The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (56 page)

That afternoon, the two partners recreated their dance—in its entirety. The performance was graceful, unhesitant, in sync.

Before 1972 no one left the monastery for higher education. Some women had entered Regina Laudis with college degrees—Mothers Columba, Agnes, Jerome, David, Catherine and Lucia all did—and Mother Hildegard George and Mother Phillip Kline earned doctorates in child psychology and anthropology, respectively, from Union Institute’s self-directed program, which allowed them to do their work at the monastery
.

Until the Education Deanery began, no member of our Community had ever been sent out of the enclosure to further her education. I don’t think it was considered unacceptable; it was just not considered at all, certainly not for the contemplative woman who was thought of as wrapped up and tossed into a wastebasket called a monastery
.

Mother Perpetua went to Washington, DC, to study further the art of pottery, and Mother Praxedes earned a master’s degree in art at Michigan State University. She has since continued her education by working with the Tomassi master sculptors in Rome, where her mentor was the famous Giacomo Manzu, creator of the bronze
Door of Death
at the entrance to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City
.

Mother Margaret Georgina got her BA in horticulture, also at Michigan State, and Mother Rachel earned her bachelor’s in theology at Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut
.

—And Mother Anne learned piano tuning in Waterbury—she’s really good at it
.

Over time, it became apparent to us that most women entering the Community were not land-based individuals; that is, they did not grow up on farms or have much experience with large animals. It was pretty obvious that future nuns would come from a similar background—suburban middle class. As all our knowledge of the land was coming from Mother Stephen and the agricultural experts who occasionally visited Regina Laudis, we decided to send some members of the Community to specialize in fields that would move our plans for the land forward. In recent years four women of the Community, Mothers Telchilde, Augusta, Jeanne-Yolaine, and Noella, have received advanced degrees from the University of Connecticut in animal science, plant science and microbiology
.

“It was really hard”, Mother Noella recalled. “We had to balance the educational workload with our community responsibilities. But the discipline and contemplative focus of our monastic life was good preparation for doctoral research.”

Mother Telchilde’s study focused on a hormone that is critical to maintaining pregnancy in livestock. She earned a PhD and uses that knowledge to oversee our livestock management as well as the abbey dairy
.

Mother Jeanne-Yolaine Mallet, who came from Nantes, France, was one of nine children, five of whom entered religious life. She earned a master’s degree in plant science and was somewhat notorious for having written the longest master’s thesis on record. It was two volumes!

Mother Augusta developed a method to predict the amount of nitrogen needed to fertilize grassland for optimal growth with the least risk to the environment. In addition to earning her PhD, she has won awards from the Northeastern Society of Agronomy for her research papers; her doctoral thesis was published in the society’s
Agronomy Journal,
and her methodology has been adopted by others in the field
.

Mother Noella focused her doctoral research on the microbiology of cheese ripening. She won a Fulbright scholarship to France to gather indigenous fungi from traditional cheese caves, which allowed her to develop the abbey’s famous Bethlehem Cheese. The French government has honored her with their Food Spirit Award, and she holds an International Academy of Gastronomy’s Grand Prix de la Science de l’Alimentation. She’s also the subject of the film documentary
The Cheese Nun.

These studies have enabled us to continue to improve our professional approach to our farm and have opened up other avenues of practical awareness that benefit our lives. I don’t think we are the only monastery that sends its nuns to school. Most communities take some role in the ongoing education of their members. But I think we might be unusual in sending our people into fields other than theology, monastic studies and Scripture
.

—Do people move out of the Education Deanery?

   
No. The people who come into Education increasingly don’t want to leave it. It’s not just a phase—“Oh, now that I’ve made vows I don’t need that anymore.” What began in the seventies as a clearinghouse for ideas from the younger members now engages the entire Community. Having the opportunity to speak freely, having a place where creative ideas are thrown around and we can brainstorm together—that’s something everybody wants all the time
.

Thirty-Three

Right after my Consecration, Reverend Mother gave me permission to begin photographing and filming Community life—cultivating the land, caring for the animals and tending the bees, chopping wood and haying, baking and preserving, even celebrations such as Mardi Gras parties
.

Almost a decade later, I had amassed hundreds of 8 mm movie reels that were impossible to screen individually. The footage ached to be edited and made into a documentary. But by whom? The answer came by way of Dick’s unexpected telephone call in September 1979 asking to visit me. A coincidence? I don’t think so
.

In the spring of 1980, I arrived at Regina Laudis to fulfill my promise to turn Mother Dolores’ movie reels into the Saint Benedict centennial film. As I parked the rental car near the main entrance, a huge tractor rolled to a stop beside me, and a lean, lithe nun leaped off and vigorously shook my hand. “You must be Mr. DeNeut”, she said with a broad smile. “Welcome!” This, I later learned, was the fearsome Mother Stephen. Her welcome served to lessen my uneasiness about the unfamiliar neighborhood I was about to inhabit.

At the door, I was met by the same severe nun who again greeted me in Latin
—“Benedicamus Domino
.” This was Mother Mary Aline, the portress and cofounder of the monastery, and she instructed me that my response to her greeting should be “
Deo Gratias
”.

At our next encounter, I forgot this instruction and said simply, “I have a meeting with Mother Dolores.” Mother Mary Aline stood waiting, a barely visible smile on her face. For several minutes we faced each other in silence, and I remember wishing I had encountered the new assistant portress instead: Mother Dolores would have let me pass without the magic words. “Oh,” memory kicked in, “
Deo Gratias
.” We were in business.

Awaiting me was a makeshift editing studio in a corner of the carpentry shop inside the enclosure. Our schedule included morning and afternoon periods of two hours plus an open-ended session in the evening, which frequently stretched past midnight.

The studio was equipped with two ancient Moviolas—the ones operated by hand—and boxes of 8 mm film covering a decade in the life of the Community. Mother Dolores had decided that the 1980 Film, as the project was now called, should also be a learning experience for a member of the Community. So, in my first-ever adventure into film editing, I was considered a master.

The term
master
refers back to the ancient custom in the monasteries of relating to a holy man who traveled in the desert and gave homilies to the monks who lived as hermits. This master figure represented the person of Jesus, who taught the disciples. Early in the history of Benedictine monasteries, the term
master
was transferred to the abbot and then to anyone who was charged to carry on the nobility and sanctity of his work. As time went on, the image became malleable, and we now use
master
to express the courteous acknowledgement of a person’s ability
.

—
It has its truth, but I think it has taken the scotch out of the scotch and soda
.

Since the establishment of the Education Deanery, when a nun comes in, her gift to the Community is to bring her professional complement from the outside and allow it to teach the Community. I quickly learned it would take time for some members of the Community to accept instruction from within, because the women resented it then. I reasoned that if I couldn’t bring them alive from the inside, I would introduce new voices from the outside
.

My assistant was Sister Augusta Collins, a bright, serious young woman in her twenties whose healthy good looks put me in mind of the film actress Phyllis Thaxter. Sister Augusta had been one of the youngsters visiting Regina Laudis during the influx of college students searching for new meaning in their lives a decade earlier. She had entered in 1975 and now wore Mother Dolores’ mantle as abbey photographer.

“I was so uncomfortable,” Sister Augusta admitted, “because the Community was not all that thrilled to have somebody sticking a camera in their faces at an intimate moment. Mother Dolores taught me that you have to put yourself in the way. ‘If’, she instructed, ‘you believe you belong in a situation because it’s important to be preserved, then there should be no self-consciousness, no embarrassment and no apology.’ ”

Throughout the several weeks it took to edit three hundred reels, this master managed to stay about a half hour ahead of his apprentice. But what an education I got! Fully expecting reel upon reel of nuns praying, nuns singing, nuns processing, nuns meditating under trees, what I got was nuns working like field hands, nuns tending cows and sheep and pigs, nuns constructing barns and raised beds for organic gardens, nuns painting buildings, repairing roofs, operating trucks and tractors, blacksmithing—even felling trees! This kind of introduction served to form an early personal vision of the Community as women first, nuns second. The reels introduced me to every member of Regina Laudis save one—I didn’t find a single shot of Mother Dolores, who was always behind the lens.

We structured the film around the Hours of the Divine Office. I found some lovely, though under-exposed, footage of Lady Abbess and Mother David cutting branches of red leaves for an autumn chapel arrangement. The low-key exposure, I hoped, would give it an early-morning look, right for Lauds, in the opening section.

Cutting 8 mm is very much like cutting spaghetti. And, unlike 16 mm or 35 mm footage, you are not cutting a copy print; you are cutting original stock, which placed a menacing responsibility on us. Each splice, of necessity, destroys precious original frames; thus, the cut had to be the right one.

The work was occasionally given a little boost by the discovery of footage that could be assembled into a montage, as happened with the Kiss of Peace, which is an affectionate greeting between members of the Community and also part of the celebration of Mass at Regina Laudis.

I found a snippet of film—only fourteen frames—of two baby lambs bowing and nuzzling as if they were bestowing the Kiss of Peace, which gave us a cute tag to the montage. Unfortunately, Sister Augusta made errors in the cuts, and there went our tag. She was despondent, and no amount of my minimizing the situation would allay her anguish.

When I arrived at the carpentry shop the next morning, there was the Kiss of Peace montage in its entirety. In the wee small hours, Sister Augusta, with determination and tweezers, had resurrected the lamb frames, each one barely the size of a grain of rice, fully restoring the sequence.

Mother Dolores followed our work with eagle-eyed intensity. Whenever a piece of spaghetti hit the cutting-room floor, she would ask, “What’s that?” I would identify the footage I judged unneeded and, as often as not, heard, “Oh dear, I think it’s important.” The discarded footage was put back. Our completed documentary has a running time of over three hours.

—
The worst times for me came when Dick kept making cuts to keep the film within a “manageable” length. With each snip I was shorn too. Later, when he wasn’t around, I would gather up all the scraps and put them away. Just in case
.

There were a lot of disappointments during our three-week marathon, but there was only one near-suicidal moment. During the first viewing of the completed documentary on the Moviola, I was devastated to see that some of the footage, having been run countless times through the machine, was irreparably stretched and torn, the tears plainly visible on the tiny screen. Mother David—then the prioress—witnessed my misery and left the room, returning a short time later with a bowl of just-picked blueberries and a glass—a very small glass—of wine, which she offered with a suggestion: “Perhaps the tears are visible on the Moviola but will disappear when the film is projected onto a large screen.” Totally ridiculous.

But that is exactly what happened. When the film was projected there wasn’t the slightest evidence of the mutilation. I looked at Mother David with disbelief, and she was smiling. If comfort could be bottled, Mother David’s face would be on the label.