The forbidden farewell

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. 

The Maryknoll publicity department

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.

Christmas Lite

Actually, it was a lovely Christmas.  I wouldn’t want to spend it this quietly every year, but as it turns out, it wasn’t quite as quiet as we’d planned.  And under the circumstances, Peter and I were glad we were not entertaining guests after all.

It started Christmas Eve morning.  Peter stepped out of the shower and it wouldn’t turn off.  We have an Aqualisa, the kind that holds its temperature constant, even when somewhere else in the house someone else flushes a toilet or decides to start the dishwasher.  It does this by the magic of electronics, which is pretty much all I know about how it works.  I can describe several ways in which the Start/Stop function does not work, however.  Or at least the Stop function.  It won’t stop if you take a kitchen knife and scrape the calc out around the edges of the Control Button.  It won’t stop if you take the front off the button and use a wooden toothpick to press the little outlets inside.  It won’t stop even if you get very wet and speak to it in language my mother didn’t know I’d learned.  Even if it’s Spanish.

It will stop if you go outside and turn off all the water coming into the house.  Unfortunately, this also stops water coming into the kitchen, the toilets, the sinks, and even the outside garden outlets.  Not such a great solution on Christmas Eve.  So I climbed into the attic (or loft as attics are called here in England), and found the valves controlling the water going into the master bathroom.  Turning them off gave us water in the rest of the house, but the entire master bathroom was dry.  It is also how I discovered that the valves were leaking, and that if something were not done about them soon, the bathroom water supply would be coming directly into the shower below through the ceiling.  I got a large plastic sheet that used to be a shower curtain to provide a temporary retainer.

Then I called our wonderful plumber, and apologized to his nine-year-old daughter for calling her Dad on Christmas Eve.  Oh, that’s okay, she said.  Can I have him phone you when he gets home?  Which he did.  I told him it was not a call-out emergency, but did he have any stop-gap solutions until he could come after the holidays.  He said to go back into the loft and turn the electrical supply to the shower off and then back on again.  “I don’t know why,” he said, “but this sometimes happens with your kind of shower, and this sometimes works.”

And it did work.  So by the time the church bells were ringing calling the faithful to midnight services, we once again had a functioning bathroom, shower and all.  Not what we’d thought twelve hours earlier we were hoping for Christmas, but glad for it after all.

Alan, the plumber, is coming next week to replace the faulty valves.  We’re hoping for a happy New Year.  That does mean, much as I appreciate him, seeing a little less of Alan in 2008 than we saw of him in 2007.

If you are wondering about my diet, I did lose a pound before Christmas.  Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I put it back on, and besides that, I also think my scale is off by about three pounds.  That means I really want to lose six pounds instead of three.  I wonder if learning to love fat would be easier than getting it off?

An anger that doesn’t diminish

Probably  because it’s Christmas, which is either the best or the most ghastly time for family, I’ve been thinking about Dad and the will that I described in the posting last week.  Besides, I talked to Tom when I saw him at Bob’s birthday party.  He’d already started drinking when he arrived, and I joined him in the kitchen partly because I was glad to see him, and partly with the hope that I could keep him from becoming too obnoxious – which he is apt to do when he drinks.

As usual, Tom began obsessing about Dad.  I suspect both his wife and his oldest sons had told him when the will was published that if he did not get his anger under control he would lose his family.  You could not make a more terrible or terrifying threat to Tom and I knew he had been making a serious and sustained effort to subdue it.  His approach has been Buddhist in orientation, and he told me that he’d come to understand that he and Dad practically lived on two different planets, that they saw the world so differently that they could barely communicate.  I agreed with him.  I didn’t add that I thought that both he and Dad had a similar blind spot when it came to understanding people, and that they both suffered from an inability to understand how often what they considered straight-forward honesty was actually humiliating and intrusive.   This is true even when they were – or are - trying to be complimentary.  I didn’t say this because I knew from experience I would hit a dead end.  So I listened, holding my own glass of wine, while Tom continued his familiar dredging of the past.

But since Tom said that his anger was much diminished, I was unprepared for his new version of family events in the early years after Mom died.   It was not based on any additional insights gained in maturity into the nature of the challenge facing my father left with eight children under the age of 18 after my mother died.  It was rather a tirade against me for not supporting him in his fight with Dad over the way he and Aunt Mary were treating the children fifty years ago.  I was astonished.  Since childhood we had worked together as a team, “raising our parents” we sometimes said, always discussing goals and strategy in our attempts to move Mom and Dad into the world we wanted to embrace.  I think he felt betrayed by my going into the convent – that it was a victory for Dad rather than for him – but I never suspected that he thought I should have entered into a family fight from the cloistered life of my first three years at Maryknoll.

I have been wondering why it is that Tom remains so implacably angry, and why I do not.  I think I consider Dad’s leaving the will he did as big a betrayal of the principles he taught us as Tom does.  So why do I forgive him, and Tom doesn’t, despite his great efforts?  Indeed, the number of people included in his circle of anger seems to be actually getting bigger.

I know Dad was concerned that Tom’s inheritance might end up with his wife.  They were embroiled in hammering out a divorce settlement when Dad was dying, and it was typically vicious and vindictive.  I understand that Larry was not included in the will because he was going to inherit a chunk of the land and our grandparents’ house down the road, and when Dad was still alive, it looked as if it was going to be worth a great deal more than in the end – that is, by the time Aunt Mary died –  it was. I don’t think these reasons are good enough.  Cathy inherited a house when her husband died, and Bob inherited a substantial pension from Mary, and both of them were given an equal share of the estate.  So I do not think these are valid excuses for Dad to have drafted the will he did and for Aunt Mary to refuse to change it when she could. 

I forgive Dad because I can see now that when Mom died he was faced with a dilemma that was beyond his skill to resolve.  I think he knew that if his marriage to Aunt Mary effectively broke down – whether or not it technically led to a divorce – his children would be even more bereft than they had been.  And Aunt Mary was not going to change.  When he wrote the will, he tried to make a compromise with her over his children and hoped that his children would go that extra mile.  It wasn’t necessarily fair;  it was even deeply damaging,  but it was the only strategy he knew and the one he’d used from the beginning of the marriage.  He wanted to leave Aunt Mary enough money to live on after he had died, and to do that, she had to have control of whatever he left behind for as long as she lived.  If she objected to the will, his fear was that she would cut out some or all of his and Mom’s children altogether.  Better instead to achieve something and hope that ultimately, we would understand. 

But I really forgive Dad for his weaknesses and mistakes because I now know myself well enough to know that I need forgiveness probably more than he ever did.  I know that it is only circumstances and not my own virtue that have prevented me from betrayals that are far far greater than what looks like a betrayal  reflected in the will.

Having said that, I will admit that I was never thrown out of the house.  Tom was.  I was not cut out of the will.  Tom was.  Larry was.  I don’t know if my ability to forgive would be quite so easily achieved if I had been.

A Donkey’s Christmas

I found this Christmas story in The Times newspaper.  These days I think rather more highly of the donkey than I did in the days of my youthful attempts at high flying. 

The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me     by Jeannette Winterson

Before it happened, an angel lined up all the animals – every one, of every kind, because this angel had the full list left over from the Ark.

Most were eliminated at once – spiders, monkeys, bears, whales, walruses, snakes.  Soon it was clear that four legs on the ground at the same time would be necessary to reach the qualifying round.  That left some serious competition – horses, tigers, a stag with antlers that branched into an unknown forest, a zebra painted black and white like an argument.  The elephant could carry the world on its back.  Dogs and cats were too small.  The hippopotamus too wayward.  There was a giraffe in jigsaw graffiti.  The camel was wanted elsewhere, as were the cattle.

.

After a long time, it was just the three of us:  the Lion, the Unicorn and me.

.

The Lion spoke first:  Present position:  King of the Jungle.  Previous history:  worked with Hercules and Samson, also Daniel in the Lions’ Den.  Special Strengths:  special strength.  Weaknesses:  none reported.

The Angel wrote it down.

.

Then the Unicorn spoke.  Present position:  mythical beast.  Previous history:  in Hebrew I am Re’em, the creature that cannot be tamed.  Special Strengths:  known to be good with virgins.  Weaknesses:  tendency to vanish.

The Angel wrote it down.

.

Then it was my turn.

“He’ll make an ass of himself,” whispered the Lion.

.

I did.  I am.  A proper ass.  Present position:  underdonkey.  Previous history:  Small underdonkey.  Special Strengths:  Can carry anything anywhere.  Weaknesses:  not beautiful, not well-bred, not important, not clever, not noticed, not won any prizes…

The Angel write it down, and down, and down.

.

Then the Angel gave us a tie-breaker.  Could we say, in one sentence, why we were right for the job?

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The Lion spoke first.  “If he is to be King of the World, he should be carried by the King of the Beasts.”

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The Unicorn said “If he is to be the Mystery of the World, he should be carried by the most mysterious of us all.”

.

I said, “Well, if he is to bear the burdens of the world, he had better be carried by me.”

.

And that is how I found myself trotting along, the red desert under my hooves, the sky rolled out like a black cloth over my head, and a tired woman nodding asleep on my back, towards the little town of Bethlehem.

This is my favourite part, but if you would like to read it, the rest of the story is published on-line at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3082491.ece

Christmas Eve gift

Two days ago, Chris Hopkins, a businessman in Yorkshire, ordered ten tonnes of snow on eBay and had it delivered to a children’s hospice in Whetherby near Leeds, so the children there could have a white Christmas.  As I write this, they are rolling snowmen, tracing angels, throwing snow balls, and sledding the inclines.

The man from whom Chris Hopkins purchased the snow has donated the proceeds to Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London.

Merry Christmas

Little House on the Prairie Family

As we were growing up on the farm in Ohio, we thought we were quite a special family.  We got into scrapes and troubles, but we were inventive and took care of each other.  We learned how to swim, and celebrated when one of the kids finally made it across the lake in one go.  We threw each other off the raft into the water, and played hide and seek in the fields of summer wheat.  I made cakes and apple pies and let the little kids lick the bowl.  We hid Easter eggs and made Christmas cookies in the kitchen and snowmen in the yard outside.  The boys learned to jump from the deck on the second floor when Mom wasn’t looking, and ganged together not to tell Dad about the latest breakage or accident.  We played 20 questions at the dinner table and discussed obtuse moral  questions like little theologians.  We sang songs around the piano, and at Christmas the house was decorated with two huge Christmas trees and masses of presents spread around the massive toy train that used up half the living room floor.

We thought we would always be like that, that things would never change.  But after Mom died, they did.  Dad began to engage in irrational temper tantrums, something I never saw because it never happened when Mom was alive.  I could barely believe the letters I began to receive from home.  Once Dad hauled the kids out of bed at one a.m. to remove all the dishes from the shelves and wash them again – and “this time do it properly.”  It was a desperate attempt to support Aunt Mary’s authority, and she did not try to moderate his tirades.  Cathy wrote and asked me if it were true that Mom had died because they were so bad.

Throwing Tom out of the house was, I think, the worst.  Because it crossed the very line Dad himself had drawn – not to ever let the sun set on your anger.  After Mom died, the sun set in anger quite a lot on our little house on the farm.

Politically correct Christmas carol special

A row has broken out in the press here in England about singing Christmas carols.  Specifically, the question is whether non-believers should be allowed to sing Christmas carols, or whether they are showing disrespect for believers by singing along all the while doubting the Christmas story.

Richard Dawson, author of “The God Delusion” confesses to enjoying a belt of Christmas carolling, and several prominent Jewish columnists have made similar admissions with equally dubious belief systems to buttress their rights to this cultural treat.

My favourite story, however, comes from a former student at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Saffron Walden near here.  At the school’s annual carol concert, their music director (who at the time was John Gardner, now aged 90) divided the congregation in half.  One half sang “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In” while the other half sang harmony with “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?”

I suppose there’s no hope for me.  I think it’s a wonderful idea and have been looking for someone to sing “I Saw Three Ships” while I harmonize with the “Drunken Sailor.”

My father and his oldest son

My brother Tom was at odds with Dad for as long as I can remember, which is back to when I was about two, and Tom was three.  Tom was in competition with Dad, and I think even he will admit he sometimes fought mean and dirty.  It was the conflict that so often exists between father and the oldest son, given its special character by the fact that Tom and Dad were vastly different personalities with quite different gifts.

Dad was a lawyer, an intellectual whose practical skills did not go much beyond boiling water.  He taught us a high set of moral principles and said that sometimes a great price had to be paid to live up to them.  Fairness in our family was a cardinal virtue, and when one person received something, we all knew that everyone had comparable rights.   Nobody earned special privileges because Mom or Dad loved them best.  By the same token, we were taught that prejudice was wrong.  Dad was always clear that the treatment of the Jews in Germany was a great crime, and so was the prejudice shown in our own country against the Blacks.

Alternatively, by the time Tom was ten, it was obvious that he did not have the skills of a lawyer, but that his engineering abilities and a capacity for farming would eventually far outstrip Dad’s.  Dad knew how to put gas in the car and tractor;  Tom could repair the engine.  Dad planned a farm with a lake stocked with fish, a tennis court, cows that gave us milk, chickens, pigs and orchards that fed us, bee hives that produced our honey.  But Tom knew how to get the cows back in when they got out of the field and strayed onto the country road or into the creek.  Dad earned the money to buy the tractor and pay Phil, but Tom knew how to farm the land and how to drive the tractor.

Tom thought that Mom was not happy.  She was too lonely, she was too often pregnant, she worried about Dad’s depression, and blamed herself for not being good enough.   I think Tom blamed Dad.  Unlike me, Tom did not take Dad’s authority as tantamount to the law of God.  If I went to my bedroom and cried because I could not be as happy as my parents wanted me to be, Tom didn’t want to die because he thought heaven sounded ghastly.  Sitting on a cloud with a bunch of angels worshipping God probably felt like an even worse scenario than our family where Dad was the undisputed king, and whom most of us adored.  Tom told me when I was three that there wasn’t a Santa Claus, and by the time he was seven, he was hitch-hiking rides with strangers against Dad’s clear prohibition.  He was always a rebel.

The worst trouble, though, began after Mom died.  Within weeks after her funeral, Dad told Tom and my brother Dick that he was going to marry Aunt Mary, a widow who had been my mother’s best college friend and had married Mom’s brother and Dad’s former law partner.  Tom was aghast and Dick had severe reservations that the move was too fast.  They told Dad this, but Dad, in love with Aunt Mary, and at the same time seeing a way to care for his family, brooked no argument, and the marriage took place four months after Mom’s funeral.

The transition was not easy for anyone, and Tom watched our younger sisters in anguish.  Mom had been an earth-mother type, while Aunt Mary was more sophisticated with an ironic sense of humour and a sharp tongue.  She was less permissive than Mom, and jealous of her position of authority.  As it became clear that Bernadette and Cathy in particular were beginning to be damaged psychologically by the new regime, Tom confronted Dad. 

This was bound to be a failure.  Tom and Dad never had had a comfortable relationship, and Tom lecturing Dad on his new wife was explosive.  Aunt Mary refused to tolerate it, and finally one night, Dad ordered Tom out of the house and told him not to come back.  Tom got in his car and drove away.  My sisters sat at their bedroom windows in shock and watched the tail lights of the car disappear down the drive. 

With the years, the wounds more or less closed, if they did not fully heal.  In 1979 Dad died, leaving his entire estate, as we expected, in trust to Aunt Mary.  Until she died in 1995, only Jack knew about the will.  He tried to get Aunt Mary to change it – it was in her legal power — but she refused, saying it was what Dad wanted.

The day after her funeral, Jack told us.  Dad had bequeathed Tom’s inheritance to Tom’s children instead.  Larry, crippled all his life, received nothing. 

Tom and Larry were the two who never fully accepted Aunt Mary into the family.  The will was her victory.  But we were stunned.  It seemed a betrayal of everything Dad had taught us.  In truth, it still does.

Grown-up families

An Irish friend of mine quoted someone to me about Irish families yesterday:  The most wonderful thing about an Irish family is that they are always there for you.  And the worst thing about an Irish family is that they are always there.

It’s not just Irish families. 

My many brothers and sisters are one of the great treasures of my life.  They are also among the most irritating people I know.  I think it takes as much tolerance and growing maturity to hold a large family together as we each grow up and develop our own personalities and points of view and values as it does to hold a marriage together as one discovers over the years what a surprising individual one is living with.  In this context, Christmas is the best of times and the absolutely worst of times for families.  We all get together in a state of anticipation, high tension, and stress, and inevitably it’s a tinder-box that can be set alight with the slightest spark.

Having just returned from a large family get-together and dealt with some of the inevitable topics of tensions, I’ve been thinking about the potential – and real – fault lines in our family.  Many of them reach all the way back to that farm in Ohio where we grew up half a century ago. 

Right now the scar that is most raw is what I think was my father’s betrayal of his oldest son, my brother Tom.  It is a scar that does not seem to fade with time, especially for Tom.  But I will save that story for my next post.