Visit to my past

I’m off for a two-week visit to my past so this is my last post until October.  First I am attending a reunion of about a third of the women who,  like me, joined the Maryknoll Sisters in the fall of 1958.  Then I am visiting my sister Bernadette, and joining in a three-generation family birthday roast,  a “Bob Blast” to celebrate his 60th birthday.  I think it’s been sold to him as merely a family get-together, so he may be a little non-plussed to discover that he’s the centre of the table.

On the roof

I spent about five hours yesterday on the roof of our house scraping off the moss that has been accumulating there for years.  It looked awful, but even worse, comes down in unsightly bunches whenever there’s a storm and either clogs the gutters or makes a mess where in lands on the stone walk below.  The roof now looks much better.

I don’t know what the neighbours thought about my being up there, but I do know Peter doesn’t like it.  He didn’t try to stop me though, for which I was grateful.  Still, it’s not my favourite recreation.  I’m not particularly afraid of heights, but I’d rather be reading a book.

Convent life: trying to get out

I think, in truth, I spent most of my years in Maryknoll trying to get out.  This might seem like a simple process for most rational people since all I had to do was literally walk out the door.  But I was convinced that I had a vocation.  And a vocation isn’t something one chooses for oneself.  A vocation is a calling from God that comes only to a selected few, and as I saw it, I could say either yes or no to God.  So getting out of the convent meant finding some way of getting a message from God that He didn’t want me there any longer.

During the Novitiate, my strategies were pretty transparent to everybody but myself.  I found strange lumps that I hopefully took to the nurse.  It was a normal breast bone.  I developed headaches.  The infirmary gave me an anti-depressant that had the atypical effect of turning me into a hyperactive wreck unable to sleep at night.  I came down with a suspected case of appendicitis (or I thought perhaps stomach cancer) that was cured with a laxative. 

Throughout these exhibitions, the novice mistress remained unimpressed.  “You want to go home,” she said with total clarity, “because you want to take care of your younger brothers and sisters.  But your father is remarried.  They do not need you.”  She was right, of course.  Obviously the ill-health strategy was not going to work.  I would have to think of something else.

Before we were accepted to take our first vows we were asked to fill out a questionnaire.  I don’t remember what was on it, except for one question which asked “Have you been happy while you have been at Maryknoll?”  My best friend told me she’d answered no.  “Phyllis!”  I said in as much sincere surprise as I would have felt had she announced that 2+2=3, “That’s the wrong answer.  They won’t accept you.”  Her response was quite reasonable:  I don’t think being happy is the point.

I was right though.  Phyllis was not accepted to take vows.  And I remember thinking that if only I had said that I wasn’t happy, instead of giving what I knew was the right answer without any reference at all to how I really felt, I would have been sent home too.  Instead, I resigned myself to answering God’s call to be a missionary nun.

But it was going to be a bumpy ride.  The 1960’s had started.  We had Pope John XXIII and the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War for starters. 

Preparing to be a nun: the novitiate

The process of becoming a nun usually involves four stages.  The first, when one is a postulant, lasts for about nine months.  The second stage, known as the novitiate, generally lasts for two years.  If one survives these two hurdles, the community permits you to take vows – sacred promises of obedience, chastity, and poverty.  At first these vows are for temporary periods, one or two or three years.  At Maryknoll, it was a full nine years after first entering the convent before women were allowed to take permanent vows.

The novitiate is a time when aspiring women are socialized into the intricacies of convent living.  During the first year of my novitiate, our group was sent to Topsfield, Massachusettes where we were isolated from any outside contacts, and were introduced to the monastic side of convent life.  We marked  the hours of the day by reciting the Divine Office - the morning hours of Matins, Lauds, and Prime, during the day Terce, Sect, and None, and at the end of the day Vespers and Compline .  It is an ancient rhythm of prayer, a changing ritual of psalms, readings and hymns that marks the feasts and seasons of the year.  We were required to ask permission for anything we wanted to read, including the Bible, which under ordinary circumstances we were not permitted to study privately.  We were not Protestants, after all, but were told that only the Pope and Bishops could be relied on to interpret the Divine Word without heresy.  We convened weekly to confess our faults in a public display of self-accusation called Chapter of Faults and were required to ask permission for any deviation from the daily routine.  If we needed new clothes, we took our shoes or underwear or worn stockings to the superior who would either require us to mend the item again, or permit us to requisition a replacement. 

At the end of our year of separation, we were returned to the Motherhouse in Ossining  for the second year of our novitiate before taking our first vows.

The year was undoubtedly an initiation ceremony.  The world was changing, though, and I think there was an unresolved contradiction in the training we received.  On the one hand, there was the monastic tradition of almost a thousand years of withdrawing from the world, of silence and prayer and self-abnegation.  On the other hand, from the very beginning, the Maryknoll Sisters were an American order dedicated to living among and with the poor in foreign countries where they were expected to learn the language, and understand local customs.  One was not going to do this effectively in demure silence and by keeping ones eyes cast down. 

In fact, I think many young sisters went into the missions with unbounded good will, immense generosity and fortitude – and in what I now consider rather terrifying states of naivete and innocence.   

The McCanns: A tragedy whatever happened

Last May a four-year-old English girl disappeared from the bedroom where she was sleeping with her younger brother and sister in Portugal.  Her parents were having dinner about 100 yards from the apartment, and when they went back to check the children, Madeleine was gone.  Despite world-wide publicity, an audience with the Pope, and several reported “sightings,” Madeleine has not been found.

Her parents, two medical doctors, returned with their two children to England last week, but the Portugal police think that Madeleine’s mother accidentally killed her, and that the parents somehow hid the body, and five weeks later transported it in their rental car to a new hiding spot.  There is gripping DNA evidence to support this hypothesis, and the police offered Kate McCann (the mother) a reduced sentence if she confessed.  After sixteen hours of interrogation in which she denied responsibility, they released her.

The problem is that the DNA evidence was gathered under dubious circumstances, most of it collected months after Madeleine’s disappearance and not gathered according to the standards which a court of law in England would require.

It’s almost impossible to find a happy version of this story.  At best, two parents have lost a greatly-loved child, and are now being accused of having killed her.  Or possibly two parents did kill her with an overdose of medicine she should not have been given, and they are trying to cover it up.  Perhaps they will get away with it.  Perhaps, guilty or innocent, they will be convicted of manslaughter and concealing a body, and imprisoned for years in Portugal.  Their two year old twins will be stripped of their entire family – mother, father, sister.  Rightly or wrongly, two medical careers will be destroyed and a mother and father faced with the anguish of loss I find unimaginable. 

To me, each of the versions is possible.  Kate McCann’s family are adamant that she could not do such a thing.  But I know that people think I am a good, kind, loving person with principles, and I also know that I have seriously thought about killing someone.  If I had, and then come to regret it, I’m not at all sure I would have had the courage to admit it.  There have been times in my life when I have not admitted my responsibility even over small things.  I did break that plate but didn’t say so.  Yes, I dented the car fender.  No, I didn’t tell the clerk that she’d just given me too much change.  Or admit that I’d said something disparaging about a friend.  How would I respond if, accidentally or not, I’d done something much much worse?

The investigation continues but the Portuguese police have not accepted any outside help, even from the internationally acclaimed Scotland Yard’s Child Abduction team. 

I guess to say it’s worrisome is the understatement of the decade.

Maryknollers after 50 years

Early next week I am flying to the US for a reunion of about a third of the women who entered Maryknoll the same year I did.  Most of us left Maryknoll years ago, and hold an amazingly diverse array of current beliefs.   The group includes doctors, psychologists, nurses, writers, social workers, lingists  and everything from practicising Buddhists,  Christian fundamentalists and serious non-believers in most religious doctrine.  I’m looking forward to the weekend with a mixture of apprehension and interest.  More after the event.

Before leaving I must fit in a dentist appointment.  I lost a gold filling, which I swallowed before I realized I wasn’t crunching on a nut.  If the dentist I’m seeing Monday is half as good as the ophthalmological consultant who transformed my eyesight, I will consider myself undeservedly doubly fortunate.

Becoming a Maryknoll novice

After Mom died I returned to Maryknoll, and four weeks later was accepted into the Novitiate.  For the uninitiated, this means we were novices, admitted to the next stage in the process of becoming full-fledged Maryknollers.  We were given new names and began to wear the full Maryknoll habit, covering us from head to foot, but were distinguished from nuns who had already taken vows by a white instead of black veil.   My new name was Sister Bernadette Mary.  It was a day of celebration, but it was going to be several years containing some surprising revelations about what life in this convent was really like.

The ceremony admitting us to the Novitiate was attended by our families, and my Dad brought my brothers and sisters to New York to be there.  We had several hours to visit afterwards, and that is when he told me he and Aunt Mary were getting married.  Aunt Mary had been my mother’s best friend since college, and she had been married to mom’s brother who had died severl years earlier.  He had also been my father’s law partner. She had four daughters, the youngest of which was my age and we were friends.  I used to love to stay over night there and listen to the wonderful stories Aunt Mary told us.  

So Aunt Mary was not a stranger.  And clearly my family needed a new mother.  What I didn’t understand then was that Dad needed a wife just as much as his children needed a mother, and that, paradoxically, was a problem.  My two oldest brothers, Tom and Dick, had both seen what I had seen over the years when Mom was still alive.  Aunt Mary fascinated my father.  There was some electricity between them for years that none of us ever saw between our parents.

So the fact that the marriage was announced and took place within months after  Mom had died made it feel like a betrayal.  In retrospect, I do not believe it was.  In fact, I am now convinced that Mom knew, even approved, the marriage.  She was an extraordinarily generous woman who would have cared most of all that her husband and children were cared for.  It also explains to me how she could have told me so clearly that I was not to return home for them.

From this day onward I embarked on a double life.  One was in Maryknoll where I tried hard to be the nun I believed I had been called to be.  The other was with my younger brothers and especially my sisters who wrote me anguished letters of pain and conflict.  I wanted desperately to go home to help them, but it took eight more years before I finally found a way to convince myself that God did not want me in Maryknoll. 

For better or worse, by that time, my brothers and sisters no longer needed an older sister to be there with them, and I did not return to live in my family home.

Well done

It’s taken me a little while to figure this out, but “well done” doesn’t mean exactly the same thing in English as it does in American.  My first inkling that this was so was the morning after my second cataract surgery.  It was six a.m. and after a restless night in the hospital I was feeling a little disoriented.  Snead does his rounds to check on the results of surgery the day before at this bright and chirpy hour and out of sheer gratitude for what I already knew was 20/20 vision in at least one eye, I was doing my best to appear coherent.   After shining lights into my eyes at various angles and asking me how I was, he finished up by saying “well done.”

“Well done!?” I screached.   Well, I now know that when Snead says “well done” it means roughly the same thing as Americans saying ”Have a good day.”  In other words, this brings our business for the day to a satisfactory close.

Not understanding this then, I said “I’m not the one who has done well.”  To his credit, Snead did not miss a beat.  It’s a team effort, he said.  I thought then – and still do – that this was a refreshing exception to the Brag and Blame strategy of so much of modern life.  Politicians especially have raised the strategy to dizzying heights, taking full credit for anything good that happens and blaming somebody else for what isn’t.  Seeing someone share credit for what is manifestly outstanding success isn’t your everyday experience, is it?

I hear the phrase “well done”  often these days and am reminded how I learned what it means in these parts of England.  But in truth when I talk about Snead and my cataract surgery, that little bit of American in me still means “well done” the way Americans mean it.  In fact, I mean fantastic. 

Mom’s funeral

On May 19, 1959, our postulant mistress, Sister Edmund Damien, called me into her office.  When I arrived she said “I guess you know why you’re here.”  “No,” I said honestly.  She told me my mother had died that morning, and that, accompanied by an older Maryknoll novice, I had permission to go home for the funeral.  I didn’t cry.  I don’t remember feeling anything.

That evening I was in my cell – the curtained area around our bed and locker each of us called our own in the large dormintory – packing the few things I would need.  Kathy Rossworn, a fellow postulant, came to say how hard it must be for me and how sorry she was.  I remember her expression of kindness as she sort of half laughed and half cried and asked if there was anything she could do –  ”polish your shoes or something?”  I’m sure it is not so, but it is my only memory of anyone suggesting to me that my loss might have been profound. 

I took a plane to Ohio with Sister Bernice Marie, whose maturity my superior trusted.  I was expected to wear my postulant outfit during the entire visit, and was not permitted to take my younger and brothers swimming because that would have meant putting on a swim suit.  After all, it was clear by the mere presence of my Maryknoll chaperone that I now belonged to Maryknoll, not to my family.  And there was the recent mandate from my mother herself.  I had a vocation to be a nun, not to care for her children.  I remember sitting on their beds before they went to sleep talking to my younger sisters who wanted to know what would happen if Dad died too.  And saying to Dorothy, the youngest as we stood in the church “be brave.”  She was seven.  Cathy was ten, the twins two years older, Bernadette fourteen.  They were so vulnerable and courageous.

Hundreds of people, of course, came to the wake and to the funeral.  Many people wept openly, but I thought I was grown up enough not to need a mother anymore.  I was aware that I desperately wanted to be there for my younger brothers and sisters, and found leaving home this time far harder than it was when I left for Maryknoll the first time.   But I returned to Maryknoll thinking I had been responsible and mature.  

It would be years before I finally faced the devastation caused by my mother’s death and sobbed without restraint. 

Mom’s last six weeks

Although I didn’t know she had been told that she had about six weeks to live, my mother knew.   I now look back at the selfless, undramatic courage she showed during those last remarkable weeks with amazed admiration.  At the time, though, I took it for granted.

She did not look for pity or attention or stage dramatic scenes.  She had six weeks to finish a job that needed years.  Her oldest son was just twenty, her youngest daughter seven.  She spoke to each of us individually - what we should do, how we should carry on, and that she would be there looking down from above.  With the older ones she told us openly that she was dying, and we talked about it freely.  Mom was dying.

This openness has had a profound effect on our family.  We talk about dying far more often than most families, and when my Dad, and my younger sister Mary learned they were dying, we all knew.  We never pretended that everything was really all right, that the medical treatments were working, that somehow we were immune from death.

Mom and Dad came to visit me at Maryknoll, and I was given special permission to have dinner with them in the guest dining room.  We spent two days together.  She told me about the challenges she thought each of us would face as we grew into adulthood, our strengths and vulnerabilities.  Her message to me was that she and Dad did not want me to leave Maryknoll after she died.  I had a vocation and I was not to return home to take care of my younger brothers and sisters.  I did not argue, thinking she probably had several years to live, and although she was dying, it was still sufficiently distant to disregard.

 Two days later she was dead.