I don't know if it's just me, but all of my life, I have looked at nuns and monks (and priests, for that matter, but we'll save that for another entry) with a strange mixture of pity and intimidation. It's hard for me to imagine someone choosing the life that monastics have - rigorously structured days of (what my impression has been) self-denial and self-effacement and all of the other self fill-in-the-blanks that tend to give me the shakes and leave me clawing for a cigarette when I even stop to consider applying them to my own life.
Back in the Protestant days, this was the only impression I'd ever received about nuns.
But, like I said, that's all I had to go with. The massively Hollywood story of an innocently mischeivous, charmingly rascally young postulant who doesn't know her heart until she meets the rich and emotionally aloof young sea captain and his seven a-friggin-dorable kids. It all works out, of course. They learn to sing again and escape from the Nazis and everything.
Well. Well. I just got done reading In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden. The book is about a Benedictine convent, and the story of the nuns in it, both before and after they take their vows. I don't know what led me to read the book, other than that it was kind of laying around. But typically, I'll avoid the topic of nuns and convents - something about there actually being people out there who choose to forego worldly consolations and move into a stone fortress of some type, and then spend every waking minute of every day attempting to reconcile their will with God's sends me into twitchy guilt and defiance. I have the unfortunate tendency, I suppose, toward assuming that if I wouldn't like something, no one would, and if I couldn't do something, well, dammit, it's not worth doing in the first place. Luckily the rest of the world doesn't cater toward my tendency. We'd all be screwed.
I digress. Back to In This House of Brede. I won't go into the intricate play-by-plays of the book - although they're masterfully done - but I will say that the story opens with Philippa Talbot, successful in the worldly sense of the word, who has made it into her forties without any thought of nunneries or even Catholicism. I'll quote her: I thought I was very well as I was; a human, balanced person with a reasonable record; with the luck of having money, friends, love. Only suddenly it wasn't enough - not nearly enough. Everything seemed - not hollow, but - as if suddenly I could see beyond them, into an emptiness, and all the while there was this strange pull; no one can describe it to someone who hasn't felt it. That's how Philippa depicts her call to monastic life. The rest of the book tells of her experiences in the convent, and Godden aligns the religious and the practical elements of nunny existence well - extremely well.
Godden gives characters for the reader to both sympathize with and not sympathize with, and this normalizes the nuns - somehow, I'd always assumed that nuns were more miserable than the rest of us, or more holy, or both. Likely both. This makes utterly no sense, I realize - holiness is accompanied by joy, but, having no real-life experience whatsoever with holiness, that's easy for me to forget. But the characters are so realistic - capable of petty cruelties, boredom, homesickness, humor. If no one at the convent is holy, what's to stop all hell from breaking loose in an environment that demands everything of you? The idea is fascinating to me - but only because I somehow expect everyone to approach the idea of monastic life with as much trepidation as I do.
It is a leftover Protestant inclination, I suppose, to view nuns and monks as archaic, a waste of potential, almost. The concept of monastic life is no longer commonplace - even Catholics are unfamiliar with it. We have our priests, and that's about as close as the most of us get to a life set apart the world.
...Food for thought.
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