The Nuns Tell Their Stories

Sister Lesley is a Catholic nun of the Carmelite contemplative religious order. Our friendship goes back many years to a time when we were both very enthusiastic, newly-minted Buddhists. Our seriousness about the practice was a reflection of our teacher, B. Alan Wallace, who was at the time a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Lesley and I not only sat arduous meditation retreats but we both volunteered to be on the board of directors for a startup retreat center. While anyone can have a go at meditation, relatively few are persuaded to join board meetings of any sort. We were dedicated.

My sharpest and fondest memory from that time, however, is neither the comradery of the retreats or the board meetings, but the time when Lesley and I very inappropriately got the giggles together while attending a scholarly lecture on the jhanas. This was a solemn and elevated discussion of the stages for the development of Right Concentration which is one of the eight parts of the Eightfold Path, the path taught by the Buddha for reaching enlightenment. No one else was laughing.

In my experience, a giggle fit is an uncontrollable force of nature; contagious and unstoppable until it plays itself out. Lesley and I could only stifle our laughter into silent, body-shaking spasms while attempting to be invisible. I may have indefinitely postponed my understanding of Right Concentration and the Eightfold Path, but Lesley just took a different direction altogether.

Following her conversion to Catholicism, Sister Lesley lived in a Carmelite monastery in the UK for twenty years. She recently returned to live in the States because of health issues and to be closer to her family. A circle of old friends periodically springs her from her Catholic retirement home in pursuit of adventure.

Old friends, Anna, Sister Lesley, and I on an ice-cream rampage

Our latest outing involved taking Sister Lesley to visit the nuns at a local Carmelite monastery in Seattle. Carmelite nuns spend most of their day, and their lives, in silence but the nuns were obviously delighted to play host to a sister of their order. They had taken great care and effort with the preparations.

St. Joseph Monastery sisters

St. Joseph Monastery grounds

We are ushered into a large room with chairs and table trays set up in a semi-circle. Sister Lesley, good friend Anna and I are the guests of honor and we are seated in the middle of this arrangement flanked by fourteen sisters of the order. Off to the side is a buffet table draped with an elegant white tablecloth and laid out with cheeses, an assortment of desserts, homemade ice-cream, and coffee.

Initial conversation is somewhat forced. It feels a bit like joining a large table of strangers for dinner conversation on a cruise ship. Contemplative nuns are not gregarious, glad-handed extraverts as a rule, but the sisters are eager to make this a pleasant experience, and they genuinely want to hear Sister Lesley's story. Sister Lesley actually is an extravert and she is at ease recounting her convoluted path to God and sisterhood. When she finishes, there is a lull as we collectively wait to see where the conversation might go.

Sister Lesley seems to be a natural at leading dinner table conversation and she's looking for ways to keep things lively. In that spirit she turns to me and asks me to share my story. This is a completely unexpected and alarming turn to the conversation and I can't imagine how my life story is going to fit this occasion. I begin rambling about my early childhood years with no idea where this story is going or how to end it. I am telling the sisters about my first year of teaching when I was hired to teach in a parochial school in the Mission district of San Francisco. Having been raised in a small farming community in Ohio, I'd had little interaction with Catholics before this act of immersion into the culture and I was intrigued by Catholic ceremony and religious spectacle. I added a few fragmented elaborations on the experience, and having brought my entire life story up to a point in my mid-twenties, I just stopped there.

My story may have gone a bit off the rails but Sister Lesley is undaunted and I'm beginning to imagine her as a cruise ship social director on the road not taken. She's now inspired to ask the sisters to tell their stories about how they found God and made this life choice. There is a momentary pause and I'm wondering if the sisters might be reluctant to disclose their intimate history. But the sisters are quite willing and it touches me deeply as I watch their faces brighten and shine with the chance to testify and relive their often circuitous paths to this calling.

As if preordained, the sisters finish telling their stories just in time for Evening Prayer. The sharing circle has been a great success and we move toward the exit in good humor like old friends briefly reunited.

Their stories run together now in my mind and I remember only snippets. One sister played the French horn for years in professional symphonies in Denver and Louisville and finally in Seattle where she made her surprising leap to monastic life. Another sister was an accountant in her past life; her story heightened by a confrontation with authorities at the Canadian border over visa problems. Each nun had given up all material comforts to join the mostly silent, monastic life but curiously, I was most moved by the sister who spoke so quietly about leaving her dog behind.

All of these stories must have had a familiarity to Sister Lesley as she'd surely heard similar tales from the nuns in her monastery in the UK, but I was unexpectantly quite moved by our visit. Anna and I had been welcomed into a normally closed world not accessible to the uninitiated. I think this particular adventure for Sister Lesley was even more poignant for me than it was for her.