My time in the convent was brief, one weekend to be exact. It was an experience of the intersection of two key things in my life: 1) my love for evangelizing teens at any opportunity; and 2) my dispositional tendency to follow rules ... until I can't. It reminds me of that wistfully sad, yet important saying of the German monk Martin Luther: "I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against my conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen."
At the outset it would be important to remark that going to spend a weekend at a convent was not my idea. I was in tenth grade. I had the usual tendencies of tenth grade girls to love horses, read books, want to live by the ocean, and begin grand ideas with the phrase: "Some day when I get married..." I also happen to like God. I don't just like Him as an idea, or an abstract concept. I don't just Facebook "like" Him. I don't like Him because when I sing the old song "Let there be peace on earth" I get misty-eyed of what that might be like. I don't like Him because one of my parents was markedly "religious" and the other was not. I like Him because somehow I felt like He had an interest in, well, me. (I think He has an interest in you too, so don't feel left out.) In one of his recent books, Author Matthew Kelly presents God as being the One Who can help us "become the very best version of ourselves." I am sold on that concept that the One Who made us has a design for each of our lives. The prophet Jeremiah said it best:
"For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for your woe, plans to give you a future full of hope." (Jeremiah 29:11)
What I did not like was the idea of going to a convent ... for ANY amount of time. In my young brain, it had the hint of "clipping of the wings" and that held zero attraction to me. In no way, shape or form did I want to give my parents the idea that this would be an amenable life choice to me. Yet every time we walked by the "Come and See Weekend" poster at church, my mother would continue to point it out to me. She really pressed the issue so consistently that I went just to put a period at the end of the one word sentence: "No." Yes that contradicts logic. And that is when the trouble began. I will tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, without telling you which order of sisters because that is kind of irrelevant to the point.
The weekend was held at the Mother House. That is a very nice way of saying: where you go through formation to ensure you and the Order are a good fit; and, also more to the point, where the elderly nuns go to die. For my way of thinking, for me, they were one and the same experience. At one point in the weekend, the Sister in charge of the young women "coming to see" took us to visit an elderly nun who was bed-ridden. She sat up and smiled, took our hands and beamed. She said, "I have had a beautiful life. When are you girls coming to join us?" I felt glad for her, but the last part caused the color to wash out of my face. The directing Sister replied, "Oh, they are still in school; they can't come just yet," and we flowed out of the tiny room into the hallway that seemed to echo in its marbled floors my own footsteps that wanted to bolt right out the front door immediately.
The other interesting thing is that the other young women there were easily two or three years younger than me. And frankly, they weren't doing a terrific job of discerning a future vocation. They were quite obviously there for what felt like a reunion of girls from Massachusetts and Connecticut with the cache of girls from New Jersey. It had the makings and feel of one giant Junior High Girls Slumber Party... albeit at a convent. Although, there was one young woman among us who was actually college age and had just converted to Catholicism. She was planning to join the Order of sisters in a few months. I would have liked to pick her brain a bit but she didn't seem to have time to speak with us, having bigger more spiritual fish to fry, I imagine.
I got in trouble at lunch quite accidentally. When I think back on it, I probably saw something that was much more interesting to me than what I had encountered so far. Among the gathering of nuns in the lunchroom, everyone sitting around in their dark colored, knee length habits with matching veils on, there was one sister wearing all-white. She was considerably younger, like in her 30's, and her round and warm Mexican face RADIATED joy. I mean, when you see THAT you see something that could make you actually consider HER religious order: doesn't every one of us want to be THAT happy? So I just said what was on my mind to our Directress, "Who is that nun?" Answer: "She is traveling through and stayed the night with us." My remark, "she is so beautiful." The iced-cold stare I got back from the Directress led me to believe we were not on the same page when I was remarking about what was clearly a spiritually-generated beauty, a beauty that came from living in the center of God's love. But I was inescapably in the dog house. Bigger faux pas lay ahead for me.
It was in the convent that I learned how to play the card game "UNO." And in case you are wondering what else happens in the convent on a Saturday night, I will break no code in telling you: Some girls watched TV. Back in the late 1970's ... they were watching Ricardo Montalban and his butler Tattoo welcome the rich, famous and desperate-for-love on the Fantasy Island that doesn't really exist go for a shot at their "one wish." I could watch that at home, I think. It seemed very, um, un-holy to be on a discernment retreat and not be discerning. So, I busied myself about checking out the bookshelves. I found a book called "Under the Fig Tree." It was something that really resonated with me for some reason. The title of the book came from Nathaniel encountering Jesus for the first time who greeted him with these words: "I saw you under the fig tree. You are a true son of Israel - there is no guile in you." Every time I hear that Bible passage read in church I wonder what was happening under the fig tree that was worthy of note? Was Nathaniel praying, crying, saying goodbye to someone, or doing absolutely nothing at all? There was something about Jesus' remark about "seeing" him, that made me think it was a comprehensive-seeing, an "I get where you are coming from" sort of thing. And to say that he had no guile in him was no compliment to the first man Israel, whose initial name was Jacob and was a deceiver. (Hence the name of Robin Williams' movie years later: Jakob the Liar.) The comment by Jesus was honoring Nathaniel for his honesty and at the same time kind of saying, "you are unique in your family because you are honest" implying others are not. Hmmm...
So then we get to the part where a Directress tries to get junior high girls to call it a night. Having done lock-in's with teens years later, I want to say to her credit at least she didn't really lose her temper with them. We stayed in a large dorm-like room with a row of beds on each of the two sides of the room, and if I remember correctly, there may have been curtains that could pull around them like in the hospital Emergency Rooms on tv shows. Somehow amidst the silly girl talk etc., I found an opportunity to get to talk to them about the Big Things God was doing in the Church in the last ten years (which was most of their lifetimes). I talked about the Blessed Mother's apparitions. I talked about the birth of the Catholic Charismatic renewal in the late 60's and what was happening in churches as far as healings and miracles occurring. It was a prime time for evangelization - they were listening, I had the good news, I was regaling them on behalf of the Big G ... and then I got in trouble. The whole thing got shut down under the guise of the international convent rule of "Grande Silence."
That's when a sister with the demeanor of a tired policeman comes to the edge of the dorm room and snaps, "Silence! Please!" I said, "But sister, don't you want to hear about this, how the Lord is working in people's lives ... healing them and ..." "Girls. Lights-out." I guess she didn't want to hear it.
I will say this after later having decades of experience with teen ministry: Youth Ministry is not for those who have to keep strict rules or need their sleep. At this point in my life, I'm not sure I could do it either. But I will say this: when the time is right and you have the proverbial floor and they are on-board with you, you've gotta let the Spirit lead and go with it. It is the Inconvenient Moment in which the Lord chooses to change lives. It is the moment after He sees you under the fig tree and there's nothing left but conversation and raw honesty and a heart turning to Him. Nothing should ever stand in the way of that. Not even Grande Silence.
My parents picked me up the next day from the Motherhouse. My father shook the Sister Directress' hand and I could see him passing money to her. Nice. But I would have used an envelope. LOL. As we drove home I could see tears in his eyes. I told him not to worry that I didn't plan to go back. There was no further discussion.
My mother and I did have a discussion about five years later that ended with me reiterating that convent life was not for me. When I look at all the places my life and education and ministry have taken me, I understand better why it wasn't:
"You can only say 'No' when you have a bigger 'Yes' burning inside you."
But sometimes I have indeed wondered about the order that the Mexican nun belonged to and if I could ever find it...
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