The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (53 page)

—Did you ever really come close to leaving?

   
I never actually packed my suitcases. I just needed to talk it out
.

Have you, in your present capacity, talked it out with young nuns?

   
Oh yes, but I’ve never met one who was as tortured as I was. I often go back to moments I had with Reverend Mother late at night—she was a night person, too—when I was facing an impossible situation. She would talk with me for hours sometimes. And I held on. So when I talk with a young nun, I never give up on her because Reverend Mother never gave up on me
.

Remembering this transitional period Mother Lucia said, “In terms of the Community, our world of European spirituality broke open, so to speak, when we saw that Mother Dolores and Mother David could work together as a
team
in Education and Formation. I think it was that relationship that formed our new generation in the monastery and made it possible for us to stay.”

When I was a postulant, Father Prokes words had made an indelible impression on me. He said that in order to design a new monastery building, he had to know us—individually—and we had to know ourselves as well. In the time that had elapsed, we hadn’t scratched the surface of this challenge. Really, the only time you said what you thought was in chapter meetings. But there was no discussion; you just said what you thought. Then the abbess made a decision
.

After the Second Vatican Council, a whole process of modernizing the Roman Catholic Church, and religious orders in particular, began, which offered us space to explore self-awareness. Father Prokes introduced the idea that in order for us to be creative within the Community we should have more input, which, in turn, could enable the abbess to make better discernments. He stressed that we did not come to a contemplative order because we couldn’t make it in the world. We came to a contemplative order because we had reached some manner of success in our fields and with that could have a true sense of place in monastic life
.

He encouraged us to reach for a more mature way of living together. He proposed bringing to consciousness the various levels of a person’s development, using as a model the study on creative process developed at the University of California at Berkeley, which recognized the four stages necessary for creative growth: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Father believed that these stages corresponded to what was needed to grow in religious life and—this was especially important to him—that recognizing them could help the nun understand herself better as a spiritual person and how she might best serve the Community through her own capacity
.

We gave the stages our own names: instinct, justice, love and union. The instinct—or preparation—level in the creative process of an actor is reading the script, feeling the story. The justice level—incubation—is letting his role in the narrative germinate, by studying the lines, going interior with it, trying things out. Illumination—our love level—is when the actor gets insight into the character and he begins to come alive. It is when the actor experiences the “Aha!” moment
.

At the union or verification level, the actor’s insight has to be validated. He must see if what was clear and exciting when he had the illumination holds up in terms of gelling with the other actors and connecting with the audience. In other words, he has to get out there and do it
.

In the monastery, going through the different stages results in the discovery of a nun’s special authority, what we call her domain. The process of discovering the domain of each individual nun is a corporate effort of the Education Deanery. Everyone gets involved as the nun considers her genealogy and instinctual depth, or
bona;
her essential background of professional excellence, or
dona;
her knowledge of self, or
cura.
Spiritual depth and capacity for care of the Community are informed by these fields and allow each woman to see how she can become a leader for the good of the Community
.

Sister Anastasia Morgan, who was Catherine Patrice Morgan and a student in the land program when I met her, spoke to me of Mother Dolores.

“I knew her from her movies on television”, she said. “For me, the thing that attracted me to actors and actresses—more than what they looked like—was their voices. Even as a little kid, I loved her voice. She’s quite small really, but her voice mirrors what a large person she is. If you were going to give Mother a size, she’s much larger than I am.” Sister Anastasia stands six feet two and weighs in the neighborhood of 250 pounds. Since her Consecration, she has been the Community’s blacksmith.

“I met Mother Dolores through the Education Deanery, which had not been long in existence when I entered. I got to know myself more in the process through Mother and Father Prokes, who was the first man, outside my father, who saw a positive thing about being a giant.

“In those formative years, when I was desperately trying to figure out my footing, Mother saw me where nobody else ever saw me and, in so doing, helped me accept who I am and what I was struggling with and trying to ignore.

“She gave me a project—to build a table to be raffled off at our annual fair. She said to look around the blacksmith shop and see what materials were available. I looked and looked but didn’t find anything suitable for a table that was meant to be special. All I found were pieces of scrap metal and discarded slabs of wood. Mother said, ‘Let the scrap tell you.’

“The table was built of only leftover wood and iron. Lady Abbess said it was so gorgeous we couldn’t raffle it off. It’s in our monastic art shop, and every time I see it, I think back to my life before I came here. I always felt like I was scrap, a piece of useless trash. I look upon my mission now as monastic blacksmithing. In our shop, we use stuff that everybody else has gotten rid of because they think it’s no longer useful.”

—
The continuing work of the deanery, you see, is to take the woman where she is in process and try to affirm her past experience as relevant and necessary to her mission as it develops through her monastic life. She has to learn to accept herself, her experience, as the preparation for her call
.

The doorway that opens to full realization is not a psychological doorway, but it is at the deepest level of our personhood where we are receptive to the love that is always seeking us, bound in union with our love of God and God’s love for us. It’s when we begin to understand this mystery that we are capable of apprehending ourselves as a new person, able to act in ways that were beyond our own expectations
.

If we are open to the love of God—a love that is revealed to us through the love we share with one another—then we will discover who we really are. This is what Saint Benedict, in the prologue to the Rule, calls the “expansion of the heart” that is the fruit of religious life
.

I have kept every chart that has been given to me. My cell is bursting with boxes of charts. I’ve been told I should burn all of them. I can’t. I have never thrown one away simply because I feel that anything that was written from that level of human experience is sacred. I’ve written on the boxes, “To be destroyed at my death”
.

Mother Lucia reminds us, “Out of all Mother Dolores hears and absorbs from the simple charting, she puts those desires into a dynamic pattern that brings the Community into greater coherence around its own mission. Do you know what her domain is? Choreographer of domains.”

Thirty-Two

The Education Deanery has supported programs that I feel have allowed as much integration of and reflection on the monastic experience as hours and hours spent reading books on Saint Benedict. They have cut across the daily plodding rhythm of the abbey and have helped to open up the Community
.

The isolating separation between the professed and nonprofessed is now gone. It is allowed that we are responsible for one another. The newcomer may have relationships within the Community, and the members are encouraged to interrelate to help her. In short, she trades the romance of contemplative life for the reality in all its seriousness
.

At the time I entered, the ideal was to forget the past and give yourself fully to the life in the monastery. The unique gifts you brought with you into the enclosure, along with your instinctual responses, were ignored in favor of heroic obedience
.

We now accept that the Community is served better when we help each woman take her place through recognizing her passion and claiming her particular giftedness. Using her gifts will not be the only thing she does within the cloister, but it will be the area through which she approaches everything else
.

There have been times when a conflict simmering inside me threatened to boil over. I still face some of the same questions I faced when I took vows—whether I am capable of fully living the life of a cloistered nun, whether I am up to the task. The questions are always there. But because we are no longer without communication, I can talk about it with a sister
.

—
Traditionally, members of a monastic community always went to the abbot or abbess to discuss a problem. We’re much less stringent than we were then. When Mother David became the abbess, her method became “You do what you need to do and then report to me.” Lady Abbess ‘approach was more “I’ll tell you what to do.” When the Education Deanery began, it became permissible to go to another member of the Community, but, personally, if I have a deep problem of the soul, I still go to the abbess. For me, this tradition has always been a workable way of getting through a crisis
.

Between Clothing and First Vows, the canonical year remains true to the custom of complete separation from the outside world. But now, at the end of that year, we have the commitment step. The novice can petition for an informal pledge to vows. In my day, it was all canonically regulated. When you fulfilled the time, and the novice mistress and Reverend Mother felt that you were ready to go on, the chapter then voted. You were called in and told you were received—or told you were not received. If you were not received, you were gone within a very short time, and nobody knew. That’s how things were done then. We are probably the only community now that has the commitment step
.

—When you were a novice, did you know any of the women who left because they weren’t accepted?

   
Yes
.

Were any of them close friends?

   
I couldn’t make close friends then
.

Another concept now integrated into our monastic life is fraternal sponsorship. Younger women who relate to specific areas of creativity are taught skills by older nuns who have developed expertise in those areas, most notably the care of the land and the animals. A hallmark of Regina Laudis is the cultivation of flowers as an essential complement to the work of the farm, and this particular know-how was handed down by our master of gardens and flowers, Lady Abbess. Even though we have cautiously entered the computer age, many things are still done by hand, as they were centuries ago, bookbinding for instance, and these techniques are passed down from nun to nun
.

Daily life in a Benedictine monastery has always consisted of three elements: prayer, manual labor and Lectio Divina, the practice of scriptural reading intended to bring a deeper knowledge not only of the Bible, but of oneself, others and God. Saint Benedict in his Rule makes time for it every day. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI likened it to “feasting on the Word”—first taking a bite
(lectio),
chewing on it
(meditatio
), then savoring the essence of it
(oratio).
Finally, the Word is digested and made a part of the body
(contemplatio).