God's Callgirl (24 page)

If you have ever been stung by an English nettle, whose barb lodges in the skin, you will know that the pain can stay for quite some time. Getting stung feels like a tiny—or not so tiny—electric shock, depending on your
sensitivity. We hesitated, but only to make sure what was expected of us.

I grabbed a nettle with both hands and was, of course, shocked by the sudden stings, but decided that the best policy was to proceed with a will. The nettles grew high and thick over a couple of large patches, as if especially cultivated. Soon the stings reddened our arms as well as our hands. We worked for about two hours, until the last weed came down. Then we tried to wash the pain out of our hands—and couldn’t. Water was a cool blessing on the raging heat, but the raw stinging would not go away. I couldn’t sleep that night from the burning and throbbing sensations, and found that nobody else could either.

‘Why did we pull out all those nettles without gloves on?’ The question came from a small Irish nun and was spoken gently at recreation time.

All of us were interested in a reply and we listened expectantly. Mother Mary John heard the question, but because there was no rational answer she gave none at all and looked steadfastly down at her needlework.

WE OFTEN HAD
to listen to words about the value of suffering. The thought of getting closer to Jesus through pain held an immense attraction for our collective ego. Life at Stella Maris was intense; suffering seemed to be on the menu daily.

In the main chapel, I always had the feeling that it was better to stay quite still, to avoid attracting attention. It was bad enough that, being so tall with a straight back I was sometimes mistaken for Mother Clare, the General’s personal assistant. She had a ramrod back and very square shoulders. We were both slim and nearly six feet in our shoes. The resemblance ended there, except when I did a
deliberate and very naughty impersonation of the way she walked, holding my shoulders very straight.

Mother Clare had a classic face; she was a dark, stern beauty, with eyes that sparkled behind her large glasses, giving an inkling of her brilliant mind. She had a great intellect and had been a marvellous disciplinarian and organiser in her day. I imagine that she was sadly missed by her school. Mother Clare’s phenomenal ability was now shackled to working out how to make the General more comfortable throughout her many discomforts.

In the chapel it could be very disturbing to feel eyes trained on you most of the time. If I sat down when I was expected to be kneeling, I could expect an enquiry as to why. It wouldn’t do to explain that you were menstruating rather heavily and felt a bit weak in the tummy. The General walked up and down the aisles to see who was awake and who was not, and to gauge what the quality of our meditation might be. She preferred that we used no book to prompt our meditation other than the one read out in chapel, though written reminders were not forbidden altogether. When I used my missal one morning to prod my brain, she kept walking agitatedly past me. I was usually at the end of the pew, beside the aisle, so I wouldn’t obstruct the others’ view of the altar. The swish-swish of her habit went back and forth, and I kept my eyes down. She rattled her rosary beads with flailing arms, to see if that would make me notice her. I pretended not to, daring her to rip the book out of my hand. She didn’t, but it must have been a close thing.

Later that day, we were called together in the convening room for a talk by the General. Seats were arranged in rows in a room barely large enough for us all to breathe together, and a table and chair were set up in front. As usual, I was at
the end of the row, this time on the far side away from the door, beside the large expanse of latticed window.

The General began by challenging some individuals about their practice of the rules and their religious life. Sister Bridget, a brilliant history teacher, was well known for her innovative chart-making and her students were achieving particularly good results. This Irish nun in her mid-thirties was the coordinator of studies in her school and obviously frantic that she had been forced to leave her department and classes suddenly unattended. I saw her distress as her charts were ripped up at the General’s command and she was ordered not to return to the school at all. Sister Bridget was beside herself with confusion, unable to make head or tail of this.

The General’s attention suddenly turned to me. ‘Sister Mary Carla,’ came the voice, interrupted by little burps of indigestion, ‘what do you think about when you meditate?’

My reply was immediate, panic-driven. ‘Nothing,’ I replied, turning scarlet at the attention I was getting and the silliness of my answer. I had given it instinctively, the kind of classic denial used in TV soapies, though I had never seen one.

The General seized on the error. ‘I thought as much,’ she retorted, producing a giggle in the audience.

I kept my head down, determined not to say another word. I was so overwhelmed by the sudden attack that my mind went numb anyway and I couldn’t have responded even if I’d wanted to. It wasn’t any fun for the General to keep on talking to a moron, so I was left alone and a dissertation on meditation followed.

After that, I became acutely aware of the questionable nature of the trances I spontaneously fell into. For example, I might be reading a book and a passage would so inspire me that I would become oblivious to my surroundings. This could last for some time, and it might take a bell to wake me up.

One summer afternoon I walked to the end of a pathway that finished at a fence with a wheatfield on the other side. Being tall I could look over the fence easily. I was in rapture at the soft winds rippling the wheat and the sight of red poppies and blue cornflowers that I used to know as a child in Holland. On this day, a lark was singing. The little creature seemed to be tireless. Whenever it dropped back into the wheatstalks for a breather, it wasn’t long before it was up in the sky again, singing as if its lungs would give up at any moment, chirping to…what? Its creator? An invisible mate? I chose to imagine that it sang to praise God, and my heart joined in with the music.

Long after the song was over, and the sun started to set in the sky, I remembered where I was. I had been standing in that one spot all the time, totally transfixed. This peculiar behaviour didn’t go unnoticed by the others. When the General had asked that question, there were several nuns who had looked at me curiously and were keen to hear the answer themselves. Well, they got none. And no amount of humiliation would make me stop using these escape mechanisms. Even when I was very little, I had learned how to escape into the painted woods on the ornately gilded picture in our sitting room. My father and I used to walk in the real woods portrayed there, so it was easy to imagine being on the track that led through the forest, smelling the fallen leaves as they were crushed underfoot, noticing the spiders hanging in their diamond webs, spotting the toadstools and being on the watch for fairies and gnomes.

A SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT
came my way. The General gave me the instructions herself; this was most unusual. Sister Angela and I listened together and I was fascinated by this
opportunity for a close-up look at the ‘orang-utan’. The resemblance was so striking that it filled my mind and the softly spoken instructions got lost in my reverie and an endless series of interruptive little burps. I didn’t think it wise to ask the General to repeat herself; besides, I believe now that she deliberately swallowed most of her words so we couldn’t possibly understand her. Her powerful presence was the only thing that stayed with me from that meeting.

I hoped that Sister Angela had listened and understood better than I had. All I had gathered was that I was in charge of picking tomatoes for distribution to all the houses, and Sister Angela was to help me. There were up to five locations to think of, including the children’s boarding school. Did the General tell us how many people were in each house, so that we could distribute the tomatoes in the proper ratio? I couldn’t remember anything more than her mumbling something about ‘Here’ and ‘There’.

Picking the ripe tomatoes with the effervescent Sister Angela (I had known her since postulant days) was pure pleasure. The smell of tomato leaves brushing against our clothes was intoxicating. Plucking a ripe tomato from its bush, with the stalk still in its centre (I did remember this part of the instructions!), and filling my hand with its healthy red roundness, felt like a little miracle each time. The hothouses held the luxury of mystique and sunny, warm light.

Our canvas bags laden with loot, our difficulties began. ‘Sister Angela,’ I said, ‘how many people do you think are staying at Stella Maris just now? Do you know how many live at the vicarage and how many elsewhere?’ Alas, she knew no better than I, so we made rough guesses and went around surprising the occupants with our gifts. Certainly, nobody knocked back any of our tomatoes!

Talking was not authorised, and I felt so guilty about breaking this rule with Sister Angela that my head was bent low when we crossed the public road. A car was cruising slowly by—probably full of sightseers lucky enough to come across a couple of local ‘penguins’—and we were both so self-conscious and kept our heads so bent down, that we crossed the road at widely different angles instead of side by side. The sight probably caused merriment in the car, but our silliness made me grit my teeth.

We had been carrying out our tomato routine for about two weeks when we found out we weren’t doing a good job. The news came via an open talk by the General to the gathered communities in the convention room. The crowded gathering was treated to a sarcastic description of our stupidity, ending with, ‘There was no rhyme nor reason in what they did. The allocation of tomatoes showed a complete lack of common sense.’

Had the whole thing been a set-up to make us look bad? I had no idea. Sister Angela didn’t seem to mind very much; she was a bouncy person, always smiling, with a wonderfully good heart and happy to have no brains, the kind who barges in where angels fear to tread. I, however, was feeling slightly desperate because I dimly realised that, in this humble institution, the only way to get a responsible job—a tangible sign of esteem—now or in the future, was by impressing your superiors.

Sister Angela and I were relieved of our tomato-picking duties.

IT WAS THE
time of Vatican II and ecumenical rapprochement, which meant that Christian churches began to respect each other’s sincerity and essential sameness.

Pope John XXIII had bravely called a Vatican Council during his short reign, in January 1959, three months after coming to office. It was an extremely difficult thing to accomplish; the Council didn’t open until October 1962 and even then the bulk of Pope John’s work was not completed until after his death.

The story of how he dealt with the machinations of the scheming, self-important Curia makes fascinating reading. The spirit of Pope John somehow managed to get past conservative thinking. The result was the now famous movement called the
Aggiornomento
; loosely translated it means ‘bringing things up to date’.

So now we were to study the research into the Bible that had been done by the Church of England (Catholics had not been so keen on the Holy Book after Henry VIII ran off with it). Mother Clare was in charge of Biblical studies and she dealt decisively with our scandalised reactions.

‘Of course Jesus may have had brothers!’

‘Clearly it is true that he could not have been born on 25 December, because at that time of the year it is too cold for sheep in the vicinity of Bethlehem to be outside. The Wise Men from the East were probably just symbols, like their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.’

We were treated to some really eye-popping possibilities.

‘Jesus may have been the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, and that was why Joseph agonised so much about whether to get his promised wife stoned or not. That might have explained why Jesus grew up secretly with the Essenes and studied for the priesthood, which he later betrayed when he let their secrets of health and other forbidden knowledge out into the open.’

Such first-class scandalous hypothesising! This was the kind of open bravery that the Catholic church largely
withdrew from when Pope John’s great spirit left the earth, and his too-frank successor died after only thirty-three days in office. After this, the politicians in the Curia succeeded in installing their puppets once again.

It was curious that some FCJs were so open, at that particular time, and yet progress within the order slowed down and came to a halt. In Ireland in particular, FCJs loved the status quo and stuck to what had seemed good enough to them since time immemorial.

When we weren’t studying or praying, we were doing chores, and there were plenty of them. I daresay we earned our keep, working inside the house and in the gardens. We also did exquisite embroidery at recreation time. I dressed a series of dolls, and even embroidered their petticoats. I never knew what happened to them, or any of the tablecloths and doilies and napkins that we made with so much skill.

Suddenly, I landed myself a very different kind of job. Mother Mary John stopped me in the corridor. ‘Sister Carla, the sister who usually prepares the parlour for the priest’s breakfast and serves it after Mass is ill. Would you like to do this service while she is absent?’

I was asked not ordered, I noticed, and said I was pleased to step into the breach. I was surprised too, because I didn’t think of myself as having such fine sensibilities as parlour manners. Well, there was no time like the present, so I took on the job with courage and a little bit of confidence.

The job required two women: one sister to prepare the food tray in the kitchen and the other to do the serving. There was one nerve-consoling factor: everything was the same from day to day—the same food, cutlery, crockery and napkins, trays, and the same procedure of ‘this goes first and that comes next’. The only thing that ever changed were the flowers in a little vase. The best part of my job was
definitely picking a little flower here and there from the lush garden for the breakfast table.