In This Small Spot (3 page)

Over their first few weeks together, the
five postulants got to know one another, sharing bits of their
backgrounds – “or more than a bit,” Mickey would have sighed. The
other four were all in their twenties. Abigail Morgan was the
youngest at twenty-one. She blithely told them, more than once,
that she had always known she would be a nun. She chattered
endlessly about the various convents she had visited before
deciding on St. Bridget’s. “Even my name led me here,” she laughed,
although she was never called Abby by the senior nuns who believed
nicknames were inappropriate. “She is so twenty-one,” Mickey wrote
to Jamie. “I often find myself longing to slap her.”

One of the biggest surprises for Mickey was
how easily irritated she was by little things. She had to force
herself again and again to swallow the sarcastic remarks which
seemed to jump onto her tongue. She had never considered herself a
mean person, but “can’t you
ever
be quiet?” she snapped at
Abigail one afternoon, earning herself a reprimand from Sister
Rosaria. Here, with so much focus on self-control and intellectual
pursuits, with no workouts, no hours of concentration in the OR, no
rushing about from place to place, no outlet for all of her pent-up
energy, Mickey felt the meanness gathering under the surface like a
boil, getting ready to erupt, “and one of these days, it’s going to
blow and all this nastiness is going to escape,” she would have
said if she had felt she could say such things aloud. If she had,
she would have quickly realized she wasn’t alone.

Tanya Petersen, a postulant who had come to
St. Bridget’s from Minnesota, was normally very quiet and
even-tempered. One afternoon as the postulants were on their hands
and knees cleaning the marble floor of the main corridor of the
cloister, Sister Fiona came by to inspect their work. Sister Fiona
was from Ireland, and was very particular about the cleaning of the
abbey.

“Hmmm,” she said, leaning over and swiping a
finger over the tiles. “Again, please.”

“But, Sister,” Tanya protested, “we’ve
already scrubbed the floor twice.”

Sister Fiona simply looked down at her with
a questioning expression.

“Yes, Sister,” Tanya said.

As Sister Fiona’s black skirts disappeared
around the corner, Tanya threw her brush into the bucket, splashing
herself and the floor with dirty water. Sputtering and blinking the
water out of her eyes, her pale Swedish complexion went a peculiar
blotchy pink as she fought to keep from swearing.

“I baptize you in the name of Sister Fiona,”
Mickey intoned in a deep voice, tossing Tanya a clean rag to wipe
her face. In a moment, all five were giggling uncontrollably.

Wendy Barnes was the second oldest postulant
at twenty-eight. She had taught in a Catholic school in
Philadelphia with nuns whose order she had entered and left after
three years, saying, “I needed an order with more discipline.”
Indeed, she seemed to embrace their new routine with scrupulous
adherence to detail and discipline, leaving the others often
feeling hopelessly undisciplined.

“I guess she likes rules,” Mickey shrugged
to Jessica Thomas, the last postulant in this year’s group. Jessica
was “round. It’s the only word I can think of to describe her,”
Mickey wrote to Jamie. “Her body is round, her face is round, her
eyes always look big and frightened and round behind her round
glasses, even her mouth when she sings looks like those tacky
porcelain angels Mom had on the mantel when we were growing up.”
But Jessica’s roundness extended to her personality. She was
unflappable, rolling with whatever came her way. She knew a little
bit about everything, and was always ready with a response if
asked, even if she never volunteered an answer. Mickey quickly came
to respect the intellect behind Jessica’s perpetually hesitant
façade, adding, “She’s probably the most intelligent one in the
group.”

Mickey remained vague about her background.
It had never occurred to her that her relationship with Mother
Theodora might be unique or unusual, but none of the others had
such a connection. Jessica’s family had known of the abbey for
years, coming from a nearby town for Christmas and Easter since she
was a child. The others had had most of their correspondence with
Sister Ignatius, the nun in charge of answering aspirants’ letters,
helping them through the entrance process, as she had Mickey when
at last Mickey had decided to enter. And, though her letters were
full of advice and encouragement, Sister Ignatius also used that
contact to size up the suitability of the aspirants. “This one will
do,” or “I have some reservations about this one; she seems better
suited to an active order,” she reported to the Council as they
decided whom to admit. “They asked me to wait a year,” Abigail told
the others, “Finish my degree. But I begged them to let me come
now. I didn’t want to be put off.”

Mickey had no idea if Mother had influenced
the Council to accept her, but sensed that her relationship with
Mother, if known, would set her apart from the other postulants
even more than her age and profession. “I worked in a hospital,”
was all Mickey had said when asked what she did prior to entering
St. Bridget’s.
Let’s hope that’s all that ever has to be said of
that,
she thought.

Following breakfast was the hour of Terce
and then Mass. Father Andrew was the priest assigned to St.
Bridget’s from St. Dominic’s, the monks’ abbey near Palmyra. Mickey
guessed him to be in his mid-fifties, his salt and pepper hair
cropped short with a tonsure. As he sang the Mass in Latin, his
beautiful baritone provided counterpoint to the nuns’ voices as
they alternated responses. Sometimes, Mickey got so caught up in
listening that she forgot to sing. A soft clearing of the throat
from Sister Rosaria snapped her back to attention as she scrambled
to find her place. Invariably, a sigh would follow from Sister
Rosaria’s direction.

After Mass another bell signaled one of two
work periods built into the day. Bells for everything. In those
first days, “I felt lost,” Mickey would recall later, trying to
remember what came next, but gradually, she began to recognize the
voices of the different bells: Lauds, Prime, breakfast, Terce,
Mass, work, Sext, lunch – and she began to feel the flow of the
days.

╬ ╬ ╬

“
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Simil
quoque cum beatis videamus…”

“Where charity and love are, there God is.
Just as the saints see –”

“No!” came a sharp rebuke from Sister
Stephen.

Work for the postulants was divided between
classes and helping in various parts of the abbey. The postulants’
classes initially focused on Latin – “which should still be taught
in schools,” Sister Stephen often lamented. “It would make our work
so much easier.”

Sister Stephen was a stern teacher, holding
the postulants to strict pronunciation and grammar. To Tanya now,
she said, “
‘Beatis’
is the object of the preposition
‘cum’
, and
‘videamus’
is first person plural, ‘we
see’, not ‘they see’.”

Mickey, who had taken Latin – “a million
years ago” – had a shaky leg up on the other four, but still
struggled to turn it into the living language of the Office. As
beautiful as the plainchant was, it meant much more when she
understood what she was singing, but she, along with the others,
was intimidated by Sister Stephen who “must be a hundred years
old,” Abigail had whispered during one of their first classes.

“Not quite,” Sister Stephen said drily as
Abigail quailed at being overheard. “Fortunately, my hearing still
works fine. But when you can ask me in Latin, I’ll tell you how old
I am. For now, back to Aquinas.”

As much as Mickey found herself enjoying the
challenge of learning Latin, their other class, Church history, was
another matter. She and Mother Theodora had talked at length about
how to distinguish one’s faith in God from one’s feelings about the
Church and some of the things it had committed or permitted in the
past.

“How do you reconcile yourself with that?”
Mickey had asked in frustration during one of their early
conversations.

Mother Theodora thought for a while. “I
assume you were born in the United States?” Mickey nodded. “Why do
you stay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the United States government has
committed unimaginable atrocities against the native people who
occupied this land before us. It sanctioned Jim Crow laws and other
forms of discrimination against blacks, and still sanctions
discrimination against homosexuals today. Why don’t you leave? How
do you reconcile yourself with being a citizen of a country that
could do those things?”

“Believe me,” said Mickey ruefully, “I’ve
thought about moving to Canada more than once.”

Mother smiled. “Neither of us can change the
history of the world we are a part of. And as angry and ashamed as
we may be by aspects of those histories, what we can offer now is a
commitment to work for justice and to see that those atrocities are
never allowed to happen again.”

“What about your vows?” Mickey
challenged.

“What about them?”

“Don’t your vows mean you’re supposed to
consider the Church infallible?”

Mother shook her head. “No vow can compel us
to accept anything we truly feel is against our conscience. I am
bound to a certain level of obedience to my superiors,” she said,
“but I feel a greater obligation to work to right the wrongs that
have been committed in the name of righteousness.”

After months of reflection and prayer on
that conversation, Mickey had decided that she would not allow her
philosophic disagreement with the Church’s politics and history to
dissuade her from testing her vocation. What was testing her
vocation was Sister Renatta, the nun who taught Church history.
Part of Mickey’s irritation was triggered by Sister Renatta
herself. She was very thin, with hollowed-out cheeks and large
eyes, made even larger when framed by her wimple and veil. Her face
often bore an expression akin to a trance as her eyes would fill
with tears in response to some vision only she could see. She
looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of one of the
illuminated medieval texts in the library, and she spoke in bland
platitudes that gave Mickey the distinct impression that she could
easily have been quoting from a twelfth century manuscript. Mickey
doubted that Sister Renatta had ever questioned anything in her
life, placidly doing and believing as she was told. Mickey thought
perhaps she was alone in her impatience with Sister Renatta until
one morning when Sister Renatta had kept them past her allotted
time, pretending she hadn’t noticed Sister Stephen pacing
impatiently at the back of the classroom while she breathlessly
concluded her lesson on the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Mickey
heard Sister Stephen mutter to Sister Rosaria, “One foot already in
heaven, that one.”

Chapter 4

Spring came in a rush of color as flowers and
trees and bushes within the high stone walls of the abbey gardens
all burst into bloom at once. The nuns, even those who weren’t
gardeners, reveled in the color as they wandered the enclosure
during Recreation. Selected cuttings were used to bring spare bits
of color into the Chapel and the common room. “We don’t want to be
garish,” Sister Rosaria said, as Mickey smiled at the thought of
the nuns being garish. But, “in a sea of black and white, more than
a little color can seem like too much,” Sister Rosaria insisted
seriously, with a reproving glance in Mickey’s direction.

As the weather warmed, the postulants and
five novices – three first years and two second years, wearing
their black habits with short white veils – were recruited to help
on the abbey’s farm. The abbey kept a small dairy herd, chickens
and a few requisite barn cats to keep the mouse population under
control. The cats were all spayed or neutered, courtesy of the
local veterinarian who cared for the occasional sick cow or helped
with difficult births. In addition to the animals, the abbey raised
hay to feed the cows through the winter months and kept an apple
and peach orchard plus a large vegetable garden. A total of a
hundred acres was enclosed within the abbey’s outer fences.

Sister Regina directed the juniors as they
planted the vegetable seedlings she had tenderly nurtured in the
abbey’s small greenhouse. Wearing work aprons and sleeves, they
planted the young plants in the rows Sister Regina had prepared in
the garden.

This work, the first physical outdoor work
Mickey had done in weeks, was like a tonic to her. Her cheeks were
flushed and she felt like she had extra energy. By the time they
got to the refectory for lunch after a couple of hours spent
working in the garden, she was famished. Mickey hadn’t been sure
what to expect from convent food – “funny how worried we all were
about that,” she wrote to Jamie – but she was pleasantly surprised
at the heartiness of the meals. She considered it fortunate that
she preferred plain food, but she never left the table hungry.
Second helpings weren’t frowned upon, but leaving food on the plate
was. Sister Rosaria only needed to admonish them once about that.
“Being hungry isn’t a sin; being wasteful is.”

Tanya, Jessica and Abigail all seemed to be
as hungry as Mickey was after their morning’s work in the garden,
but Wendy took only a tiny helping of food. “She’s starting to look
like Sister Renatta,” Tanya murmured. Looking at her more closely,
Mickey realized Wendy had lost a good bit of weight. Sister Rosaria
obviously noticed as well. “Believe me, abbey life will provide you
with all the suffering you think you need,” Sister Rosaria reproved
Wendy when she saw the meager portion she had taken. Mickey hid a
smile. Sister Rosaria had been postulant mistress for a long time.
“Picking you up after you faint is more suffering than I need.
Eat,” she said sagely.