KNIFE ON BONE

My friend, who still belongs to a Catholic community of religious women, wrote this past summer to tell me that their motherhouse was closing. "The ritual of leaving will be Sunday, August first," she wrote, "and I'm sure it will be very sad. I become slightly depressed just thinking about it." My eyes rested on her word, slightly. I didn't believe it. How could she be only slightly depressed when I, who hadn't been a member of that convent for thirty-two years, felt my heart quake at the news. The motherhouse that was about to close still fills my dreams as though sleep were a doorway into my past. Behind that door is a memory I cannot quite possess of a life I never completely lived.

            I had been so young when that convent was built, just seventeen. Five other young women and I, most of us adolescents, were the first class to be accepted as postulants at that place. Construction on the new building was not yet finished when we moved in. It was the first week in September, 1958. We walked in our new black lace-up shoes on planks laid across the mud, and Mother Ann of the Blessed Sacrament opened the door to the new novitiate. There we would be cloistered, enclosed, for the duration of our training. Tile had not yet been laid in the concrete hallways. Mr. Hagen, our maintenance man, had yet to finish the cabinets and closets for our dorms. Those that were built awaited wood seal and varnish, and each young postulant and novice would become skilled with the paint brush. The chapel had no pews, but we were promised a pipe organ would be installed soon. When it came, we all gathered in the otherwise still empty chapel to hear the second-year novice, Sister Mary Clarence, play it for the first time.

            In my memory the time of novitiate seems endless, like the summer days of childhood, but it lasted a mere three years. How could it have held such an abundance of experience?  We picked rocks from the grounds. We sowed grass seed. We harvested the garden planted by other sisters the previous spring as the new convent's walls were going up.

I remember three gardens. The first was located in front of the building. Another postulant and I had been assigned to work there after supper every evening while the harvest moon set on the horizon, melting into a huge red-orange puddle. Mother Ann had warned us that religious vocations are fragile things initially, and we needed to pray to nurture and strengthen ours. I stopped my gardening in the twilight of the harvest moon and prayed as she had recommended. Strengthen me. Let me stay in this place. Keep clear your call. Let me listen. Let me hear. Let me become a Sister of St. Joseph. I prayed to the God behind the moon, for surely that must be where God rested on that evening of unparalleled beauty.

            We planted the second garden beside the barn on the banks of the river once spring had come again. The ice broke that year on Holy Thursday in the middle of the afternoon and the novices' veils lifted like black wings on the spring breeze as we flew from the motherhouse to the barn to watch the spectacle. We kept silence as was the custom while the river crashed and roared, uprooting trees along the banks, upending gigantic blocks of ice and impelling them into one another. "Your torrents and all your waves wash over me," came the words of the psalm into my head. I wanted to yell, to join the torrent. I stood with the other novices, my voice silent, my hands in my sleeves, my heart racing, my mind on fire.

            In the third year we seeded the third garden in the lowland of the river's backwash, like the biblical Egyptians seeded the floodplain of the Nile. Up came tangy rich tomatoes, cabbage and cauliflower, peas and yellow and green string beans, cucumbers for eating and others for pickling, carrots, and an array of dried beans—black beans, navy beans, pinto beans. The milkweed pods that grew up on their own alongside the vegetables dangled the jeweled chrysalises of monarch butterflies.  

            We took picnics to the woods on Thursday afternoons, and sometimes we sat by a bonfire late into the night. At those moments we became the girls we once had been and still were, someplace deep underneath the veil. When night fell and the stars hung from the sky, we sang and then lay back on the grass. I disappeared into the sky. I dream even now of bonfires and of veiled women chanting in a foreign tongue. I dream of walking on the path through those woods. I yearn sometimes for my convent years, but the object of my yearning is the God behind the moon, above the stars, and in the gashed embers of our bonfire burned down. My yearning is for the poetry of our life that seemed to have little to do with its stringent customs and its holy rule.

            In the novitiate classroom we were taught to stand and sit and walk like nuns. We were taught to admit every small infraction of the holy rule and of the customs of the house.  We were taught not to defend ourselves from accusation even when we'd done nothing wrong. We were taught to kneel and kiss the floor, honoring this earth on which Jesus once walked and demonstrating our bent human condition before the splendor and glory of our creator God. We were taught also to kneel before our sisters, to kiss their feet as Jesus had kissed the feet of his disciples after washing them, because while humbled by our humanness we also were to remember the splendor of grace borne by every one of these women who had been chosen by God. We were taught to kneel by the table during Lent while we ate our dry toast and cereal without sugar and eggs without salt. We were taught the discipline of silence, the discipline of custody of the eyes, the discipline of reserve with "people of the world." We were taught to guard our affections, to be detached, to prefer no one in particular to anyone else. We were too young for all of this teaching, and it lay upon our souls and minds like a whitewash of lime. I learned, instead, resistance. I kept the feeling down. I will hold my head high, I told myself, I will walk like a queen. No one will know what I truly feel and soon I will not feel it anymore.

            What was underneath erupted in infractions of the holy rule. I wandered at night through the dark hallways, leaving the novitiate dormitory and making my way almost outside, but I couldn't or wouldn't open the door. I stood in my bare feet and watched the northern lights shimmer over snow. I thought I heard a child scream. I agonized over whether to wake the nuns, to tell them that someone had been wounded, someone was being torn apart like a rabbit in the jaws of a timber wolf. I put my hand over my mouth for it was sacred silence, and the part of my mind that still could think rationally said there is no screaming child. You are the child.

            Yet, that rule against which I rebelled--the holy rule as it existed in the 1950's, before the Second Vatican Council sent nuns scurrying back to the diaries and letters of their founders to find the true source of their mission—gave the religious life bone. We were taught that if a woman could internalize that set of rules, she would have a spine, straight and strong, that would keep her through fifty, sixty, seventy years of consecrated life. But even if she couldn't internalize the rule, she might wear it like a corset, and it would keep her from bending under the weight of a life lived "in the world but not of it." The rule also promised to strip us of the superficialities inherent in every experience of life. It was a knife, carving away excessive pleasure, and sharpening our vision to access what the poet, Hopkins, called the "dearest freshness deep down things." What was most simple in life became, under that knife's blade, most powerful. The red leaf in the stream. The musical flow of chant. A slant of light through stained glass. The inhalation of breath. The scent of altar wine. The taste of bread upon the tongue.

            Mother Ann taught her novices that once we lived the rule we would no longer be ourselves; the girls we once had been would be replaced by Sisters of St. Joseph.The holy rule and the holy habit would be our cloister, and we would walk in the world as women set apart.  Once internalized, the knife of the rule could strip the bone of the spirit clean. It could either carve us into saints or whittle us into brittle cages of bone to lock away the residue of what we once had been. It was up to us.  Many of us could not survive the keen edge of that knife on bone.

            One might think I would have left convent life as soon as I felt the scraping of that knife and the moment I recognized the identity of the child who cried out within me. But it took me fifteen years. My skin erupted in boils. My stomach often refused to hold the food from our garden, and I, who had been quite small to begin with, lost more than twenty pounds. Now I look at the snapshots taken of me then and wonder at the denial that kept me from seeing in that skeletal body the way in which I was trying to make myself small enough to fit, to hide, maybe to disappear into the framework of a way of life that couldn't hold me. It was a life already emptying itself out, unable to hold so many of my sisters who'd already been dispensed of their vows and returned to a life in the world and on the world's terms. I insisted to myself that I wouldn't do that—I would remain a nun. I didn't realize that the convent and I were becoming mirror images of one another, both skeletal from the scraping of that knife's blade, our bodies losing their recognizable form  

            I attended renewal meetings. I accepted a position on the steering committee for renewal. I gave lectures on what convent life might look like in the future. What could I know of a future for consecrated religious women? I could barely envision my own future. With such limited vision as I had, I tried to shape a convent where I might finally fit, and it turned to nothing in my hands. I lost it. At the same time I lost my identity as a nun, the identity I once thought to be my true self.

            The garden at the Motherhouse dwindled. The raspberries went wild, became a thicket. The backwash from the river deposited prairie silt as usual, but who would seed it? Who would be there for the harvest? Perhaps next year more novices would come. We fed ourselves on that pretence, but it didn't nourish. At that year's annual retreat I couldn't make myself attend the lectures or participate in community prayer. Each morning, instead of going to the chapel with the other sisters, I walked the path through the woods to the clearing where as novices we built bonfires and lay to watch the stars. I sat there all day, alone, staring into the woods, waiting for what I did not know.

            Even then I didn't leave the convent. I returned to my assignment for that year. The child's cry that I'd once heard in the woods behind the motherhouse increased in intensity. Twice I blacked out from the noise it made: once at the home of a parishioner, the second time in the dining room of a large restaurant. I'll get better, I told myself. This will pass. I will make myself fit. Vatican II renewal will finally change religious life enough for me to find my place within it. These thoughts would stabilize me for an hour or two, and then my mind would start to quake and I'd hear the cry again.

            A teenaged girl from the small town where I was working came to the convent door with an old bicycle and a pair of shorts for me. "I can't wear these," I told her, laughing. She laughed with me. "Sure you can," she said. I could, and I did. I rode the bike on country roads where the leaves were just beginning to turn. It was August, fourteen years after I first stepped over the threshold and through the convent doorway to become a nun.

            A few mornings after my bike ride, I woke early in the morning to hear a bird singing, "I am."  In the sound I recognized the timbre of the lost child's cry, now transformed. Its trill kept repeating those two words and in them I understood that the first responsibility of my life was exactly that: to be. I knew that I was free to stay in the convent or to leave. Since it was clear that I'd never found my place in the religious life, I chose to become myself and live on my own, and I left the convent that very day.

            In The Spiral Staircase, her memoir about her post-convent years, Karen Armstrong tells us that convent training was meant to last a lifetime, and it does. The mark of that life and its holy rule on the spirits and minds of the women who stayed in the convent, as well as of those who left, is indelible. But when the old rule was abrogated, replaced by a softer, more flexible mission statement, perhaps the paradox of a nun's life, to be in the world but not of it, was also scraped away. What remained was something so still, so unambiguous, so without creative tension as to feel empty. On walls that soft there can be no echo, and even the cry of the lost child is finally silenced.

            "What will you do now?" I asked my friend, the nun who told me the motherhouse would close. "What will happen to religious communities?" She thought perhaps they would become more fluid, and smaller. Maybe small, autonomous groups of women would organize to meet some crucial need. But they would have to belong to a central federation or they would not be in compliance with the legalities of the church's canon law. Maybe that wouldn't matter, she reflected. Maybe if religious women think about it, they would be better off without being institutionalized. Maybe institutionalization is what caused the decline in the first place. Maybe, whatever can hold the community together enough to carry it into the future is something both more powerful and more flexible than laws or rules ever were or could become.

            The motherhouse is empty now. The elder-nuns have moved to a local retirement center and from there, when the time comes, they will move again into a nursing home. The bishop has un-consecrated the chapel. The building with all its contents has been sold. Will the spirit that once was there leave the river and the woods? The spirits of the nuns and former nuns still might watch the stars and northern lights. The winds even now might remember their veils that rose like gigantic wings. And in the backwash of the river, where the garden used to grow, it seems certain to me that I still could find the milkweed, maybe hundreds of them now that the land's gone wild, and each of them dangling a chrysalis in which a new creature slumbers, wet with life and awaiting her release.

Copyright2002 Christin Lore Weber