. My father was the first to relent. He had nothing better in his life, and told himself that even if the nuns were bad, God might not be.
But my mother never fully regained her trust in religion. She couldn’t drive herself to church, and her occasional excuse of being unable to come with her husband because she had to mind the kids at home became more frequent. She no longer confessed her sins either; her cynicism reaching new heights when she learned about the exploits of the local parish priest, a mean-minded little man, who stroked the thigh of her friend when she went to him for advice.
There was something, however, that my mother had been hiding from
me
; something I wouldn’t find out about for many years to come. For the eight and a half years before I made my final vows, my parents and my sister Liesbet had been sending money to cover a list of ‘expenses’ that the nuns regularly presented for payment. For all that time, while I worked hard as a cleaner and a drudge in the convent, and produced many exquisite pieces of embroidery, they had been duped into subsidising my lifestyle. My sister took it in her stride, but my brothers were less forgiving—and it showed in their attitude towards me when I first came out.