“I wake to sleep and take my waking slow . . .I learn by going where I have to go.” Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), The Waking
I stared at the contents of my little trunk: denim underslips – ankle-length pinafore-style; baggy mid-thigh underpants; long thick black stockings and for long lonely nights, a pretty modest pair of pajamas covered with small violets. They would replace these, I supposed, with plain white gowns. The mix of dread, anxiety and excitement I felt at age 17 as I prepared to leave for the convent was deeper than at any time since. Leaving my childhood home in 1953 for a future unknown and unpredictable, to go to live “forever” with an institution full of strangers and a strict lifestyle, seemed quite different from that experienced by my classmates preparing for college, freedom and, dreamily, new boyfriends. My eyes fell on my high school scrapbook. It was the hardest thing for me to leave behind. In it I had tried to build, at least in my imagination, a credible love life. There between the pages were the dried corsages from two proms, both attended with convenient, not beloved, young men (gardenias still fragrant in one and tiny rosebuds in the other); and a corsage from a stranger. He had accompanied me to a Michigan Tech Fraternity Ball at the request of my brother, and here I could no longer remember his name.
The real crush of my young life was represented in my scrapbook only by a torn picture of Jimmy H. I loved him with that innocent abandon that rests on no experience, no knowledge of young men and no realism about life in general and romantic love in particular. What I felt was a certain purity of sheer attraction. When I was with him, I was too shy to string together three sentences, but while discussing him with a girlfriend from his small farming town who knew both of us, I could render whole books of words. Jimmy and I had worked out a meager relationship built on his occasionally following me home, shouting from a car driven by one of his friends, his carrying me once over a puddle, Sir Walter Raleigh style, our ice skating together, and sharing a many kisses, new and exquisite. I was convinced he was the best kisser I would ever know and I wasn’t far from right. He had, indeed, asked me for a date once. He said he would pick me up at 7:00. But on the designated evening when the clock said 7:20 I nervously assumed he would not come and went downtown with my sister Kate. When he arrived at 7:30, told I had gone, he assumed I had jilted him. We never spoke again.
Also left behind in my scrapbook – the convent was to discourage feasting on past memories – were small things I doted on: pictures from Copper Falls where we had our “mature” senior class picnic; letters I’d received from a marine and a soldier during the Korean War. I took up the small bouquet of flowers that the soldier, Rudy T., had given me. They were picked by his mother from her little garden, he said, and were accompanied by a note that explained a gift I was later to receive when he was overseas: satin pajamas with golden dragons accompanied by slippers decorated with delicate fur. I remember how my no-nonsense father stared at me as I danced around our living room wearing this, my first genuine token of affection from someone. When he learned of my joining the convent, Rudy told a mutual friend he would live as single life since he could not have me. As it turned out he waited for eight years before marrying. Finally, toward the back of the scrapbook was a letter awarding me a small scholarship and a copy of a talk I gave to the whole school when I would be honored as a salutatorian for the four-dozen-strong St. Ambrose class of ‘53, a modest honor when, years later, I saw my daughter named valedictorian of a class of thousands of gifted kids.
A second major move to life on “mission” was quite different. Life at the Motherhouse had become completely comfortable. After four years there, I had become the convent equivalent of a big-shot, knowledgeable about rules and customs, nooks and crannies, fun, feast days and games. As an older young nun, age 21 as opposed to the 15-18 year olds arriving each fall, I was feeling authoritative, bossy really, possessive the way one feels as a senior in high school. I was now a bona fide teacher. Assigned to teach seventh grade at St. Boniface School in downtown Manitowoc, Wisconsin, I took with me only my clothing and an old fashioned typewriter bequeathed to me at the death of my closest childhood friend, Rita K. I was trained; I had no fear. I should have felt fear, for the class was wild and at first I practiced the opposite of correct discipline. I was kind to the class as a group and harsh to each miscreant – the class thought me weak and the individuals hated me. I gradually realized why I must change: the class had to see me as tough and its members be able to say, “I can’t do that; Sister Marta will kill me.” Individuals, on the other hand, should find me compassionate though firm, and privately come to respect and perhaps even love or admire me.
Several more moves defined my convent experience. During five summers so sweaty that some nuns slept in their bath tubs, I studied for a Master’s Degree under the Jesuits at the University of St. Louis. During these school years, I entered three new subcultures: the small farming community of Hollandtown, Wisconsin; the southern style small city of Cambridge, Ohio; and the big, bustling, noisy city of Chicago. During these years, I found a sense of place and home in each place, mainly through the love I felt for my religious Sisters and my students. I learned that teaching, especially teaching literature, provides a unique kind of love where sometimes mind enters mind and heart enters heart. Intellects and emotions blend because of shared poetry, stories, Shakespeare’s plays and Emerson’s essays. My own joy in these and the eagerness of young adolescent minds made the hard work of teaching writing worthwhile. In Ohio, where I taught the same students for four years, I found they came to seem like young brothers and sisters.
But there were a few, with the natural ardor of youth, who seemed uneasily like potential sweethearts, a phenomenon I was scarcely prepared for. A priest too, whom I met in Cambridge, became affectionate and after I had left the community, asked me to wait for him until the Pope, surely soon, removed the ban on married priests.
After thirteen increasingly depressing years, I prepared to leave my community. I was given a few hundred dollars with which to buy clothes and start a new life (my dowry to the convent on entering had been only twenty-five dollars). I quickly latched on to a job with a Great Society-funded anti-poverty program in Chicago, and earned enough for tuition for my last summer in St. Louis. Offered invitations by all four of my siblings, I chose to go to Los Angeles where I secured a teaching position exactly one day before classes were to begin at Birmingham High School, in the San Fernando Valley.
What I was learning from these experiences was to trust life and to practice detachment from mere material things and places. But from many people I never truly felt detached. They have inhabited my mind – and still do – like bright jewels washed to a gleam by the tides of years. One of my intellectual heroes, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, envisions a God who salvages human temporal experiences into his eternity. Preserved and gathered together are our highest, best experiences: a look, a smile, a touch, a sense of the beauty and warmth and love surrounding us at times. God, both Whitehead and Teilhard said, takes our most precious “jewels” and carries them where they will again greet us, as it were, in the next life.
TO BE CONTINUED . . . .
Journal of a Former Nun 