When my husband and I gave up our university jobs and moved to Spain in 1986, we were told it would take 17 days to get a telephone.  We thought that was a rather long time, but decided we could survive the wait.

In fact, it took four years and $4,000.  Even then we didn’t get a land line phone but were able to buy a mobile phone at an exorbitant price.  Not that it was a mobile phone anyone would recognize today.  It was about the size and weight of a medium-size brick, and was mobile only insofar as it had to be positioned to access a satellite signal because there were still no telephone lines for miles around.

Two days ago, a telephone engineer switched the cables controlling our home telephone and internet service in a central control box several blocks away.  By unhappy chance, our mobile phone also stopped working, apparently blown out by an electrical surge through the charger.

For 48 hours we have been in the middle of England in a communications black-out.  48 hours was bad enough.  How we ever survived four years in Spain like this is more than I can fathom.  I do recall feeling then as if I might, quite seriously, go mad.

But 48 hours hasn’t been all bad.  These two days has made me aware of just how much time and energy I spend on email, reading papers and books online, posting this blog, and keeping abreast of current affairs.

I found myself almost without thought crafting a schedule for myself not too dissimilar from the one I lived as a Maryknoll nun.  I divided the day into segments with various tasks given only an allotted time.  I am amazed to discover how productive I have been.  I’ve been much more focused and wasted a lot less time on trivia.

I am now, however, dead tired.

England is strewn with abbeys closed by Henry VIII in the 16th century.  They were methodically stripped of their roofs and any valuables, and today they stand as haunting historic ruins, a reminder that even power seemingly backed up by the unassailable authority of God will not last forever.

What struck me about these abbeys when we were visiting one with our guests last week wasn’t this loss of power and prestige, however, so much as the process of globalization that has taken place for the last millenium.  Today it might be Walmarts and Tyotas that mark worldwide globalization.  Then it was Christianity.  By the 7th century, this included monastic life of the abbeys and convents which are now spread all over Europe and the Americas.  I recognize their layouts and the life styles they represent immediately.

They may be ruins, they may still be occupied and used for their original purpose,  or even converted into apartments or hotels.  But the monastic life around which they were originally built is unmissable.  I recognize them like the streets of my hometown, because I lived for nine years as a nun and the fundamental structure has not changed for more than a thousand years.

There is the church, of course, the cells, the refectory and kitchens.  And there is the chapter room where the community met.  Usually it was to deal with questions of regular discipline and where the Chapter of Faults took place.  I explained to my husband and guests how it operated.  One by one, each individual stood before the community and accused herself of the faults she had committed since the last chapter.  After the recitation, she lay prostate on the floor and received the penance from the superior.  Then the next sister stood up and accused herself until every individual had confessed their faults before the community.

“What did you do if you hadn’t committed any faults?” my husband asked.

That could not happen.  To pronounce oneself to be blameless would of itself be an exhibition of the great sin of pride.  Far far better to make a sin up than to stand in speechless innocence.

However, there was always several fall back positions.  One was to confess to breaking “custody of the eyes.”  Breaking custody of the eyes meant that one had looked around, had displayed interest or curiosity in the people or events around you.  In my time, there was also always the potential of confessing to “recreating in two’s.”  As young nuns we were never permitted to have a conversation involving less than three people.  Although this was never said, the obvious purpose of this rule was to reduce the possibility of homosexual attachments but confessing to breaking this rule did not seem to suggest that the sinner was a lesbian, so it was a useful fall-back in case of need.

Neither of these rules are extant among Maryknollers today.  But there are still many convents – including in America – where they are still taken with deadly seriousness.

I realized again today my problem with heaven as a perfect place.  It occurred just when I thought I’d eliminated the blockage in our kitchen sink with about $30 worth of Drano.  It backed up again into the conservatory.

It’s not that in my ideal heaven, drains would routinely back up anywhere, and certainly not into one of our favourite rooms.

In fact, my first thought wasn’t heaven at all, but something more like its opposite.

I’d already determine that the blockage was not between the sink and the conservatory outlet, but somewhere under the floor in the pipe that leads to the outside sewer.  So I opened up the pipe cap on the floor and removed about two feet of smelly dirty water.  I tried to syphon it out with an old piece of hose, but getting it started by sucking the water through the hose was more than I could contemplate.  So I bailed it out using a six-ounce bottle.  I eventually hit something white and soft.

Since the stuff was white and this was at the bottom of the drain, I thought at first that some previous owner had tried to block off the drain and whatever they had used had corroded.  But as I began to pull it out, I realized it was an accumulation of years of fat which must have been poured down the sink.  It was two feet under the floor and probably about six inches deep.

I was lying on the floor digging it out in handfuls when Peter walked in.  He was appalled, and said I’d not earned my Ph.D. to clean sewage pipes.  I told him to go away.

It took about an hour, and when I was finished I put every stitch of clothing I’d been wearing into a 90 degree wash, and stepped into the shower that was almost as hot.

And I did it.  I solved the problem, and the water has been running out of the sink with a speed it’s not had since we moved in.

And that’s my problem with a perfect heaven.  It’s not that I would like to have a career cleaning sewers.  But I do enjoy solving problems.

In heaven, I might even find myself tempted to break up the boredom by collaborating with Lucifer to create a little havoc that I could then go in and organize.

The problem of boring is not, I admit, quite up to the standard of the problem of evil.  But it probably illustrates see why I didn’t last all that long in the convent.

In the Cambridge Botanical Gardens this morning, I saw a girl probably about six years old walking with her parents.  She was wearing an academic gown.  It was a miniature version (or was made for a very short professor) but she wore it with the casual aplomb of an experienced member of faculty.

It reminded me, when I was just about her age, that I used to go to my bedroom and dress up in my self-designed nun’s habit.  As I recall, I wasn’t concerned about becoming a a holy person.  I spent too much time looking in the mirror reaching the conclusion that I might make quite a fetching nun.

Unfortunately, the first time I put on the authentic nun’s habit as a Maryknoll novice, my priorities had not altered much.  I remember heading for the nearest mirror and evaluating my image.  I thought then, too, that I looked quite attractive, seeing as I had to do without any make up.

At least I eventually decided that I did not belong in the convent.  Though it was not with a great deal of self-knowledge even then.  I left saying that I could not live the life I’d entered Maryknoll to live.  That may have been true, but my deeper motives at that point were still pretty well buried.

Yet, it is often possible in retrospect to see in children the directions that their lives will take.

I wonder about the girl in the garden today.  Will she become an academic?  or merely a clothes horse with a great sense of style?

Since the documentary last week about Father Cleary, I have been re-evaluating my thoughts about clerical celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church.  Despite the fact that recent popes have adamantly refused to consider a married clergy, it is worth remembering that even in the RC Church, clerical celibacy did not become a requirement until the 13th century, when it was imposed in an attempt to control wide-spread abuse.  Additionally, it is a practice which has never been introduced by the Orthodox Catholic Church, and a requirement which is not being universally imposed on some converts from among the Anglican clergy who are already married.  So clerical celibacy is not in that circle of doctrinal beliefs like the divinity of Christ, for instance, or the Trinity of God, which Rome believes could not be changed.

The traditional argument in favour of clerical celibacy with which I grew up, and which is still the principle defence used by the Church, is that celibacy frees the priest from the demands of a wife and family, giving him greater freedom to respond without limits to the needs of the Catholic community which he serves.  I pretty much accepted this view as I was growing up, including the corollary that celibacy was a higher calling demanding greater sacrifice than marriage.  This puts the celibate on just a little higher level than the ordinary laity who have succumbed to the more basic needs of human life.

Examining this view in the light of nine years experience as a nun, and thirty-five years of marriage, I humbly suggest that this view of celibacy is a little off the mark.  Marriage is not easier than celibacy.  It is not a series of riotous romps in bed night after night.  On the contrary, living full time with another adult with opinions, evaluations, goals, and traditions different from ones own is one of the most demanding experiences life can offer.  Raising children together makes the task doubly demanding.  In my view, there is no other circumstance in life that puts greater demands on one’s personal egocentrism.  You just cannot make a marriage last without being willing to re-examine and frequently to relinquish many of your pet practices, assumptions, even, on occasion, convictions.

Sex can bring great pleasure.  But it often does not.  The divorce rate makes it clear that sex in itself does not hold a marriage together.  In any case, making a marriage work sometimes is simply impossible.  But even in the most successful marriages, there are days when it seems unachievable at any cost, or at least more difficult than is worth it.  I like being married.  It is one of the best things that I have ever done, and my husband is one of the most wonderful things in my life.  But it has not always been easy, and it is I who have made it difficult as often as my partner, as we each attempt to stretch and grow and reach across that great space that exists between the human consciousness of two separate human beings.

So I think is marriage potentially one of the most maturing and rewarding of all human endeavours.  At the same time, I think celibacy is frequently a dangerous state in which the self-centered egocentrism of childhood remains unchallenged throughout adulthood.  As a result a tremendous number of celibate priests remain immature, cursed with the arrogance that comes with a life-time of never being challenged, lacking the courage that comes when one enters into a close enduring relationship with an equal adult.

I fear this childish arrogance and unexamined self-satisfaction often reaches deep into the  Roman Catholic hierarchy itself.  Many in the hierarchy also strike me as incredibly naive about sexual matters, placing all sexual indiscretions in the same shameful category.  Homosexuality between consenting adults is just as sinful as paedophilia, which is equally as perverted as transvestism or having an affair with a woman, married or not.  An underlying assumption is that these problems occur because some men simply do not have the strength of character and self-control to maintain their vow of celibacy.  Sexual indiscretions have been treated with such cowardice and secrecy and their discovery the source of such shame that serious help for the errant priest to face and deal with his problems has often been effectively unavailable.

Of course, just as marriage is not a fail-safe map for growth and maturity, celibacy is not an inescapable curse of immaturity.  But having lived both life styles, it’s going to take a lot to convince me that celibacy is the higher road.

Thinking it over, I think the Roman Catholic Church would benefit a great deal more from a married clergy than a celibate one. 

At least half a dozen people have responded privately to my saying in a post last week that, after my visit to Maryknoll, I would never give another homily.  Consequently, I have been unable to let my comment go without re-thinking it.  First, it was perhaps a rather self-centered thing to say, based as it was on the view that people were seeing me as a source of spiritual direction as I stood up there during the liturgy.  So my horror at being perceived as a preacher (instead of a teacher) was at the very least a little Over The Top. 

And I must confess that I myself learned more about hope in the process of preparing this homily, or self-reflection.  And it seems that other people did too.  One person came close to reprimanding me for not accepting the gifts that I have and the obligation to use them. 

So I take it back.  I think it unlikely that another situation will arise in my lifetime when I will actually be asked to give a reflection during a liturgy.   But if I were, I would do my best to do so.  I think I might even look forward to the unlikely opportunity, and approach it with a little less self-importance.

In any case, the whole Maryknoll visit was a significant learning experience for me, which I enjoyed way beyond the bounds of most run-of-the-mill enjoyments.

I’ve just emptied my email trash box filled with panting assurances that “bigger is better.”  This and “younger is more beautiful,” are among the modern advertisements I find most annoying.

I’ve only recently developed an annoyance with the association of young with beautiful.  It is no such thing.  Just today in the supermarket I saw a stunning grey-haired woman probably in her seventies, and the most attractive airline stewardess on American flight I took last week was at least in her mid-fifties.  And look around.  It’s not hard to find young people who are not beautiful by any standard.

However, the “Bigger is Better” mantra is the deeper of my annoyances, probably because I’ve been getting over it for longer.  I was named after St. Therese, the Little Flower, which annoyed me as soon as I was old enough to understand the import of it.  I had no desire or intention to be little anything, and thought at the very least, my parents could have had the foresight to name be after Teresa of Avila who was adviser to Popes and Kings.  By middle age, though, I’d begun to get an inkling that bigger was possibly overdone.  Great people were not always so great, nor, as I wandered through grave yards and cast my eyes upon famous effigies, did greatness really seem to have a long half-life.  Then I began to read about quantum mechanics, where little and big, top and bottom, existing and nonexistent, before and after, are muddled completely. 

It gradually dawned on me that Bigger is perhaps antithetical to the constrains of human-ness.  Needing to be immensely important, terribly powerful, overwhelmingly effective, or hugely influential as I was conceiving them for myself are pretty much beyond the potential of human limitations of time and space.  We cannot hope, or be expected, to do more than fill that small modicum of time and space given to us in one life time.  And so I find great contentment today in being immensely unimportant, ineffective, and of very little influence.  And big, whether it is in political ambition or sexual prowess, holds no allure for me or for anyone whom I love.

Which is probably why I found the story in Maryknoll Sister Jean Pruitt’s brochure about the home she founded in Tanzania for street children so wonderful.  The story is about an old woman who walked each day along the beach as the ocean tide receded to return stranded star fish to the sea.  A young man laughed at her saying there were hundreds of star fish and she couldn’t possibly make a difference.  “It makes a difference to this one,” she said, as she returned another to the water.

(www.dogodogocentre.org). 

When I was at Maryknoll last weekend, someone asked me what I knew about bee colony collapse and its relationship to genetically modified crops.  She said she’d read that first generation bees seemed to show no effect, but second generation bees suffered from serious immune deficiencies that made them vulnerable to the viruses and diseases that seemed to be wiping them out.

I had not heard about this possibility before, although I was aware that the sudden and unexplained collapse of bee colonies was becoming a serious concern to American farmers who depend on the bees to pollinate their crops.  So I did a search on Google to see what I could learn.  I appreciate that using the internet as a source of reliable information much be approached with great caution and belief should be suspended until one is sure of the reliability of the source. 

Nonetheless, what I read is leading me to follow this question up with some serious concern.  I think it is not hysterical hype to believe that the collapse of bee colonies and other pollinating insects (which are also declining, but not as the same rate as bees) is potentially catastrophic.  Unlike global warming which could gradually squeeze essential water and food supplies over the next half century or so, bee colony collapse could lead to a devastating loss of almost all the world’s entire food supply in less than a decade.

So how bad, really, is the problem, and what is causing it?  I’m fairly certain that it is reliable information that 1/2 of  all American states are affected, most badly on the east and west coasts where 60-70%  of the bee colonies have collapsed without apparent cause, and that the disorder has now begun to spread to Europe.  I don’t know at this point how fast it is spreading, nor how much of our food supply is actually imminently under threat.  I am going to try to find out.

The cause or causes of the disorder are equally problematic.  Some scientists say we simply do not know at this point.  Some think the radiation generated by mobile phones is contributing to the problem, while others are looking for some toxin or chemical fertilizer, as well as at some types of GM crops.  There are reports that when the colonies collapse, other insects do not raid them for their honey, which is usually the case, and that the dead and dying bees show unusually high levels of viral infection.  I have been aware that the US government has put some money into research toward solving this problem, but I haven’t had bee colony collapse disorder high enough on my worry list to keep abreast of current developments.

However, the problem has just made a giant leap up my Priority List of Mega Concerns.   

Since I returned from my visit to Maryknoll, I have been thinking about Sister Mary Edith who was the first person I remember suggesting that good intentions are not enough.  We were studying the Greek tragedies, and she said their basic message is that it isn’t sufficient to want to do the right thing.  If we do the wrong thing, there will be consequences that are often as disastrous as they would be if we had deliberately chosen to do evil or even innocently made a mistake.

This has become an important principle, and I’ve reflected on it in hundreds of different situations big and small.  If I mean to give my child an aspirin but give him a capsule of something less benign – Viagra, perhaps, or Valium – the consequences will be as bad as they would be if I had done it deliberately.  If a workman doesn’t close the cargo door before a plane takes off, it is as destructive whether it was on purpose or not.

I had this same nagging worry when I left Maryknoll last Sunday too.   Maryknollers are intelligent, educated, outstandingly caring and hard working.  But the majority I think, like most workers in developing countries, are not by nature analytic thinkers.  They are doers.  I’m not sure why this is so.  Is it a reflection of the basic attitudes of Christianity with the Pauline emphasis on conversion?  Is it the fundamentally doctrinaire approach of Roman Catholicism with its insistence on papal infallibility and its doctrinal rigidity?  Does it grow out of a conviction that however much we might strive to help the poor, material well-being is less important than obedience to God’s will and his commandments?  It may be all or some or none of these.  Whatever they may or may not be, I found myself wondering if Maryknoll’s outstanding capacities and dedication could be more effective if it were founded on a broader foundation of economics and social and political theory.

For myself, I had reached the conclusion even before leaving Maryknoll that striving to convert others was an assault on their dignity and culture.  I still believe that the only worthwhile thing to do is to live with as much integrity and love as one can, to be responsible for oneself in the service of others, and to let that speak for itself. 

I know now I never belonged at Maryknoll for the longer term, and it wasn’t because Maryknoll hadn’t changed fast enough or had left me to work in the kitchen and sewing room for almost nine years with decreasing hope of ever going to the missions.  I do not have the talents to be an activist.  I’m an academic.  I can think about social problems, understand economic theory, and explore the complexity of solving problems of poverty and education and injustice.  I can compare the effectiveness of different programs, and discuss their relative potential versus possible limitations.  But when it comes to putting these theories into practice, I am far less talented and lack the perseverence that is so outstanding among so many Maryknollers.

And I live with the terror of believing that simply wanting to do the right thing isn’t enough.  Hard-working, dedicated, intelligent people of immense good will don’t always achieve the good they hope for.  They We can also do terrible damage.

During the four days at Maryknoll, a group of us who had entered there fifty years ago gathered together and took turns telling our stories.  We were mostly in our late teens and twenties when we first met, but in those days we were expected to cut ourselves off from the life “in the world” we had lived previously, and so few of us knew anything about each other except for the few years we had spent together in Maryknoll.  Many of the stories were riveting.

One was told by a woman who is still a Maryknoll sister about falling in love.  In some ways it was not remarkable.  But falling in love is always remarkable.  When it’s happening to you, it’s earth-shaking, it’s unique, it’s something without comparison.  And the dignity and humour with which she told her story was remarkable.  She met someone, she fell in love with him, and her world exploded. 

Ultimately, she stayed in Maryknoll and returned to the missions.   But I think few of us felt anything but gladness for her that she had known what falling in love is like.  As I listened, I thought of the three times I have been in love with an all-consuming passion.  Twice I walked away.  Like this nun, I cannot regret the loss.  It is often part of the price that has to be paid to preserve the love and life one has.  But I could never wish I had never known it, and neither did she.

There is something else too.  It is how young one feels in an old body.  We were a group of women, the youngest of whom are approaching 70 years of age.  But what it feels like to be in love feels as fresh as it did at 20.      

I returned yesterday to England after my return to a Maryknoll reunion at the motherhouse of the missionery order of nuns I joined 50 years ago and left 9 years later.  It wasn’t the first time I’d been back, but it was the first time I hadn’t just slipped in quietly to visit a friend for a few hours.  This was different.  This was meals in the convent refrectory – or perhaps it is now called a dining room.  We stayed in rooms very like those we inhabited as nuns, and there were no cloistered areas from which we were quietly excluded.  Differences between those of us who were no longer Maryknoll sisters but there only for the weekend and those still official members of the community were often indiscernible.

The weekend was a complex experience which I haven’t fully processed yet.  So I will probably write more than one post as I think it through.  The most outstanding, unmissable thing that has survived and even blossomed for me at the Maryknoll I saw this weekend is a generosity of spirit that permeates everything.  The overwhelming spirit is one of tolerance, a non-judgemental acceptance of life styles, with a great compassion and interest people of every persuasion and belief.  Everyone there had, at one time or other, decided to dedicate their lives as Maryknoll sisters to work and live with the poor in foreign countries.  Most of us hadn’t stayed the exact course, but in the face of a huge diversity, hardly anyone seems to have lost the essence of that first impulse that was just a little out of the ordinary, always just a little close to the edge.   The variety of religious belief or lack there of and the tolerance of sexual orientation and relationships that would have been considered at least unconventional four decades ago were -liberating.   For everyone, there was that concern for people, for earth, for giving something back for what we’d been given, to try to make some difference for the better.

For myself,  I was amazed by the enthusiasm and warmth with which I was both received and remembered.  So many women wanted to share so much with me, I was taken aback.  My first temptation was to wonder if I was actually quite such an extraordinary presence.  On second thought, I brought myself down to a more sober reality, but it was, nonetheless, an experience I ponder with some considerable pleasure, and possibly a modicum of confused humility. 

My presentation on the history of all of time and the subsequent discussion on science and religion were a delight to give.  There was the kind of interest and questions that most teachers would kill for.  One friend kept asking me if I was nervous about the upcoming presentation and afternoon discussion, and did not seem to believe me when I said I wasn’t.  But I was unprepared for my response to giving the homily during our closing liturgy.  Teaching is one thing;  preaching is quite another, and I was hugely uncomfortable. 

It isn’t that it wasn’t a good homily or that I offended anyone.  But I realized as I stood there in front of what had turned from a group of learners into a congregation of worshippers that exorting is profoundly different from teaching.  I am willing – perhaps some would say even exasperatingly eager – to express my opinion on any subject whatsoever about which I may or may not be informed.  But giving spiritual direction fills me with apprehension.  I will never again agree to giving a homily.

Which may explain why, as I left Maryknoll Sunday morning, I knew I did not belong there. 

About which more on another day.

Tomorrow I am flying to the States to return to the Maryknoll Motherhouse from which I left the convent 41 years ago.  I have been back to visit friends several times since, but during this visit I am making the keynote presentation to the annual reunion to which all Maryknoll sisters, past and present, are invited.  It is also the 50th anniversary reunion of the group of women who entered Maryknoll the same year as I.  I’m presenting a brief overview of (get ready for this) the history of the universe, which was the topic of my latest book.  I’m also giving a homily about hope (as in Faith, Hope, and Charity) at the liturgy.  I feel rather honoured, to tell the truth.

If anyone had suggested 41 years ago that Maryknoll would ever have me back under circumstances like this, I would have laughed at the fantasy.  It is quite astonishing how much Maryknoll has changed.  I think the nuns are expected to behave much more like responsible adults now than as submissive servants.  So I’m immensely eager to talk both to those who have remained and the much greater number who left Maryknoll but who, like me, are returning to touch base with old friends.

This will be my last posting for 12 days or so when I return to the UK. 

You may not have noticed, but my story which I have been blogging about in fitful stops and starts includes a fairly sizable gap between the night I walked out of the convent and the beginning of my relationship with Peter, who is my husband.  The gap is sex.

I left the convent in 1967, the era of hippies and the civil rights movement, of anti-war protests, drugs, free sex, and communes.   I was in terms of sexual experience still a naive 18-year-old from the mid-west, completely unprepared to understand the “liberated” world into which I waded in New York City.  I never got into serious drugs, but apart from that, I tried pretty much everything else on the list.  I discarded any sense that premarital or even extra-marital sex was immoral.  What was wrong with it, as long as one did not become pregnant and bring a child into the world without a functional father?

But I thought that for most people, sex was at least personal commitment.  Not necessarily marriage, but certainly that it represented some kind of  serious caring.  Oh wow, was I wrong.  And oh wow, was I cynical by the time I met Peter.  He was serious, but I dragged him through the mill, behaving with as much carelessness toward him as others had treated me.   

It’s not a time I remember with guilt, but I do remember it with some embarrassment at my simplicity, and with profound gratitude that I met someone like Peter.   It’s not a period I find any delight at recounting in any detail. 

With maturity and many years of marriage, I am still of the view that premarital and under some circumstances extra-marital sex is not de facto wrong.  But I now respect other women enough to feel that their partners are not free for the picking, whatever justification for wandering is proposed by the male half.  Even more importantly, perhaps, I do now appreciate that being faithful to ones partner creates a relationship of a depth and richness that is most unlikely in a situation of “free love.” 

In that context, I was somewhat appalled when the leader of the Liberal Democrat party here in Britain volunteered quite candidly that he had slept with ”no more” than 30  women in his life.  The journalist reporting the story said they’d had a whip round the office, and it was agreed that this is about par for the course for a man today in his early 40’s.

My response is not that I’m an old fogey who is out of contact with the “real world” of the younger generation.  My response is that this is a middle-aged man who has not grown beyond the egocentric selfishness of childhood. 

It’s not 30 that I find so appalling, but the fact that in middle age he’s still counting, and doesn’t seem to think that this casual promiscuity is something he perhaps should have grown beyond.  The 17-year-old who reported recently that he was the father of five children by five different women seems irresponsible, but at least he’s not 40. 

Though come to think of it, the mind boggles if he follows the same stunted path as the Liberal Democrats’ leader.  Whose name, by the way, is Nick Clegg.  The press are referring to him as “Clegg-over.”

I’m sitting here looking at a snap shot taken in the early 1970’s.  I’m sitting on a couch with Geraldine and John in their apartment in Paterson, New Jersey.

I’m dressed in a nun’s habit, with a medal around my neck, and wearing a veil that allowed a fringe of hair to show, the convent’s concession to modernization at that point.   Geraldine and John are in their early twenties.  Geraldine worked in the local hospital, John did odd jobs in the community.  They were quiet, retiring, kind people.  Geraldine tended to do the talking for both of them.  We became friends insofar as a Catholic nun living only temporarily in the community and a young Black couple can become friends.  I attended their church services on occasion and shared a meal at their table.

Tragedy struck when John was arrested for rape.  Geraldine was distraught, and it was an allegation which struck me as ludicrous.  Geraldine and I worked together to find some kind of legal representation, and eventually John was released without trial.

We stayed in touch, and several months after I’d left Maryknoll, Geraldine called me again in desperation to ask for help.  John had been arrested for armed robbery, something Geraldine said was absolutely impossible because they were having a party in their home during the time of the alleged robbery, and John had been out of the house for less than fifteen minutes when he went out for more wine for the guests.  At that time, I was living in a one-room apartment in New York City on a very small income as I was trying to finish my degree.

I told her I didn’t think I could help. 

Later I tried to telephone, but her number was disconnected.  I wrote a brief, helpless note but that too was returned as undeliverable.

I’ve never talked to her again.

I got out my Jerusalem bible today, the one I read in the convent once, after years of agitation, we were no longer forbidden to read it privately.  The last time I opened it I was looking for the story of Mary Magdalen when she washed the feet of Jesus to be read at my sister Mary’s memorial service in 1995.  I was looking for this particular story because it was apparent that my sister had an ample supply of perfumes, a good heart, and was not even acquainted with the inside of her local church.  So her sisters thought Mary Magdalen might be a fitting reading.

Today I got it out because I wanted to re-read the story of Cain and Abel.  I wanted to study it as a result of a trailer for a television programme in which biblical academics try to make sense of the story.  The bible doesn’t actually say why God rejected Cain’s sacrifice of grain while accepting Abel’s lamb, and it is unclear from the bible how to recognize the”mark of Cain” which is supposed to identify all Cain’s descendants. 

Most intrigueing – and I wonder why I never asked this obvious question before – who, in a world with a population of four, are the “people” Cain feared in the desert?

None of these questions poses a real conundrum for me, because I think many biblical stories are meant to be symbolic, a kind of story that is much more exalted and capable of communicating a much higher truth than a merely historical, literally accurate recounting of events.  So historical errors and impossibilities do not seem to me to reduce the legitimacy of biblical stories.  On the contrary.

I also found in my bible a picture of a young Black couple I had come to know well when I was working as a nun in Paterson, New Jersey.  I have thought of them more than once with pain and regret, and wonder what became of them.  I will write about Geraldine and John in my post tomorrow.  

“I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.”  Jules Renard (19th-century French author)

I do have relatives and acquaintances who would consider it irreverent, and I suppose the fact that I think the above is marvellously funny explains why I never exactly fit in as a nun.

But you have to admit it one of the most succinct summaries on record of the difficulties posed by the problem of evil for the existence of God.

The apartment on 86th Street where I first moved with three other ex-Maryknollers after I left the convent served as a sort of half-way house.  By the spring, I’d been accepted for the Ph.D. program at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, and was vastly lucky at the same time to be given an NHS fellowship that covered both my tuition and modest living costs.

I found a studio on West 13th Street within walking distance of the university.  It was about 10 x 14 foot with a small stove, sink, and refrigerator and bathroom.  I bought a fold-out couch on which I slept, and a fold-out chair on which guests could sit and sleep.  A friend gave me access to the miscellaneous furniture used as back drops for TV shows and commercials, where I liberated a used table and several chairs and what I needed to make the kitchen functional.  Dad gave me a small black and white TV, a radio, and electric typewriter.

I didn’t need much else.  The grant meant I could afford the books and food I needed and I was embarked on an academic career where I thrived.  I loved the university, and loved the work.

I did, however, have some glimmer of an insight that perhaps I needed to understand a little better why I’d gone into the convent in the first place.  My fear was that if I didn’t get it, I’d repeat the whole process again in some hidden form.  I tried a variety of different kinds of psychotherapies, and finally settled on psychoanalysis, with three sessions a week which I paid for at a vastly reduced rate of about $9.00 a week.

I was eminently successful in my academic life, achieving my Ph.D. in three years with highest honors, and landing an academic position in the psychology department at Montclair University.  But for five years after I’d left Maryknoll, my sexual relationships were chaotic, neurotic, and immature.

Then I met Peter.     

I left the convent with what, in retrospect, was a sense of vindicating victory.  I’d won.  I’d been accepted, and it was I who had decided to reject the convent, not the superiors who decided I wasn’t good enough.  So I didn’t have to deal with the bitterness of having been rejected.  On the contrary, my sense of self was that I possessed a superior moral vision.  I thought of myself as leaving Maryknoll because it was Maryknoll that had lost sight of its mission.  I, on the other hand, thought that I could best carry on my lofty purpose outside the convent enclosure.  In fact, I had no idea how much I needed to learn – fast.

I left Maryknoll and moved into New York City in the upheaval of the 1960’s when the younger generation was taking over the universities, dying for civil rights, and marching against the war in VietNam.  Hippies and flower children had begun to live in communes, experimenting with drugs, music, and sex.  We all thought we knew how to transform the world into a place of peace and love.

Into this caldron I came at the technical age of 27.  I did not suspect just how naive I was.  I’d left the farm where I grew up in the midwest at the age of 18.  I’d had no sexual experience whatsoever for nine years.  I knew little about using make-up, buying appropriate clothes, or styling my hair.  I presented myself with what I later came to recognize as an “ex-nun look,” more evident on the streets today on actual nuns wearing civilian clothes. 

Nor had I any idea how tantalizing I was, a young, innocent, frighteningly trusting, not unattractive virgin in New York.  Professors, priests, men from the TV studios where we’d broadcast the Maryknoll Sisters weekly program, fellow students, lawyers, workers from Summer in the City, friends and mere acquaintances vied to relieve me of this burden.  And I missed all the signals.  I rode the crowded New York subway in skirts that were too short and tops that were too revealing, and did not understand why men grabbed my bottom.  I ended up in parked cars and hotel rooms, truly mistaking the purpose my male companion had for our being there.   On one occasion a man followed me to my apartment where he stood outside the door for two hours trying every strategy he could to get inside, including a request to use the bathroom.  His last attempt was to disappear and reappear with what he claimed was dinner for us both.  Secure behind my locked door I did not relent.  I was too inexperienced at the time to fear he might develop into a stalker.  If he had, I would not have had any idea how to deal with him effectively. 

In truth, I was fortunate never to have been raped.  Well, in part it was good fortune.  In part it was because I didn’t always say no when that is what I would have preferred.  But my socialization in which I’d learn to believe that it was a virtue in a woman to strive to please was critically distorted and left me with a grave weakness – I’d never learned to say no effectively. 

Initially, I had moved into an apartment near Broadway on 86th Street with three other ex-Maryknollers.  It is a racially mixed apartment block that was fairly inexpensive but safe.  A middle-aged Black couple invited us over for drinks one evening.  It was years before the obvious occurred to me.  We were being interviewed to make sure we were not four street workers.  What else were three young women doing with a single older woman along? 

It was a short transition period, though, and within months, all of us had moved into our separate apartments, moving away from the security of our convent acquaintances and into our new lives. 

Gradually I began to stop telling people I was an ex-nun.  Because gradually that was no longer how I saw myself. 

I did know that the world in which I had grown up had changed, but was astonished to read a summary of a report from the Vatican that today there are fewer than 750,000 Catholic nuns in the world, and less than 200,000 priests. 

And people living what the Vatican calls “a consecrated life” are continuing to disappear at an accelerating rate.  There are 25% fewer nuns now than when John Paul II became pope, and there was a jaw-dropping decline of 10% in the year 2005 alone.

I’m beginning to think that my past is a little more interesting than I realized.   

I took my final vows as a nun in June 1968.  My father and his wife came from Ohio for the ceremony in the chapel, and I knew the night before that they had arrived at the hotel in Tarrytown where they were staying.  For my part, although I didn’t know it, I was keeping my options open.

Those of us making final vows spent the preceding days in retreat, theoretically in prayer and meditation to prepare ourselves for this momentous step.  What I remember most clearly was my meeting with Father Fox, a priest from the New York archdiocese who was active in the Hispanic community and whom many of us worked with in the Summer in the City program.  Most people when they make final vows mean that they are vowing to spend the rest of their lives committed to the cause to which they are vowed.  I can’t do that, I told him.  I can’t promise I will never leave Maryknoll.  Can I still take my final vows tomorrow? 

My parents had driven from Ohio to be there.  I had fought like a wild cat to be accepted by the community.  I had waited until the 11th hour to ask this question.  But I was prepared to leave Maryknoll that night if Father Fox had said that I could not legitimately take final vows if I wasn’t sure I could keep them.  But he didn’t say that.  He said nobody who knows themselves well can ever be sure they will never see things differently in the future.

So the next morning, amid the pomp and circumstance of the day, I took my final vows.  Within two months I did see things differently and petitioned Rome to be released from my life’s commitment.  Nothing spectacular happened during those two months that I can recall.  In retrospect, I can only think that I was so oriented to success that I could not make up my own mind that I didn’t want to be there until I had succeeded in being accepted.

Last year, another ex-Maryknoller told me about a friend of hers who took final vows, and the next morning said “Good.  Now I can make up my own mind.”  She too left Maryknoll soon afterwards.

Leaving the convent, though, is not as simple as walking out the door.  Psychologically I remained an “ex-nun” for some time.

It’s a little embarrassing to look back and see what was so obviously going on when I made my final vows as a Maryknoll nun.  Final vows are supposed to mean final commitment, no going back, no changing your mind, no breaking the promise.  So it takes some fancy footwork to explain how I managed to take final vows, and why I am sitting here now a very married and thoroughly non-nun for more than 40 years.

I will start  with the more ego-enhancing part of the explanation which, I admit, I’ve only recently thought up.  It is that the Catholic Church itself sees final vows as less irrevocable than getting married or becoming a priest.  In fact, women outside of marriage don’t have a commitment that the Church sees as irreversible.  Men do but not women.  I think it makes it just that little less significant, that little less binding.

Baptism, and marriage, and ordination to the priesthood can’t be undone, even by the Pope.  I can’t go to Rome and say I want my original sin back, that it was removed from my soul when I was baptized and before I was old enough to give my consent and that it’s not good enough to say I can easily produce many more sins of my own.  This was my first sin and it was an original. 

I can’t go to Rome and say I don’t want to be married to X anymore either.  If I have enough money, I might be able to convince the powers in Rome that it was never a valid marriage in the first place, but if I can’t achieve that, I’m irrevocably married until one of us dies.  Likewise, priests can be unfrocked and relieved of their priestly responsibilities, but they can’t be un-ordained.  Being made a priest is a permanent state for life.

Becoming a nun, even taking final vows after many years on probation, never becomes irreversibly permanent in that way.  Rome reserves the power to release nuns from their vows. 

So perhaps the fact that I took my relationship with Peter more seriously from the start than in retrospect I took my final vows at Maryknoll was in part the result of a subtle socialization.  I always knew it didn’t really have to be for keeps.

But there are other explanations, too, for which I must take a greater share of personal responsibility.  About which, more on another post.

For those not interested in the progress of my diet – which is probably everybody who is reading this – please look away now.

Since I began this diet caper several weeks before Christmas, I have lost three pounds.  Unfortunately, it’s the same pound which I’ve lost three times.  Obviously, I am not onto a winning strategy here.

So for the last three days I’ve lowered my sites with the hope I will actually reach my goal by going in smaller steps.  I have been concentrating on two things.  The first is on exercise – 30 minutes a day circuit training. 

My second concentration is an adaptation of religious practice.  At Maryknoll we said the Divine Office – Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline.  In their strict observance, they have been recited for centuries by monks and nuns about every three hours throughout the day.  Similarly, the Muslim call to prayer occurs five times a day.  The psychology of these rituals is to keep the presence of God constantly in mind, and in both cases, the intervals between prayers is about three hours.  My goal, I fear, is a little less exalted, since what I am trying to do is keep in my consciousness why I am trying to stick to my diet.   But I think a specific reminder every three hours has a solid history of accomplishment to recommend it.  I am truly a reprobate, by almost any standard badly in need of reformation.  Between 5 and 8 pm is the worst which is invariably when I consume more calories than I can burn.  It’s when I eat out of nervous energy, and when I’m most apt to abandon even the semblance of reason.  I have even, on occasion, grabbed one of my favourite chocolate nut cookies saying to myself “I’ll think up a reason later about why I’m justified in eating this.” 

It’s so ridiculous I can’t believe I fall for it.

My new strategy is to put half-minute reminder breaks in every three hours during the day, with a double break at 5:00 when I concentrate on being calm.  I know these breaks are a mere 30 seconds, but they are so short it’s easy to overcome the temptation to skip them.  My back-up strategy is to walk out of the kitchen when I begin that inner dialogue with myself about those cookies. 

So far, so good.  Although do note that “so far” is thus far a mere three days.

I’ll keep you posted.  I’m sure you can’t wait.

Yogi Berra once said that prediction was difficult, especially when you are talking about the future.  I’ve often thought that, although we think predictions are more uncertain the further into the future we go, it is often events about two seconds in the future that hold the most unexpected surprise.

Today Peter and I were walking in London on our way back to Kings Cross to catch the train to Cambridge.  Without any warning whatsoever, I tripped.  I tripped over absolutely nothing visible for no identifiable reason, but went careening across the sidewalk, dizzily trying to avoid running into pedestrians coming in the opposite direction and pushing them into the traffic.  I almost caught myself, but failed and the first part of me to hit the concrete was – my cheekbone.

Two men got to me before Peter, and helped me up with great solicitations.  I was mostly embarrassed, but it must have looked absolutely awful, and it was difficult to assure either my husband or the two strangers that apart from what was rapidly becoming a black eye, I was fine.  During the five seconds or so in which I was crashing to the ground, Peter thought I was having a stroke or heart attack, and it must have felt like one of those moments when the future changes totally in a two second segment.  We are now home, and he is still in shock, I think.  I myself am no longer in shock, but I am concerned that I did not catch myself with my hands instead of falling on my face.  With my osteoporosis, a fall like that could indeed short-circuit my future quite substantially.

Predicting the past, on the other hand, is somewhat easier.  Someone has just sent me a story about a play three of us put on as young professed sisters at Maryknoll, and as Yogi Berra also said, it’s like deja vu all over again.

The author, G, describes herself as a dreamer, supremely confident that we could carry it off with aplomb.  T was a doer – she procured copies of the play, the props, and somehow a huge selection of costumes from which we fashioned our stage outfits.  “Bernadette Mary,” G says, “was the most practical.”  I was also the most sceptical, and a perfectionist.  Most of all I realized the danger in the serious possibility that we could all make fools of ourselves.  Yes, that would have been me.  More concerned to avoid ridicule than to produce a flawed but creative entertainment.  I asked how I looked in my selection of costumes and managed apparently to look quite fetching.  Yes, I would have been sure to manage that.  (I didn’t get over an almost obsessional concern about how I looked until I met Peter, who paradoxically convinced me that I was indeed quite physically attractive, and that he would love me even if I weren’t.)

We three were young and energetic with a lot of good will.  We complemented each other more than we knew then, each contributing our strengths and talents, and doing for the other what we could not do for ourselves.

How good the play actually was, though, I can’t remember.

To see additional posts on osteoporosis, click on “Select Category” in the right-hand column, and select Osteoporosis.

The paradox of my work in the publicity department at Maryknoll is that it was the best and the worst of events that happened there that were most significant in my finally leaving Maryknoll.  It is the only work to which I was assigned as a Maryknoller that I found stimulating and challenging.  Sister Francis Louise was a creative writer with talents and a character quite different from my own.  It was the first time in my life, I think, that I was ever challenged to be creative instead of being merely right.  It was the other half of the world I grasped so eagerly in courses with Sister Mary Edith.  Despite – or perhaps because of – our differences we were compatible and made a good team. 

Sister Francis Louise and Sister Maria del Rey, the veteran journalist and department head, were not so compatible.  In fact, they constantly trampled on what each considered their own patch.  Sister Maria del Rey, I think, was threatened by the talent of this young sister who did not show the traditional deference to her superior accomplishments.  Sister Francis Louise, for her part, was sharp, incisive, and educated.  Although I would not describe her as a natural trouble-maker, I also would not list her as a talented peacemaker either.  The individual friction between these two was exacerbated by the overall atmosphere in the Motherhouse where more than 300 of us were living in close quarters with few outlets beyond the Maryknoll compound.  The older and younger nuns were in constant conflict about changes in the Church, and  Sister Maria del Rey said unambiguously that we young ones should “shape up or ship out.” 

Both Sister Francis Louise and I were scheduled to renew our vows in June.  I was accepted for a further three years.  Sister Francis Louise was asked to leave Maryknoll.  I was distraught by the decision and went to Mother Mary Coleman to ask them to reconsider their rejection, but failed.  Leaving Maryknoll in those days was a pretty secret affair, and women were spirited out the door and into a waiting car without any farewells.  One day they were there;  the next they were gone.  Sister Francis Louise left on the day before I was scheduled to renew my vows.

I was already in bed the evening before we were to renew our vows, when someone shook the curtains of my cell and said that Sister Mercy, acting for Mother Mother Mary Coleman in her absence,  wanted to see me in her office.  I dressed and went upstairs.  Sister Mercy may have given the gentle impression of a kindly mother, but she was tough.  She told me that because I had attended a forbidden farewell party for Sister Francis Louise that afternoon, the ruling Council had decided that I should be permitted to renew my vows the next morning not for three but for one year.  “But I didn’t go to the party,” I objected.  Well, Sister Mercy replied, the Council had decided anyway.

It is a reflection of my naivete that rather than argue about the injustice of this kangaroo court decision, I said I would accept it but that I wanted to tell her what was really happening with the younger nuns at Maryknoll.  I said she needed to know the attitude of those in authority was alienating many of us, and that if they did not change, very few young nuns would be left in Maryknoll at all.  She said she would pray for me.

It doesn’t give me a great deal of joy – no, in truth maybe it does – to look back and see how right my prediction proved to be. 

Of the 64 original women who entered Maryknoll in my group, two are today still Maryknoll Sisters. 

For anyone reading this blog who may be trying to make coherent sense out of it, I apologize.  It isn’t coherent.  Occasionally I am obsessed with an impulse to organize it into some rational form, but right now it would create too much of a strait jacket for me.  I don’t know what – if anything – might eventually result from this thinking out loud, but right now I know it’s a hodge podge.  All of which is my explanation for why I am now returning, without logic, to describing one of the seminal times I had at Maryknoll, and which I remember with energized delight.

After the three years of probation in the novitiate, I took the traditional temporary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  Poverty didn’t mean being poor, but rather that I would not legally own anything.  By any standards I was not poor.  Chastity meant renouncing sexual relationships.  It would not have been possible to establish a viable heterosexual relationship in those particular circumstances, in any case, but I entered into the covenant voluntarily.  Obedience obliged me to obey the wishes of superiors.  These wishes sent me for several years to work in the Motherhouse bakery, pantry, sewing room, and promotions.   Promotions was even more brainless than the pantry, and I hated the boredom of mindlessly filling out multiple copies of forms for hours a day.

But then I was assigned to the Publicity Department.  The department was headed by Sister Maria del Rey, a published journalist, and author of the book, Bernadette Becomes a Nun,  that had influenced many of us to enter Maryknoll in the first place.  In publicity, we actually wrote articles to be published in the Maryknoll magazine, and I developed darkroom skills, spending hours developing photographs sent in from the missions to accompany the stories they illustrated.  But the most exciting thing we did was to put together a weekly television show for children recorded in NBC studios in New York City.   The show was written by Sister Frances Louise, a talented nun who also had professional writing experience before coming to Maryknoll.  The show consisted of several puppets who carried on conversations about events of the day with a Maryknoll sister.  I was the Maryknoll sister.  We might talk about why we hide Easter eggs or decorate Christmas trees, or discuss a recent news event like the Watts riots by angry and disenfranchised Blacks in Los Angeles.   

Every week we drove to the NBC studios to record the show for transmission on Sunday mornings.  The show was made to meet the law requiring a certain number of television hours every week dedicated to religious programming but we were young, innocent, dedicated, fresh, and enthusiastic, and thought NBC was running the show because of its intrinsic worthiness.  The NBC staff adopted a protective stance toward us, and never suggested that what we were doing was anything but something of great moral worth.

Inevitably we got to know the director and producer and the cameramen and the people behind the scenes.  They told us about their families, and sometimes told us about their own family rituals.  Many of the staff were Jewish, and their stories were my first introduction to Judaism in New York.  The rituals were different from those I was familiar with, but the roles of special food, and candles and prayers and fasting were ones I knew well.  I was fascinated with the whole process, with the people, with the drive and creativity of this media world.  I felt an affinity with them, as if in some way I came from their world, and was returning home. 

It was the New York to which I had thought to escape at the age of seven.  And it was, in the end, to world to which I did escape when I left Maryknoll.