The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (39 page)

Father Prokes met with the entire Community every Tuesday morning, and I was very taken with his homilies at Mass, which he celebrated for us whenever we did not have a chaplain. He was a pinch hitter, so to speak. None of our chaplains made the impact that Father Prokes did. They conducted Mass, performed other chaplain functions but did not really enter into our Community life the way he did. He was a robust, energetic and vital man whose relationship with us would last for more than twenty years
.

Father Prokes called a meeting of the whole Community to discuss the proposed buildings that would comprise our future monastery, specifically the new sanctuary. He spoke about architecture on three levels—artistic, intellectual and spiritual—as if it were a living thing. He was working so hard to get his message across that he was sweating. I’ve never seen an actor work as hard on stage
.

He asked for our ideas on how the sanctuary should be designed, stressing that to plan the buildings, he had to know who we were, not only as a community, but as individual persons. No one said a word. He showed us his drawing of the altar, which I didn’t like at all. When he asked for comments, I was the only one who raised a hand. I said I thought it looked like a giant whistle
.

Father asked if I had an idea of what the altar should look like. I said I would like to see a baldachin over the altar—a canopy with a decided feminine image, perhaps a mother and a child—but I wasn’t sure exactly what it should look like. The immediate response from the women was that our church would be too small to incorporate a baldachin, but Father Prokes suggested I make a model to show what I had in mind. Two weeks later I presented a clay model of my baldachin, which contained a molded image of our Lady and the infant Jesus, and both were naked. Father Prokes found it “lovely but not practical” for the proposed sanctuary
.

One of the older nuns, however, found it obscene. One night, she took the model from the studio and buried it in an uncultivated area in the enclosure known as Saint Mary’s Woods. This was not done surreptitiously. Oh no, she told me she had buried it to “save” my soul. She also said something I have not forgotten to this day: “You
say
nothing because you
know
nothing. You
know
nothing because you
are
nothing
.”

Since childhood, I had lived very independently. When I got into films, I was always being interviewed, listened to, and I got fond of saying what I wanted to say. I didn’t like to be told to shut up
.

“When Dolores came in and also, for that matter, when I came in four years earlier,” Mother Abbess said, “the Community was different from what it is now. You walked into an atmosphere that was
theirs
. There was a real separation, and nobody told you anything. It was tight, especially tight for someone who was used to communicating, talking about herself a lot, that sort of thing. All of a sudden, you could not communicate. Think about that.”

“You are not asked to think; you are expected to obey”, Mother Placid explained. “Obedience isn’t easy, and you’re not obeying just the major superior; there are so many people you have to obey along the way. It is more than culture shock. It’s humanity shock.”

I often wondered if I should just be grateful that everything was determined by superiors who knew God’s will better than I, leaving me free to apply myself to loftier matters. “Obedience”, I was told, “is practiced by observing all the rules, customs and practices of the Order and by making the will of superiors my own.” But
my
purpose in coming to a monastery was to find
God’s
will in
my
life
.

Beneath my feeling of separation was an unshakable sense that the soul of this Community could not be dry or dead, that it was moving timidly toward the spirit of relationship. I recognized undertones of longing to push away from the encrustations of the old ways and move toward the new forms that allowed a broader freedom to find that new spirit
.

Father Prokes was instrumental in awakening that spirit when he said he needed to know us not only as a community but as persons. Father felt strongly that, because we were following an ancient monastic practice, all of us were in denial about our professional lives. And he insisted that for a woman to become a religious devoted entirely to God she needed to integrate everything about herself, including what she had done in the world before she entered an order
.

“
Don’t cut it off,” he told me, “assume it. You are going to have to maintain absolutely in this Community that you are what you are—an
actress.”

—That was something a Jesuit taught a Benedictine
.

Father Prokes managed to reignite many of the feelings that I was trying to put out of my feverish brain. Denial of my previous career would cause it to fade away from memory, and my professional gifts would never be utilized to the fullest. And this applied to all of us. We could not truly contribute to the Community if we buried our gifts
.

“It wasn’t so much restricting women from utilizing their gifts,” Mother Abbess stressed, “as there was no venue to use them. There was no way to employ their talents. Then the women were assigned work according to the needs of the Community.”

Down deep, I felt Reverend Mother Benedict was of like thought—indeed, hadn’t she jumped to my defense on my entrance day with the opinion that the new generation must be listened to
?

However, she was also faithful to her formation at Jouarre with its strict monastic structures going back over a thousand years. I found that it wasn’t until she had the guidance of Father Prokes that she found a way to explore the concept of women in the Community connecting to the professional background that each brought with her
.

Even without direct communication, I became sensitive to an undercurrent of unrest within the Community, and I perceived that this agitation was directed at Reverend Mother Benedict. I wasn’t sure what the rumbling was all about, but I remember saying to myself, “I have to do something about this.” What that could possibly be I hadn’t the foggiest idea
.

“At that time,” Mother Abbess remembered, “Reverend Mother’s desire for a land-based community began to cause resistance among some of the women. Regina Laudis, as the only enclosed Benedictine monastery in the United States, was rooted in the hierarchical model of French monastic life. Some of the older French nuns objected to Reverend Mother’s plan. They were still groping to find a comfortable niche in America and preferred preserving and bookbinding to raising animals and baling hay. The newer members of the Community were not only Americans; they came from academic situations, from professions, and they simply were not prepared to become farmers.”

However, an immediate land-based problem had to be faced by the entire Community, professed and novitiate. Burritt Hill Road bisected the monastery property. Once used by the neighboring towns of Bethlehem and Woodbury, it had been closed to resident travel when Robert Leather turned the land over to the nuns. But now the townspeople wanted the road reopened. This would cut the monastery enclosure in two and make it impossible for the nuns to cross the road without breaching the restrictions of a cloistered order.

I was invited to a meeting of the elders to discuss how we could negotiate a plan to ensure that Burritt Hill Road remained under the jurisdiction of Regina Laudis. The road was becoming a hot issue. Some members, however, did not think the land was important enough to cause this fuss. Their attitude was that we should live the monastic life behind grilles and stop risking our health in the exhausting responsibility of caring for so much land
.

One of the older nuns sat knitting like Madame Defarge throughout the meeting. The click, click, click of those knitting needles was annoying, but no one in the room made an effort to stop her. I didn’t care if the woman wanted to knit, but she was plainly showing her disdain for the subject at hand, which irritated me. I took it as long as I could, then went to her, grabbed the needles from her hands, and slammed them to the floor, growling, “Shove these and see if they’ll knit!” and left the room
.

Dolores’ action shocked the nuns into silence. Mother Abbess recalled, “This was the first time such a thing had happened. We were not used to giving personal opinions when not asked to do so and certainly not in such a violent manner. But most of us were secretly pleased. It was, I believe, a defining moment in our Community life.”

For my part, I was immediately sorry for what I had done. Not for the action itself—she deserved it—but for what it might mean in terms of my not being able to adjust to monastic life. When I left the meeting, I took a walk in the field behind the house until I could go no farther. I glanced over my shoulder at the barn with the hills in the distance, and in that moment an image of the Wyeth painting I love flashed before me. I was bowled over by a single thought: Christina, I know you at last!

When I next saw Reverend Mother, she made no mention of my outburst. I spoke to her about my experiencing Wyeth’s painting of
Christina’s World
on an intimate level. Christina, I was now sure, was not retreating
from
anything. She was going
toward
something
.

Reverend Mother gave me a very knowing smile and said, “Isn’t it wonderful to receive signs
?”

As Benedictines following the monastic way of life established in the fifth century, the Regina Laudis Community did not adopt all of the Vatican II allowances. Many orders experimented with modified habits or eventually chose secular clothing. We did not. Reverend Mother felt that our traditional black habit effectively enabled our choir work just as it was—signing, sealing and enclosing us. We still wear the habit. Even when we work, we wear the blue denim habit she created, using as her inspiration the work clothes worn by local laborers
.

The Latin Mass was replaced by Mass in English in most American churches but not at Regina Laudis. The chant, too, was discarded by others, but Reverend Mother held fast that Saint Benedict’s edict “You will sing the Office” was at the heart of the foundation and must be kept. Regina Laudis remains one of the few religious communities in the United States that sings the whole of the Mass and Divine Office in Latin
.

Reverend Mother taught us that the chant has the power to communicate the life of God as no other music does. “You are singing the Word of God. You are not the author, only the medium. You take in the Word and possess it in order to release it. You have to be really at peace in order to do that successfully, because each person will possess the chant in a different way. You have to be so acclimated to it that you don’t stop to think about it anymore. You don’t need to because it s
in
you. That’s the indispensable condition for singing it
.”

The chant functions as a daily discipline and spiritual glue. Each day Gregorian chant gives our Community its spine. It is a form of labor that comes naturally to some; others of us have to sweat it out. I did not have a strong singing voice, but Reverend Mother told me I had a perfect voice for chant
.

—But then, she was also fond of saying, “You can tell a nun anything except that she can’t sing
.”

A fourth nun soon joined the monastic cadre responsible for Miss Dolores. Mother Cecilia Eichelmann was assigned to teach her the basics of chant as well as exercises for singing and breathing. Mother Cecilia had been a music major in college. She had a beautiful voice with perfect pitch. She was the oldest nun and very stately, up on a pedestal in the Community.

—
She was one of those people you went around very gingerly. She described herself as a porcupine
.