And Then There Were Nuns (16 page)

“Maybe they're sent by God
and
Satan to shake us out of complacency,” I mused.

Because the truth was, I had become complacent and selfish at Quarr Abbey. I had participated in almost all the offices every day of my stay, but had my intentions been completely honorable? Was I more seduced by the atmosphere—the architecture, the grounds, the monks, and the romance of being sequestered in a monastery—than by God?

The following day, an end-of-season commotion further disrupted the tranquility of Quarr as the other guests packed up. The Scottish priest had left the previous day; the father and his troubled son were leaving for home after Mass.

“I hope you had a good few days,” I said to the son.

“Oh yes, it's very peaceful here.”

If you say so.
I had been so patronizing in my assessment of the young man's troubles that I had failed to recognize my own. We were both fighting demons.

( 3:x )

FATHER LUKE
dropped by my room for a visit that evening.

Seeing a book by Thomas Merton on my desk, he sighed with pleasure: “Ah, Merton.”

“I love Merton, too,” I said eagerly, picking up the copy of Merton's journals that I had purchased from Quarr's bookshop the day before. “Last summer at the convent in Toronto, I discovered
The Seven Storey Mountain,
and it changed my life.”

“
The Seven Storey Mountain
had a huge impact on my decision to become a monk,” Father Luke said solemnly.

When
The Seven Storey Mountain
was published in 1948, something like seven hundred men beat a path to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Merton was a monk. Religious orders today can only dream of being inundated with those sorts of numbers.

“What else inspired you?” I asked Father Luke.

“Schuon. Frithjof Schuon. Heard of him? He wrote a book about Islam that influenced me, too. You must read it.”

Our conversation moved on to my convent-or-Colin dilemma.

“It's more than choosing one or the other,” I explained. “Every time I think I'm close to resolution, more questions crop up. I feel like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls: every question contains another question, which contains yet another question. All I want are answers and a decision right now.”

“Well, marriage is a big decision,” said Father Luke. We both withdrew into silence as we pondered the situation.

Eventually he spoke. “The chance or risk of becoming too unselfish or selfish is lower in marriage than it is in religious life. In other words, you give up far more in religious life, but the pay off—eternal life with God—is greater.”

“Is this some religious Vegas-style game theory?”

He smiled, and picked up a pen. On a scrap of paper he drew a vertical line down the center with the words “unselfish” and “selfish” on either side. Then he drew two horizontal lines: one line was short, and the distance from the center on either side was equal. This was the marriage option: the risk is equal to the payoff. The second line was longer but also of equal length on either side of the center line. This was the religious life option: the risk is greater; but the payoff is bigger.

“Don't be concerned about the questions,” he assured me. “It's part of the process. Take your time. Keep thinking. Keep asking. Keep praying.”

( 3:xi )

JUST AS
I resigned myself to being the sole guest at Quarr for the last few days of my stay, a new one showed up.

Her name was Mita, an artist who lived on the Isle of Wight. We bumped into one another in the guest lounge, and she was so interesting and entertaining—it was as if we had known each other for ages—that we pulled up a couple of chairs and chatted freely until supper, ignoring the bells as they tolled successive offices.

Mita obviously had not received the memo about meals being conducted in silence, or if she had, she ignored it. She did not seem familiar with the term “indoor voice” either. I had to be the killjoy and keep telling her to button it. She paid me no heed. Not even when the monks were saying grace. I felt like the head librarian constantly saying, “Shh!”

When Father Sting brought in our food, Mita pounced on him and flirtatiously tried to engage him in conversation. He responded in a slightly baffled but polite way, smiled and quickly retreated.

“He's
cute!
” said Mita as she dug into her food with gusto. I winced, hoping that Father Sting hadn't heard the comment. “Has he been serving you all week? Makes you wonder why they're monks, doesn't it? I mean, what a waste of a man!” She tore apart a piece of bread.

“Well, they have given themselves to serve Christ, so is that a waste?” I whispered.

Mita's mouth dropped open and she gave me a look of disbelief that said,
Are you shittin' me? Are you even female?

I tried to keep silence at the table, but Mita would have none of it. I was sure Father Nicholas would be storming in any minute to tell us both off.

The next morning, well past lauds, she staggered into the breakfast room wearing fluffy slippers the size of dusters.

“Did you go out last night?” I asked. She looked as if she had consumed twice her weight in alcohol.

“Bloody bells kept me up all night,” she yawned, rubbing her heavy, sleep-deprived eyes. “Surely you heard them.”

“Nope, not one.”

“You must be a really sound sleeper,” she said, pouring a coffee. “Or deaf.” With mug in hand, she padded back to bed.

I stayed in my room all day. The wind was still ferocious, and it made reading, praying, and concentrating all but impossible. I was packing my bags in preparation for my departure from Quarr the next day when there was a knock at my door.

It was Mita. She had her coat on. Her suitcase sat on the floor beside her like a loyal pet.

“I'm leaving,” she said. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”

“But you just arrived!”

“I can't sleep here, and the silence is driving me crazy. My husband's on his way to pick me up.”

We hugged good-bye. I was extremely sad to see her go. Despite her incessant yakking, her spirit had given me a boost, and I adored her company.

“I was thinking about what you told me about your journey to explore being a nun,” she said. “Read Kings One; it's about Elijah in the wilderness when he was fleeing from Jezebel. Maybe you're in your own desert right now, fleeing from something. Just know that God is with you, and He'll get you through this. Have faith.”

And then she was gone, and it suddenly felt lonely and cold once more.

Elijah and Jezebel. Those two again. They were responsible for my being here in the first place. Yeah, best to leave Eli and Jezzy alone for a while. They're trouble.

I sat down at my desk to write. It was so quiet I could hear my pen scratching its way across the paper. I paused to look at it:
Do they sell silencers for these things?
My ears perked up at the sound of low voices in the corridor and doors opening and closing. Footsteps passed in front of my door.

In many ways Quarr was giving me exactly what I asked for. If I joined a convent, this would be my life: sitting alone in a sparse room, reading Thomas Merton or the Psalms, making notes, resigning myself to the monotony of the routine and the pervasive silence, and deriving excitement from the sound of footsteps or a distant door opening.

More footsteps. Gone now. Maybe not. Someone opened a door. Door closing.

The windowpane in my cell rattled. A door in the hall slammed shut, and it scared the crap out of me.

Yes, it was time to leave Quarr. Silence has a way of preying on you. Preying while you pray. Mita had told me that she had been texting back and forth with her husband. How can you prepare your mind for the voice of God when you're waiting for a text message? Then again, who was I to talk? I had my laptop with me, and at certain points of the day I was able to pick up a signal and send and receive email. I, too, craved connection with others; I simply used a different poison.

More footsteps in the hall. Someone is putting a key in the door of Mita's room, shuts the door and locks it. Footsteps pass my door once again.

Yup, it was definitely time to move on.

( 3:xii )

I WAS
up early the next morning to attend vigils at five-thirty. I had not attended vigils at all during the week, and I wanted at least one experience of it. The moment it began, I regretted not making the effort to attend more often. It is the longest of all the offices, but it also was the richest in providing food for thought. There were Bible readings and a homily, and I heard, for the first time, the monks actually speak at length. Father Sting had an Irish lilt; one monk sounded like Terence Stamp; another sounded as if he was auditioning for a
BBC
production.

I loved Quarr, but as much as I was going to miss it, I was also relieved to be leaving. I had become distracted and confused by my own wild fantasies, and that is never a good thing.

Plus, everyone I had met at Quarr had raved about St. Cecilia's, its soul-stirring chanting, and its fantastic guest accommodations. I could not wait to get there. Yes, time to move on.

Father Luke was saying Mass at St. Cecilia's that morning—the priest-monks at Quarr rotate this duty—and he offered to give me a lift. I loaded my bags in the boot, and once I was in the car I turned my head for a final glance at beautiful Quarr.

The incident with Wanker Man had begun to recede from memory, but it wasn't over yet. The Devil was far from finished with me.

················

St. Cecilia's Abbey

Isle of Wight, England

WITHIN TEN MINUTES
of my arrival at St. Cecilia's, it became clear that God had reviewed my expectations, crumpled them into a ball, and pitched them far across the universe to that quadrant of space where downgraded, discarded entities like Pluto are left to wallow. And then, with a bit of time on His hands and feeling frisky, God had rolled His gigantic God eye across the planet, latched onto the Isle of Wight, zoomed in on St. Cecilia's Abbey, and, zeroing in on a hapless figure ascending the church steps, said to Himself, “Oh, goody. This could be fun.”

Father Luke, having gone off to change for Mass, had handed me over to a happy little nun, as small as a hummingbird. She led me into the church, and I took a seat in a hard, dark pew halfway down the short aisle.

Things felt uncomfortably strange. Normally I can walk into almost any church and love it. Not this time. I closed my eyes to summon a spiritual connection with the place. Nada. I tried to focus on something—a friendly face, a work of art—that would generate a degree of comfort and help me bond with my new surroundings. Nothing.

Steady on,
I reassured myself.
You'll warm to it all. You always do. Look at how easily you got on at Quarr.
But my confidence-building pep talk felt hollow. Instead, my nose started to tingle, an early-warning sign of a meltdown.

I shifted in my seat, coughed a little, and attempted to resettle myself into a fresh perspective. I rescanned the church for a hopeful sign, but absolutely nothing resonated. It was such a bland, characterless place that I almost cried out of pity for it.

Unlike Quarr's church interior, which had been designed for openness and transparency, St. Cecilia's was designed for segregation and separation.

The layout was L-shaped. One end of the long part of the L housed a spacious domed sanctuary with scrawny ribs stretching to form a gothic vault. At the opposite end of the L, out of public view, were the choir stalls for the nuns. As if to reinforce the separation—and in ecclesiastical architecture, it's all about the symbolism—a tall black iron grill stood between the sisters and the sanctuary. The short extending arm of the L was where the congregation was corralled; it held about fifty people, and on this particular Sunday morning it was three-quarters full. A low black iron railing separated the congregation from the sanctuary. With the altar facing the sisters, the secular congregation saw Mass conducted in profile.

A nun dressed in the traditional, familiar-looking black habit entered through the cloister door and approached the iron grill. With a key attached to the cincture she wore beneath her scapular, she unlocked and opened a door within the grill, bowed to the altar, then turned and proceeded, I assumed, to her seat in the stalls. Seconds later, a procession of about thirty nuns filed in. Each bowed to the altar and turned toward their stalls. Many were young with pretty faces. Judging by their habits and veils, they were in various stages of profession: gray veils were for postulants, white veils were for novices, and black veils were for professed sisters. I felt a little envious.

St. Cecilia's is one of the most strictly enclosed monastic orders in the United Kingdom. Nuns only leave the enclosure for dental and medical appointments. They are not permitted to return home under any circumstances, and mail and phone contact with friends and families is rigorously limited.