And Then There Were Nuns

Christmas Jane

Description

Bestselling author Jane Christmas resolves to enter a convent to find out whether she is, as she puts it, nun material. She also wants to understand why she has felt and avoided a siren call to religious life for so long. But just when she convinces herself to take the plunge, her longterm partner suddenly proposes marriage. Determined not to sideline her monastic dreams any longer, Christmas puts her engagement on the back burner and sets off on an extraordinary year-long adventure to four convents. With her trademark humour, verve and feistiness, Christmas relates how she revels in and at times chafes and rails against the silent, simple existence she has sought all of her life. When an unexpected and searing memory rears up, she is forced to confront both her past and her future.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir
• Humour

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 24 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745957975
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for And Then There Were Nuns:
“This is the best kind of memoir, revealing, refreshing, and reflective enough to make readers turn many of the questions on themselves. A delightful trip down the road less traveled.”
—BOOKLIST
“(Jane Christmas) is a wonderful writer, entertaining, self-deprecatingand yet not cynical or worried about stating her spiritual affinities... It’s a fresh eye on a kind of spirituality that is often mocked or treated superficially. It was a quick, absorbing read and I truly enjoyed it.”
—THE INDEXTRIOUS READER
“(Jane Christmas) is an accomplished writer, careful researcher and deep thinker. And she has the heart of a lion. I’m glad she was courageous enough to share her story.”
—THE ANGLICAN JOURNAL
Praise for Incontinent on the Continent:
“Christmas is a fine travel writer, and the personal journey she shares is one with which more and more of us are dealing as all our lives move, with welcome and enriching detours, down their one-way streets.”
—GLOBE AND MAIL
“(Jane) Christmas recounts her travel adventures so vividly and with such down-to-earth experience that you feel connected to her and he mother from page one. It is truly a pleasure to read.”
—BELLA ONLINE
Praise for What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim:
“The title, subtitle and first line of Jane Christmas’s memoir tell you almost everything you need to know about the book: who, what, where, when and why are laid out neatly, and the first sentence, ‘impulse is intuition on crack,’ sets both the hook and the tone... it’s a great first line and it suits the book, which is relentlessly smarter, funnier and holier than thou.”
—GLOBE AND MAIL
“Jane Christmas is, in a word, hilarious. She is definitely up there with Bill Bryson in the genre of funny travel writers. The hamilton woman also exhibits wonderful candour as she recounts her one-month pilgrimage... Christmas writes with an edge and she is painfully (and hilariously) candid about her own foibles... It makes your feet ache and your lungs gasp for air just reading it.”
—KINGSTON-WATERLOO RECORD
“Former newspaper editor and author Jane Christmas gives the gears to the midlife crisis travelogue with this... Forget elizabeth george and her oprah field memoir about a pilgrimage of rediscovery in middle age. This is the real deal... Fortunately, Christmas avoids reducing her experience to a pat epiphany or platitude about how the trail changed her life (though it did). Her style is equal parts nora ephron and Bill Bryson, balancing pithy observation with the history of the trail and her own experiences upon it... The warts and grottiness of Christmas’s journey... are recognizable and relatable, much more so than a glossy religious experience or steamy love affair, and much more enjoyable for its accessibility.”
—QUILL & QUIRE
“It’s a good, funny read with descriptions so lucid and real it almost felt like the author was holding my hand and guiding me through this brutal walk. The 800-kilometer walk with its mountainous, muddy, rocky terrain, its cranky and competitive pilgrims and the crowded and mostly full pilgrim lodges sound(ed) quite daunting to me, but it’s not without its good moments and of course, the wonderful humor of our host... What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim is however so much more than just the walk... it is a conversation on women’s friendships, motherhood, a reflection of one’s faith, of pushing oneself to the limit, the celebration of a milestone and a journal of self-discovery.”
—LOTUS READS

Copyright © 2013 Jane Christmas
The right of Jane Christmas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Lion Books an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com/lion
ISBN 978 0 7459 5644 2 e-ISBN 978 0 7459 5795 5
First published by Greystone Books Ltd, 343 Railway Street, Suite 201, Vancouver, BC, VA6 1A4 This edition 2014
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library
Cover design by Peter Cocking and Jessica sullivan Cover illustration by Talent Pun
I will lead her out into the desert
and speak tenderly to her there.
HOSEA 2:14
Contents
(1) In the Beginning, There Was a Proposal
(2) At a Crossroads The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine
(3) Battling Demons Quarr Abbey
(4) An Invalid Religion St. Cecilia’s Abbey
(5) The Cloistered Castle Order of the Holy Paraclete
(6) The Winter Desert Order of the Holy Paraclete
(7) When Silence Knocks Order of the Holy Paraclete
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Also by Jane Christmas
1
In the Beginning, There Was a Proposal
.......................
Essex, England
T HE TIMING WAS so unbelievably awkward, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I did neither. I just said, “Yes.”
I had dreamed of this moment for six long years (very patiently, I might add, because six years in female terms is like, what, fifty years?). A marriage proposal. Who doesn’t love that? Despite having two failed marriages under my Spanx, I remain intractably optimistic about wedlock.
I was visiting my beau, Colin, over Christmas. Our six-year transatlantic relationship had evolved into a contented pattern of visiting each other every three months in our respective countries: England (him) and Canada (me). The subject of marriage had been broached several times in the intervening years (by me), but it had hit a sticking point—specifically, a complete lack of interest (by him).
So here we were in a guest room of a seventeenth-century village pub in rural Essex. It was a bright Boxing Day morning, and a thin crust of frost shimmered on the surrounding fields. I was absorbed in a near-commando-type mission to find a missing earring. How does an earring so easily disappear? It was on this table a minute ago.
Colin was gathering up our bits and bags in preparation for check-out. From the corner of my eye I saw his lean, lanky frame methodically checking drawers and closets to ensure nothing was left behind. He is a quiet man by nature, but he was more so this day, and I assumed he was perturbed that I was taking so long to get organized.
Ah, there it is!
“Found it!” I said triumphantly, as I plucked the earring from its hiding spot beneath the corner of a clock radio. I whispered a prayer of thanks and hooked it into my lobe.
Suddenly, Colin grabbed one of my hands.
“I’m ready now; sorry to have taken so long,” I said, trying to wrench my hand from his so that I could get my coat. But he wouldn’t let go. When I turned to face him, he was on the floor. On bended knee.
Oh dear, has he stumbled? I yanked his arm to help him up, but he resisted, pulling me toward him instead. This tug-of-war went on for a few seconds until I noticed his smiling blue eyes gazing up at me through a fringe of gray-flecked ginger hair.
Uh-oh! My heart raced, my face flushed. I saw a small velvet box bloom from his unfurling hand as Colin said softly, “Will you marry me?”
I stood in a state of ecstatic disbelief, one hand holding his hand (more for balance now), the other covering my mouth as I blubbered like a schoolgirl, “Yes!”
And this is where the awkward-timing aspect came into play, because moments earlier I had been rehearsing in my mind how to tell Colin that I had decided to become a nun.
(1:ii)
I DON’T want to give the impression that I am one of those nut jobs who listens to the voices in her head, but in all honesty I am someone who listens to the voices in her head.
Like most people, I hear the voices of my children, my parents, past and present partners, friends and acquaintances who babble away and bounce off the walls of my head.
But there is another voice—the Voice Within—that originates not from my head but from my heart. A kind, soulful, authoritative voice, a sort of Dumbledore-meets-Peggy-Wood-when-she-played-the-mother-superior-in– The Sound of Music . The voice of God. And for a big chunk of my life the Voice Within has been steering me toward a religious vocation: the Voice Within has been calling me to be a nun.
At least, I am pretty certain He said “nun.” God is a bit of a low talker and from time to time He gets drowned out by some of the louder, more excitable voices.
Did He absolutely say “nun”? Or did He say “run”? If it was “run,” then wouldn’t I be gravitating toward spandex and marathons rather than habits and convents? Bun? Done? Fun? Gun? Pun? Sun? Oh, sun. I could so get behind “sun.”
But no, there were no sibilants in what He had said. It was definitely “nun.”
If that was the case, then what sort of nun-to-be accepts an engagement ring? It was like two-timing God.
During our courtship, Colin’s laconic attitude toward marriage had always pulled me up short, and in the long stretches of solitude I alternately nursed my bruised ego and reassessed my future. If he didn’t love me enough to marry me, who would? If marriage wasn’t in the cards, what was? Did I need to be married again? What would I do with the rest of my life? Subconsciously, I was writing a new chapter for myself.
What I was absolutely certain about was that I was done with what Isak Dinesen referred to as the business of being a woman; in this case, the type of mature woman that society was funneling me toward: a tepid, somewhat infantilized character obsessed with appearance, dithering about whether to consign every wrinkle to a syringe or a surgeon’s scalpel, mulling over dubious fashion advice, and sprinkling in light amusements such as gardening and cooking. The world seems in an awful hurry to scoot midlife women into a pre-retirement stupor.
By co