Religious
Life Nuns
live out an odd paradox
By DIANE ROCHE
On New Years Eve I celebrated
my 51st birthday in the company of women. Not too surprising for someone who
has spent the last 25 birthdays in the convent, as people used to
say in the Irish-Catholic neighborhood in which I grew up. But the group of
women who gathered in our simple house in North St. Louis are not nuns, and the
house itself hardly conjures up images of quiet cloister.
Instead, my companions were a diverse lot, drawn from the streets
of the working class neighborhood that surrounds our two-story brick house on
the corner of Knapp and Palm Street. It is a neighborhood in transition, having
endured years of arson and abandonment. That evening an almost rural quiet
prevailed. Only the rapid fire of semi-automatic weapons at midnight reminded
me that I live in the inner city and that the snow-covered fields across the
street are actually vacant lots that were once the site of handsome
turn-of-the-century apartment buildings and private homes.
The women are also in transition. As each of us tried to remember
and share the high point of the year ending, we learned that one of us has been
married several times, several of us have grand children, most of us have
struggled with serious physical, financial and emotional challenges. The one
thing we all share is some kind of connection with the Roman Catholic church
and a sense that we are becoming a community of support for one another through
that connection. I was also aware, as I listened to each one speak, that our
household, by its presence in and openness to the neighborhood, is becoming a
vehicle of hope and healing.
To be a Roman Catholic nun at the beginning of the 21st century is
to live out an odd paradox. Our heart-felt desire to be a healing presence in
the world calls us to be countercultural at a time when our secular life style
makes us almost invisible, if not irrelevant. Many years ago, when I was
teaching religion to ninth graders, the subject of vocations came up. I was
explaining that we lived a very normal life, that we all worked, took turns
cooking, wore regular clothes -- when one girl raised her hand. Sister,
why would I want to become a nun when I can do everything you do and have a
husband and kids as well?
In the old days the exotic routines and trappings of
religious life (the habits, the structured communal prayer, the imposing stone
buildings in which we lived) sustained a powerful sense that something out of
the ordinary and perhaps even holy was going on. The hierarchical structure
protected those at the bottom from many of the distractions and pressures of
ordinary life, and the time for personal prayer and reflection was guaranteed.
The witness that Roman Catholic nuns bore to their belief in God was powerful
and public.
Ironically, I would never have considered becoming a nun if all of
that hadnt changed.
By the 1970s, when I was attending a Catholic college in Boston,
the nuns on campus had already begun living in small communities and wearing
normal clothes. Many of their companions had already left and were making up
for lost time -- finding husbands and starting families. The significance of
all this was lost on me, preoccupied as I was with organizing the Grape Boycott
in East Cambridge and learning transcendental meditation. My friends and I
hitchhiked to various communes and admired those who had decided to live close
to the land, heating their homes with wood stoves and raising their own crops
and animals. While I felt a powerful desire growing within me to be of service,
I never gave a serious thought to entering religious life.
Then I stumbled upon a small group of those invisible
nuns living in an old town house in the South End, running a tot-lot for kids
and helping women from Central and South America find a market for their native
crafts. Young men and women from local colleges flowed in and out of the house,
sharing meals with the nuns and often staying for simple liturgies featuring
homemade bread and heart-felt, made-up prayers. I was enchanted.
In the 25 years since that first encounter (and my own entry into
the Society of the Sacred Heart), I have lived out several variations on that
theme of radical insertion: in a low-income apartment complex in Washington
D.C., a blue-collar parish in Seattle and now in this North St. Louis
neighborhood poised on the edge of gentrification. I have come to see the
subversive power that an ordinary and loving presence can have when it is
planted smack dab in the middle of despair. There is no exotic veil of mystery
to pierce; the neighborhood kids have seen me in my bathrobe at the back door
when they have shown up at two in the morning needing help. There is no
cloister to keep people at arms length; a crisis will turn our dining
room table into a command center for organizing the details of a childs
funeral, and our living room has served as the neighborhood watch center when
arson and burglaries required an organized response.
While we do not have the imposed asceticism of the liturgy of the
hours, we do experience the daily asceticism of availability. In order to have
quiet time to pray, I wake up at 4:30. A neighbor joins me and one of my two
housemates for morning prayer at 6:15. Our communal life does not inspire much
curiosity because there is a standing invitation to come and see.
This past Christmas Eve our quiet community dinner for three expanded into a
table for 10 with the last two guests literally showing up on our doorstep, one
of them in tears, just minutes before serving time. While it felt like the
miracle of the loaves and fishes to me, the community member who had cooked
felt a bit less edified and a lot more anxious.
While our life does not seem unusually interesting to our
neighbors, I have discovered that it does inspire great interest in the young
women who attend our academies. By living together and sharing what we have
with our neighbors we provide a powerful answer to the young freshman who
wanted to know why she might want to be a nun. Every summer I invite 12 girls
to spend 10 days living with us, sleeping together on the living room rug,
sharing two bathrooms and enduring the St. Louis humidity without benefit of
air conditioning so that they can experience for themselves what it feels like
to place your gifts at the service of children and adults who really want and
appreciate them. They love it, and I love having them here.
An artist friend (nicknamed Crazy Harry by the drug
dealers in the neighborhood) once explained his own passion for living in and
photographing desperately troubled environments by explaining the cycle of love
and need: I need your love, I love your need. By our very ordinariness, nuns in
the 21st century are perfectly positioned to play the humble role of connecting
both ends of this divine energy cycle: There are some of us who fit perfectly
on the governing boards of well-funded institutions and others who fit
seamlessly into the neighborhoods that need the services of those institutions.
Is it romantic? Not particularly. Is it satisfying? You bet!
Sacred Heart Sr. Diane Roche is the executive director of the
Old North St. Louis Restoration Group and Seeds of Change Community
Corporation. Her e-mail address is droche@rscj.org
National Catholic Reporter, February 23,
2001
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