The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (51 page)

In his mid-seventies, Mother David’s father died. Mr. Serna was a darling man, an earthy, full-blooded Peruvian. Mother David was concerned that she would have to buy a commercial casket when she really wanted to lay him to rest in a coffin of his people. I heard myself volunteering, “I’ll build it
.”

Mother Mary Aline was dubious that I would be any more competent in carpentry than I had been in farming. She set the bar high by insisting the coffin be identical to the ones she had known at Jouarre and supplied her own sketch as a guide. Using almost forgotten skills I had acquired from Grandpa and newly learned design knowledge from Brother Jerome Blackburn, a gentleman who had helped build our barns, we built Mr. Serna’s coffin in three days. It was very simple and, I thought, quite beautiful. Mother Mary Aline gave me a good review. She said it was exactly like the coffins at Jouarre
.

I had stumbled upon my area of productivity. When Granny came to visit, I was hesitant to tell her I was the Community coffin maker, but she reminded me that I had come by the job honestly—Great-Grandfather Bowen, remember
?

I always looked at the making of coffins as a way of strengthening faith, because to build a coffin for someone who is close is very difficult. It is done with the realization that this person is going to eternal rest in the pine box being fashioned by your hands. That you are creating this sarcophagus, this cocoon, is very sobering
.

—How many coffins have you made?

   
In the twenty years I was the Community’s carpenter, I think fifteen. There are eleven sisters at rest in coffins I made
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There had never been a designated carpenter at Regina Laudis, and at first I worked in the blacksmith shop. I made most of the door latches in the monastery, many chairs and tables—I’m particularly proud of the television cabinet I designed and made for our common room. I helped Father Prokes build the sheep barn, which was a major undertaking. I remember the first thing he did was lean a tall ladder against the side of the building and send me to the very top to nail down siding. It was two stories! I thought I would die. But I did it. From then on, I proudly wore a tool kit on my belt
.

—On occasion, I still do
.

In time, I got an assistant, Sister Nika Schaumber, a very pretty young woman with the sunniest smile. The two of us were allowed to leave the enclosure to attend night classes in carpentry at Kaynor Tech in Waterbury. The course in basic carpentry skills lasted a year, and when we completed it the two of us had learned enough to finish the half-completed carpentry shop interior ourselves. Students in Kaynor’s electrical course came to wire the shop as part of their training
.

My formation mothers had repeated over and over that all work must be stopped at the first bell in order to be on time for the Office. That rule was supposed to be a part of me. But one day in the shop I was just about to finish cutting a board with the power saw when the bell rang. I was annoyed because with one quick push I would finish the job and wouldn’t have to set up the whole thing the next day. But just before the last chime, I heard my formation mother’s voice in my head. “Your core reason for being is to praise God.” Immediately I stopped the machine and turned to leave
.

But it didn’t stop. I looked back to see that the center pin holding the saw in place was wobbling frantically. Suddenly the blade flew off into the space where I had been standing. I was shaken to the bone. If I hadn’t listened to that bell, the blade would have struck me in the heart. I’ve never forgotten the impact of that moment
.

I remained our carpenter for over twenty-five years. In that time, I taught others to make coffins—among them, oblate Richard Beauvais and two novices, Sister Ida Nobuko and Sister Alma Egger
.

Sister Ida Nobuko was Nobuko Kobayashi, who carried the ring at my Consecration. Eleven years later, after earning a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa, Nobuko converted to Catholicism and entered Regina Laudis. It was a life change that caused her traditional Japanese family great pain. After a few years, her father became quite ill, and she made the decision to leave monastic life and return home
.

Sister Alma Egger, who has a master’s degree in fine art, was the director of art education at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center in Connecticut when she began to relate to Regina Laudis in 1995. When I was hit by the neuropathy in the late 1990s, I had to face the reality that I was no longer able to continue as carpenter, and Sister Alma took my place. It was devastating at first to give it up, but there is nothing greater than having your place taken on in continuity
.

“Mother Dolores shared her carpentry expertise with me”, said Sister Alma. “I ran for a lot of ‘gozintas’. She can be quite formidable. I always have a sense that she’s connected, that she knows about things instinctively”—she tapped her forehead—“up here. I mean about us, as well.”

In the late seventies, Henry Ellis was introduced to Lady Abbess and Father Prokes and, subsequently, to the whole Community. Mr. Ellis was an engineer by profession, a conservationist by commitment and a Catholic by conversion. His home was on Shaw Island, one of the smaller San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State—four thousand acres of unspoiled land with only a hundred or so residents.

One-quarter of Shaw was owned or controlled by the Ellis family, and Mr. Ellis had decided to donate three hundred acres to Regina Laudis for the purpose of establishing a Benedictine community there. He paid a visit to the abbey to make his generous offer, which came, he said, with “no strings attached”
.

The first thought that popped into my head was, “What’s the catch?” I immediately chastised myself for being suspicious. Was it because I came from Hollywood that I thought there had to be another agenda? I kept those suspicions to myself
.

Thirty-One

When I was a working actress I took on personal relationships with the characters I played. They became intimate friends who had a story to tell, and I was their medium for a while. I didn’t know what I would do when the matter of vocation hit me because I didn’t know what to do with the people who inhabited me and drove me so deliberately. If I had no part, I wondered, what would I do with myself
?

—Letter to Dick, February 1973

One morning Lady Abbess called me into her office. She took a folder from her desk drawer and handed me an envelope. I recognized it instantly as that fiery letter I wrote as a novice
.

“
I want to talk to you about these things you had a problem with a few years ago”, she said. “I think we are ready to look at them now. We have to see what can be done to integrate these considerations, or else I don’t know how the monastery will continue. Four deaneries will be formed at Regina Laudis. I would like you to be dean of education
.”

The purpose of the deaneries, she pointed out, would be to make sure that all the levels of the human person—emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual—were expressed and developed in each candidate seeking to be a nun at Regina Laudis. Classical monastic formation as it existed prior to the Second Vatican Council did not address all these levels, only the spiritual. Religion then was not a way of achieving personhood; it was assumed that all personal needs were integrated prior to seeking entrance into a monastery
.

Certainly those dimensions of monastic life must have been addressed from the beginning in some fashion. But it was an innovation to divide responsibility for these areas into deaneries—Formation, Liturgy and Choir—and, particularly, to add an Education Deanery that would underpin the others. What Lady Abbess and Father Prokes were proposing was unheard of in fifteen hundred years of Benedictine monasticism and did not have a precedent in tradition. Education in classical formation had only to do with academic study, learning about Scripture, the Fathers of the Church and the Rule
.

“
But I have no degrees, only a high school diploma”, I protested
.

“
You don’t need a sheepskin”, she tossed back. “The only degree I’m interested in is the degree in street smarts. You are more than qualified to deal with people on the instinctual level because of your training as an actress. An actress is able to identify with many personalities. An actress recognizes, she listens, she connects the dots. You have the additional gift of being analytical, and you must admit you have a strong commitment to push for the result
.

“
The classical approach is not going to be sufficient to educate modern women coming in to the virtues of monastic life. Nor is it going to educate me and the rest of us who were trained classically. We have to find the way to make that bridge between the experience of contemporary women and the classical line. You mark the point of a new era, a new generation of vocations, a new world entering the monastery. I feel you are the only person who can do it
.”

Well, I had to agree with her. A professional actress does have to be able to express the range of human experience, and I did have the training to know how to access those dimensions. I would find soon enough it would take a whole lot more
.

Change was necessary, but it took me a while to face the fact that I was dealing with something that didn’t yet exist. It remained in limbo for a long while, and I guess I was thought of as a dean of something. With no job description forthcoming, I wondered at times if Lady Abbess had made me a dean just to keep me from leaving
.

The definition was to come out of the meetings we had with Father Prokes, but there was only one meeting a week that the entire Community could attend. The whole idea of living in a corporate community structure was an awfully big issue to try to cover in only two hours a week. We were encouraged from the beginning to talk about what kind of deanery we wanted, but mostly we listened to Father articulate the principles of this new methodology in relation to the principles of our constitution. I took reams of notes that I prayed would enlighten me eventually, but the one thing I immediately grasped was Father’s intensity
.

With his guidance, I envisioned the Education Deanery as a forum for
anything
that people wanted to discuss. Education in this context is drawing out of the persons who they are, what their gifts are, what they bring to monastic life, ensuring that they
know
themselves and—this was important—can
express
themselves
.

I envisioned an Education Deanery in which ideas would come from a broader base of the Community that would permit the thoughts and ideas to rise—like a leaven—from the bottom to the top. You didn’t have to be professed; you could be a postulant and be heard
.

In preparation, I asked each nun to write a short biographical account of her life for my reference. But, as helpful as this curriculum vitae was, it did not fully address what I knew firsthand to be the crucial ordeal of the life
.

It’s a shock being in here. Once you enter, you feel and think things you never did before. All your patterns of life change; your professional life goes, and you are under the pressure of living closely with a lot of people. You suffer things piercingly. And, with nowhere to go with them, you can feel trapped
.

I did not want anyone in my care ever to hear the words I heard less than ten years before: “You
say
nothing because you
know
nothing. You
know
nothing because you
are
nothing.” A place needed to be provided where a woman could get things off her chest. I wasn’t that far removed from the younger women in age, a decade perhaps, and could remember feeling trapped, having strong views and nowhere to go with them. My tear-stained antiphonal reminded me of that every day. Perhaps, at least, I could be their sounding board
.

I invited every person to write down at the end of each day what she was experiencing and to do that without any fear that it would be judged or that the information could affect her relationship with her formation mother. Everything would be kept absolutely confidential. I called the idea “instinctual charting”, but it was simply giving the women an opportunity to say, “This is what’s going on in me”, and to trust that it was all right to feel whatever she was feeling
.

These pages were left in a basket I mounted on the door of my cell. They trickled in at first, but soon there were seven or eight pages waiting for me each evening. I would read them at night after Compline while the Community slept
.

I did not set up conversations with each novice to discuss her charting unless she asked to meet with me. The charting was not for me; it was for her. It could be enough just to write down the gripes. I would evaluate whether someone’s charting revealed something that should be changed or if the issue was an essential one for the process of becoming genuinely capable of submitting. But if someone asked to meet, I was available
.