The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (19 page)

She was from Brooklyn, last name Dempsey, an art major on scholarship at Marymount College, particularly drawn to medieval art. She also had been a regular at Broadway matinees and had worked on sets for the Blackfriars Guild. For a monastic nun she was very current on what was happening in American theater, even able to tell me what was coming to Broadway, because actresses would write to have prayers said for auditions. I guess you could say she had one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in Greenwich Village
.

Dolores met one other nun that first visit: the guest secretary, Mother Columba, whose family name, coincidentally, was Hart. Mother Columba came from an intellectual Yankee family of no small accomplishment. A graduate of Smith College with a master’s degree from Radcliffe in a day when such a thing was rare for a woman, she had been a teacher in the English department at Smith. She spoke French fluently and had a passing knowledge of theater. In fact, she had known the famous stage actress Maude Adams. Mother Columba had produced some major scholarly contributions to monastic studies—especially in regard to the monastic women mystics of the twelfth century. She had translated and published the works of Saint Hildegard, which have, to this day, continued to earn royalties. Like Dolores, Mother Columba was a convert to Catholicism.

Mother Columba had a tiny voice, wore thick glasses and was almost completely hunched over from, I would learn, endless hours at her desk. She was a scholar. She had a romantic imagination and a drive to which I immediately responded. I found her a very dignified lady
.

I don’t remember having any problem with conversing through the grille, and in those days the grille separating the enclosed nuns from the guests had a double row of lath. You could not put your hand through it, and you could not pass a nun a piece of paper without crumpling it. But the grille didn’t obliterate the feeling of intimacy for me
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The chapel at Regina Laudis was quite different from Catholic churches I had seen in LA, Chicago and New York that were similar in their adornment. This one was small, almost cozy, its stained-wood walls lending a decidedly country feel. It smelled like roasting pine nuts and was sprinkled with golden light shining through yellow stained glass, which dotted the two or three small windows in no particular design. Entering the chapel was like walking into a warm piece of toast
.

I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so the entire room appeared to be lit by teeny sparkling lights, which were, in fact, candles burning in cut-glass vases. The altar was a simple wooden table with a runner of crisp white linen. At the back of the chapel, behind a large wooden grille, curtained off from view, was the choir area where the nuns prayed. The chapel had a cleanness about it, a simple waiting room where I felt the Lord was waiting
.

Women guests were housed in a nearby white farmhouse named Saint Gregory’s. It was comfortable and spotless. Vegetarian meals, simple and filling, were taken in the guest refectory. Although I was a steak eater by preference, I was always on a diet, so the fare was pretty well down my alley
.

Regina Laudis was the only Benedictine monastery for contemplative nuns in the country (there was one other in North America, in Canada), and the Community followed the Primitive Observance—Saint Benedict’s fifth-century Rule. It was an ancient pattern of
ora et labora, “
prayer and work”
.

Prayer consisted of singing the Divine Office according to the monastic breviary seven times a day and once at night beginning with Matins, at 2:00
A.M.
, and continuing through Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None and Vespers to Compline at 7:40
P.M.
Interspersed were periods of Lectio Divina—holy reading—and private prayer
.

Manual work included all the tasks necessary in a large monastic household: the charge of the sacristy, library and storerooms; cooking and baking; cleaning, laundering and sewing. During the summer there is outdoor work in the orchards and gardens and indoor work of preserving. A large place was given to arts and crafts such as painting, bookbinding, vestment making, ceramics and printing
.

Intellectual labor consisted of study of Holy Scripture and the Church, the
Rule of Saint Benedict
and the history of monastic life as well as of Regina Laudis itself
.

The history of the founding of Regina Laudis is thought to be the basis for the Clare Boothe Luce magazine story that became the successful 1949 film
Come to the Stable.
I remembered having enjoyed that movie as a child, but it bears no relationship to the actual events. Loretta Young and Celeste Holm play nuns, and it is set in Connecticut. The similarity ends there. The two screen nuns are not quietly devoted to a life of contemplation, prayer and work. These ladies toot around Bethlehem in a jeep, seeking support to establish a children’s hospital, and they get their building from a New York gangster
.

The roots of Regina Laudis are found in the seventh-century Abbey of Notre Dame de Jouarre in France. In 1936, a young American woman, Vera Duss, had just received her medical degree from the Sorbonne and was beginning a career in medicine when she stunned her family by entering religious life at the Abbey of Jouarre. By an unprecedented decision by the abbess, Miss Vera, even though only a postulant, became the abbey’s doctor
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During World War II, Jouarre was seized by the German Army, and the abbey was occupied by Nazi officers. After the United States entered the war, the now-consecrated Mother Benedict Duss was forced into hiding. Because she was an American, her mere presence in the abbey was a constant danger, and more than once she was kept from falling into the hands of the Gestapo by the quick thinking of her loyal friend, Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, who had wanted to be an actress before entering monastic life
.

On August 27, 1944, the Abbey of Jouarre was liberated by the Allied Forces under the command of General George S. Patton. As Mother Benedict watched the convoy of American soldiers moving through the village, she vowed to make a commensurate response to their victory over oppression. She was determined to find a way to bring contemplative Benedictine life to the land of the liberators, her native country
.

That vision was never out of her thoughts or her prayers through the long, slow and difficult period that followed. She finally received support from two important men—Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the papal nuncio to Paris who would later become Pope John XXIII, and Cardinal Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI
.

Fortified with their blessings and practical advice, Mother Benedict and Mother Mary Aline sailed to New York, arriving with exactly twenty dollars between them plus the names of two Americans, Frances Delahanty and well-known artist Lauren Ford, who became their benefactresses, not only taking the nuns into their farmhouse near the town of Bethlehem but also bringing their mission to the attention of Robert Leather, an industrialist living in the area
.

Leather was a devout Congregationalist who owned a large piece of land there. He wanted his land to be held intact in perpetuity, and he gave it to the nuns, knowing that they would care for it as a sacred place. This wooded hill became the center of the eventual 450 acres of land, both cultivated and wild, that the Abbey of Regina Laudis comprises today
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There was a large barn on the land that Leather had converted into a brass-polishing factory but which now stood unoccupied. The factory was eventually remodeled and became the monastery building. Before long, the Community grew to eight with the arrival of six nuns from Jouarre. A small farmhouse on the land was converted by the nuns into their first chapel as well as their living quarters. This little red-and-white house, my introduction to Regina Laudis, later became the guesthouse for male visitors
.

—
That story would make a better movie than
Come to the Stable.

The Benedictines are named after their founder, Saint Benedict, who was born in the Umbrian town of Nursia in the year 480. Benedict came from the aristocracy and was a student of law in Rome, but, abandoning family wealth and career, he set his mind on serving God, joining a community of similar seekers in a village at the foot of Mount Affile, where a miracle occurred. This miracle concerned an earthenware colander his nurse had placed on a table. It was knocked over and broken, which left the nurse distraught. Seeking to comfort the distraught nurse, Benedict picked up the pieces and began to pray. When he rose from his prayers, he saw that the colander was once again whole
.

The occurrence caused Benedict to become so renowned that he left the village. After living as a hermit in a cave for three years, he made his way to Subiaco, choosing a life of hardship. It was this coming together of holiness and hard work that was to become his great legacy
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Benedict founded a monastery at Monte Cassino, where he wrote his Rule. The Rule stressed living in community, and over centuries like-minded groups who lived by it became known as the Order of Saint Benedict
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I did not have an educated opinion about the Benedictines or what set them apart from the other orders with which I had come in contact. During my first visit, I didn’t really discuss Benedictine life with either Mother Placid or Mother Columba, so when they mentioned the
Rule of Saint Benedict
I was curious about it. As neither sister offered me a copy, I bought one in the monastery art shop, where it was hidden behind jars of honey and bags of tea and skeins of wool—all prepared by the nuns
.

—
Obviously, no one was trying to “sell” me
.

I read through the Rule while I was visiting. It grabbed me with the first words of its prologue: “Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart.” I found it a simple commentary that spoke to me about the dignity of being human. We are meant to serve God with the gifts He has given us. Sin is not so much doing something wrong; sin is not being true to who we are. That someone would have that light in the fifth century was a discovery for me
.

My grasp of Benedictine life would develop more fully after I entered the monastery, but somehow even then I found it very right for me. I felt a tremendous rapport with the Rule’s basic premises-simplicity, discernment and praise of God. When I left that weekend, I thought that, however Regina Laudis interpreted the
Rule of Saint Benedict,
I could accept it personally
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Upon reflection back in Manhattan, my hoped-for mission had been fulfilled at Regina Laudis. I had found it restful; I had recharged my batteries and now was eager to get on stage again. Latent thoughts about a vocation had not been stirred up
.

I was again taking bows with the cast every night, holding hands as applause rolled over us—what was it Anne Baxter said in
All About Eve?—“
like waves of love”. I loved the theater, and I loved the movies, and I wanted more than anything else to grow in my career. Why would I look anywhere else
?

Memories of the monastery, however, remained in my thoughts. Regina Laudis was the perfect place to go to integrate the weariness of a long run and the anxiety over what awaited me back in Hollywood. But I had to admit that there was something more
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I didn’t know then that I could have walked into any other Catholic convent or monastery anywhere in the world and walked away, keeping the life I had intact
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For the remainder of the play’s run, I made repeated visits to Regina Laudis. I attended Mass and Vespers and occasionally some of the other Offices, though never the 2:00
A.M.
Matins. I took walks—either alone or with another woman guest—exploring the land. I helped to clean Saint Gregory’s. I meditated. I had parlors with Mothers Placid and Columba but no other members of the Community. Visitors then were not passed on to other nuns with shared interests
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On each visit, Mother Placid greeted me with the same question: “Why have you come?” I always wanted to answer that I needed a first-rate catechism course. In her own splendid and lofty way—camouflaged a bit by the twinkle in her eyes—she smiled and said, “You return to give of yourself. When a person gives of himself, he gives what he is, his essence, just as God continually reveals to us His essence, which is love
.”

That’s how it had felt to me ever since I sat all by myself in the church at Saint Gregory’s School. I knew then I was not alone, that God’s presence was close to me. That feeling had grown stronger over the years. I had come to rely on it. I had come to want God even closer
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During my third visit, I met the founder of Regina Laudis, Reverend Mother Benedict Duss. She was a handsome woman and had the most incredible skin, soft and smooth, unlined. She seemed ageless. Her gray-green eyes were cool in the sense of remote—sometimes distant, sometimes thoroughly amused. She was radiantly joyful and spoke so positively about life. My first impression was that she was a very happy person. But as I left the parlor my estimation of her was harsher. How could she possibly believe that life is that beautiful? How could she be so naïve? She was a woman with professional experience, a doctor. A person that old and with her background should have some cynicism. Doesn’t she know how painful the world can be? Either she was enlightened or she was a boob
.