Let the Convent Take Care of You!

 

Here is another writing I did for writer's group. One can see the Catholicism of my youth in a lot of my writing.  Sometimes I have worried I erred in religion, always being the seeker and shopping at the "religious shopping mall". I told my husband, "You know how some people are commitment-phobes in relationships, that's me and churches and religion." It's a horrible trait or fault that's complicated my life. 

 Some may say "Oh that's a positive, you want to know the truth!" which honestly is what messed up my life in religion. That said, That means losing out on a community. I was talking to him about my good IFB church, saying to him, "We should have never moved, it led to my problems in faith". That church closed anyway. The people of simple faith who do stick to one place and don't wonder around seem to be a lot happier. I thought about leaving my Unitarian Universalist congregation for more than two years. Covid started it but I already knew they were supporting things I really didn't. 

Catholicism wouldn't have worked, I read too much Bible, was horribly bored by the repetitive mass though I can see how some derive comfort in the sameness. My mind hasn't changed on the Vatican being a cracked puzzle palace oppressing the world.  The Pope pushed the clot shots big time! This doesn't mean, I don't see some good things in the religion of my past. My soft spot for some Catholics, nuns, convents and monasteries remains. For some, an alternative life does bring good things, and some of them do really serve and help others. I do wonder if one is loved by their family if they remain in the religion they are raised in, my hellish home had me looking out of the window for something else. Some Catholics do deeply believe and seek after God. My family really used Catholicism as a window-covering not really caring about spiritual things. 

Let the Convent Take Care of You!

I could have been a nun but I needed love first. I wasn't neat and tidy enough to arrange flowers and candles on the altar and endlessly sweep industrial kitchen floors.  My father said "Let the convent take care of you!" He didn't want the job.

 Rebellion ruled my heart where no priest would have ever let me in the convent door. Normal 12 year olds didn't read Ingersoll. The nuns would confiscate my Addams family cartoon books where I dreamed of being Wednesday. My pink plastic rosary beads had been ripped from the string. 

 Saint Anne's with its green linoleum floors were polished to a sheen and there were beige tiles on the walls I counted from the punishment corner of the cloak room. A bleeding statue of Saint Sebastian with his many arrows guarded the halls outside. 

Our black dressed sisters with clacking rosaries timing the cadence of their walk, the forever good girls, the penguins, were there to turn us into productive life-long Catholics. The fires of hell were a useful tool to keep rocks in the bully's pockets and girls like me from skipping class to hang out in the woods. Jake Blues mouthed back but for us it was rare. Flashing rulers were for the past but there were plenty of erasers to be cleaned.

 We all gossiped about how the Sisters of Perpetual Mercy from Cleveland Ohio all had their heads shaved to a smooth cueball under their habits. Tears would fall right after they took their vows. No hairbrushes and make up in their cells.  Did you know they wore white wedding dresses to marry God with ring included?

 They taught us boys were dangerous and sex was so bad, Maria Goretti was now gloried in heaven for fighting it off. Virgins were the shining stars. At puberty, us girls were ushered into the convent basement secretly, with its desolate piano and metal folding chairs. The lights were turned off for a movie to teach us about our troubled futures, God's monthly punishment for Eve's sin.

 In those days right before the Moral Majority, the Reagan Revolution and Jim Bakker bought his first air conditioned dog house, we knitted God's Eyes with multicolored yarn weaving it in and out among the crossed popsicle sticks. I imagined that these lined up eyes stared down at me from above the chalkboard.

 Sister Abigail, the happy nun with golden guitar and red tortoiseshell embellishments herded children with ease. For her, those idealistic Vatican 2 days never died. God was love among the notes. Her faith came easy never to be tinkered with. I was a heretic by 10.

 Sister Christy spoke of the apocalypse, the seer at Fatima warned Russia would end the world. Pope John Paul II with the Fatima secret locked up tight in a metal box foretold a dark future. She'd tell us we must all prepare. Bernadette on film left her old stone house running to caves, begging people to believe her visions. We made pink roses in May tied with string out of Kleenex and sprinkled them among light blue dress plaster Mary with arms open wide. The end of the world may not be your end with the Virgin's protection.

 Sister Teresa loved softball, food pantries, kitchens, collecting money for the poor and favored the boys. She reminded us, you could be starving children in Appalachia with no running water. A fountain of soup from split pea to bean chili poured from her pots during Lent.

 Us kids would be taken to far flung convents and monasteries for "retreats" introduced to lives of order and silence, sitting in the woods on stone benches, religious readings, personality tests and discussions of our future vocations. Dreams of lives of promises and hope and quiet solitude for those too young to know the pains and bills of modern life.

There were Masses to be attended, Seven Sacraments to memorized, Steps of the Station of the Cross to be walked with Veronica wiping Jesus's face with her veil. These places included The Shrine of Mother Seton, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, endless churches with high ceilings to be gawked at with painted angels making us always look up. The sisters would tell us to keep our eyes averted in prayer.