The Kindness of the Mount Community: Part II

Today’s posting is the last one I’ll write for this blog or my writing blog for the next several weeks. However, I plan, except for a few vacation days in July, to continue what I began yesterday: reading and commenting on your blogs.

            Why relinquish posting until sometime in August?

            Because I’m storied out. Writing, editing, and polishing stories about my life has lost some of its urgency for me. I’ve mulled and found meaning in so much of my early life and your comments have helped me put everything in context. Now I need to move on to the convent years again.  So when I begin again—in August, I’ve let go of my first twenty-two years.            

            Instead, I’ll share with you my Scholastica years in the convent. That is, the three years—1960, ’61, and ’62—for which I made temporary vows. During those years, which are a tapestry of color woven with both dark and light thread, I began to teach.            

            Today’s posting will also be about the convent, specifically the recent sesquicentennial. 

          Five members, including myself, from our class of eighteen returned to the Mount for its celebration of being home in Kansas for 150 years. I didn’t get to visit at any length with any of them because the entire day and a half was taken up with meeting and greeting and hugging and laughing with so many nuns who are still in the convent and so many who have gone on to other lives.

            We ate and prayed together and took tours of the cemetery—where so many friends of my youth are buried, nuns who taught me in college and enriched my life in the convent—and also the fourth floor of the monastery where we used to sleep in large dorms. Now these dorms have been converted into rooms for individual nuns along with recreation rooms for viewing movies and television.

            One of the things I missed in the convent was stretching out on a couch or putting my feet on a hassock and snuggling down into the comfort of an easy chair. Now the fourth floor nuns have all of that: couches, easy chairs, hassocks. O joy in the morning!

            So many changes: a large library, eating at whatever table one chooses, a nursing-home section that ranks as one of the top ten in the nation, talking in the halls, a cafeteria instead of a refectory with novices trundling in the food on carts and then later washing the dishes in the scullery. So many changes from the life I knew.

            But one thing hasn’t changed: the hospitality of the Benedictine nuns. St. Benedict, some 1,500 years ago, wrote in his Rule that we are to welcome the stranger as we would Yeshua/Jesus. And so the nuns, who are steeped in graciousness, did all they could to embrace our return to roots.

            I’m ending today’s posting with a poem about what being back at the Mount monastery was like. The poem, written by Sister Barbara Ann Mayer, OSB (Order of Saint Benedict), conveys the celebration much better than I can. She has spent more than fifty years as a nun and has witnessed many changes. One of these is that she can now pursue her love of writing. Barb’s poem captures the joy we all felt—both the nuns who have stayed at the Mount and those of us who have journeyed elsewhere.

Coming Home

We hugged, laughed, cried,

to see faces from long ago

etched with wrinkles and lines,

strong, intelligent women who

faced their uncertain future

with courage and hope. They

came to share their lives, their

stories, their memories, and

we felt blessed by their coming.

As they placed flowers at graves

of those they had loved, prayed

the psalms with joyful voices, we

felt a bond never really broken

by distance and time, a sister bond

of friendship that survived the years.

“It was like coming home,” one said,

“I feel like I left part of my heart here.”

Barbara Mayer, OSB

June 2013

Have a lovely summer. I hope to see you back here in August. I’ll be visiting your blogs in the days and weeks ahead. Peace.

PS: The Mount has published Shadowboxing,  Sister Barbara Ann Mayer’s first book of poems, and it is available at the monastery gift shop. Please click here if you’d like to contact the gift shop about Barbara’s poetry or about other books written by the nuns as well as their crafts—from iconography to embroidered tablecloths to place mats to pottery.

All the photographs are from the Mount web site. They are used with the permission of the prioress, Sister Anne Shepherd, OSB. Click here for the web site.

An Unexpected Letter of Kindness

My last random-act-of-kindness posting tells how Sister Madonna reached out to me a few weeks after I left the convent on December 24, 1966. It will make more sense if you’ve already read the following three stories, which I posted in August 2011. They explain my leaving and the confusion that swirled within me.

Seeds of Doubt Amidst Great Joy

Why I Left the Convent

Where and What Is Home

         I know that, like me, most of you are too busy to read so many postings, so I’ll briefly summarize why I left the convent: During the eight and one half years I lived there, I became more and more depressed. By the end of that time, I was hallucinating three nagging personalities; I quaked under the expectations I thought others had of me; I felt like a fake because my inner thoughts weren’t consistent with my outer actions.

         I knew I was experiencing a nervous breakdown but I was such a fine actress that I faked being normal. No one seemed to realize just how emotionally bruised and mentally ill I was. Yet I knew I couldn’t keep up the act infinitely. I was sure that if I stayed I’d end up in the mental institution in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where “crazy” nuns spent the rest of their lives.

         My letter to the Mount community asking for permission to leave was, I think now, probably rambling and disjointed. But I remember that one of the things I stressed was that Mount nuns taught and I was a poor teacher.

         In January 1967, I began working at a publishing house in Dayton, Ohio. Faking normalcy took its toil, and I’d fallen into a deep malaise. But once again, no one realized this because of my acting ability. I knew what normal looked like and I feigned it. My one certainty was that I’d failed in everything I set out to be as a nun. 

         Several weeks after I left the convent, Sister Madonna, who taught in the psychology department of Mount Saint Scholastica College, sent me a letter. She was older than I and I’d never taught with her. In fact, I knew only her name and her reputation as a woman of great graciousness, wholeness, and learning.

         In her letter, Madonna explained that she’d recently interviewed all the seniors—about 70 students—at the Mount Academy because she was writing a paper for a psychology journal. The fall of 1966, I’d taught English literature and religion to these seniors.

         Madonna wanted me to know that each and every one of them had said I was the finest teacher they’d ever had. She went on to tell me some of the things they’d shared about me and about my teaching.

         Her letter, an unexpected act of kindness, was water in the wilderness in which I wandered lonely and lost.         

         Madonna wanted to assure me, she said, that if I left because I didn’t teach well I could put that reasoning aside. I was an outstanding teacher.

         I shall never, ever, forget the kindness of this woman. She was the Good Samaritan who came upon the beaten and bruised wayfarer and cared for her. I remember taking a deep, gulping breath when I read her letter. I hadn’t totally failed. My life hadn’t been a wasteland. I’d done something well. I felt . . . peace.

PS: Next Wednesday I’ll post Part 2 of the sesquicentennial reunion. Then I’ll return to my convent postings that ended in December 2011. Also, tomorrow—Sunday—I’ll post news about my manuscript entitled “The Reluctant Spy” on my other blog—wordcrafting: a writer’s blog.

Kindness from a College Friend

Today’s act-of-kindness story takes place in September 1954 when I began college at Mount Saint Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas. Just three months before, I’d graduated from St. Mary’s High School in Independence, Missouri, a small town with a population of about 30,000 at the time. St. Mary’s was also small. Its entire enrollment was only about 140 students, of which 30 or so of us were seniors.

My senior picture, sans eyeglasses. The photographer “prettied” me up!

         Mom drove me up to the Mount in early September where I encountered a freshman class of about 140 students—as many as the entire student body at St. Mary’s High School. Many of these young women had come from small towns as had I; but many others were from Chicago and eastern states like New Jersey and New York.

         It seemed to me then that I was a true hick among sophisticates. And so I became tongue tied. To make matters even worse, I’d lost a tooth filling on the trip up to the Mount. I was going to college on a scholarship and Mom didn’t have the money to give me to go to a dentist in Atchison so I had to find a way to keep the cavity secret.

         Every time I smiled at some one in the dorm or the halls of the administration building, I kept the right side of my mouth stiff so as to cover what seemed to me to be a gaping hole in my lower right-hand canine tooth.

         In my mind, I thought that everyone must see me as that strange, cavity-ridden, acne-faced kid from the town where President Truman lived. I was miserable and after two weeks of awkward smiling and talking, of hearing stories about plays on Broadway, and about air travel, I knew that I didn’t belong in college. I was just a country bumpkin.

Mount Saint Scholastica College Administration Building—1954

         One of the freshman—Marge Tansley from Chicago—befriended me during those two weeks. Somehow she found something to like in me despite the dark hole in my tooth. As Marge and I sat in the rec room on the first floor of the ad building, I dolefully confided my decision to quit college and return home. I moaned about my gaucheness, my ineptitude, my ignorance, my lack of social graces, and on and on and on.

         Marge took me in hand. Instead of calling me “Dolores,” the name by which I’d always been known, she welcomed me into the kingdom of nicknames. Surely that meant she liked me!

         “Dee,” Marge said, “you belong here just as much as any of us do. Give us a chance. We’re already friends. You’ll make lots more. Come on! Stay! Stop thinking of yourself all the time.”

         I protested. She insisted. I moaned some more. She shook me by the shoulders. I finally relented. “Okay. I’ll stay four more weeks. Just four.”

         She hugged me. And that, my friends, changed my life. I stayed at the Mount, made many friends among the student body, got an excellent education, became involved in student government, and on April 10, 1957, in my junior year, I realized that I wanted to enter the Mount convent after I graduated the next year.

         For me two roads diverged: stay or leave. I stayed and that “has made all the difference” as the poet Robert Frost would say.

         That difference came about because of Marge Tansley, who entered the convent after our freshmen college year. We met again at the sesquicentennial celebrate this past weekend. She is yet another blessing in my life. As are all of you. Peace.

Here I am as a freshman in St. Lucy’s dorm

 after Marge encouraged me to stop thinking of myself

 and to start concentrating on my classmates.

PS:  Tomorrow, I’ll post one more story about the kindness others have extended to me. But before I do that I’d like to explain what prompted these postings. They are part of the Wayman Publishing blog fest, which ends today—Friday, May 31.

            Wayman is offering ten e-books as free downloads to you. Other books are offered at a greatly reduced press. Both of Dulcy’s e-books—A Cat’s Life and A Cat’s Legacy—are available. The first for 99 cents and the second for free.

         Almost seventy other bloggers are participating in this celebration of random acts of kindness. If you’d like to read other stories of how we gently touch one another’s lives, please click here to find information on the other bloggers and their postings as well as the names of the ten free downloads.

The Kindness of the Mount Community: Part 1

(Continuation of postings on random acts of kindness . . . )

Nearly forty-seven years ago I left Mount Saint Scholastica Convent in Atchison, Kansas, after living there for eight and one-half years: as a postulant for six months; as a novice for a year; as a scholastic, having taken first vows, for three years; and as a professed nun, having made final vows, for four years.

            Many changes took place in the Roman Catholic Church after the ending of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. One of those changes was that many nuns left the convent. I myself walked away from that life of prayer and work on Christmas Eve in 1966.

Part of a stained-glass window in the choir chapel. It portrays Saint Scholastica.

            Because only a handful of nuns had left by then, the convent had no procedure for wishing a woman well on her journey. All of us there were still wearing the habit and the convent provided no “lay” clothing or any money with which to get started in that new life.

         Of course, we had brought nothing to the convent, such as a dowry, so the convent had no obligation to give an allowance or stipend to anyone who left. In fact, I didn’t expect anything because I was the one leaving the convent; it wasn’t leaving me.

         My mom and dad drove up on December 24 with clothes my pregnant sister-in-law loaned me. For the next four weeks, I stayed at home with Mom and Dad until starting to work for a publishing company in Dayton, Ohio. The company flew me to Dayton and gave me an advance on my salary so that I could rent a room at the Loretta Home for Working Women and pay for my meals.

         Within six months of my leaving, the Atchison nuns had voted to change from their habit to “regular” clothes and to provide a basic wardrobe and a stipend to anyone who left. This was in keeping with the Benedictine tradition of responding compassionately to the needs of others. And it speaks to the generosity of the women there—a generosity that continues to this day and that was in great evidence this past weekend.

The statue of Saint Benedict at the Mount, with the choir chapel in the background.

         The Mount monastery—this designation is more in keeping with the Benedictine Rule than the word convent—is celebrating its sesquicentennial throughout 2013. As part of that celebration the Mount invited all its ex-nuns to return to be part, once again, of a community that helped form each of us into the women we are today.

         Sister Mary Grace—who is truly full of grace—headed the committee that researched which ex-nuns were still alive. She sent out 135 invitations and 45 of us accepted. Of those 45, however, only 43 arrived at the Mount on Saturday, May 25, because two had fallen ill. (In fact, one of them died this past Monday.)

         A friend from convent days—Paullene Caraher, whom you met in my Tuesday posting—now lives in Arizona. She arrived at my home on Thursday evening and we began our visit.

         Neither of us had married, so we had no pictures of children and grandchildren to share. But our friendship, which began in the fall of 1962 when we taught together, rested on a solid foundation, so there was no awkwardness despite the fact that we hadn’t seen one another since about 1985 when she visited me in Minnesota.

         We spent Friday talking a mile a minute about our former lives as nuns, what we’d done since leaving the convent, and our plans for the future. When we drove up to the Mount on Saturday morning for a day and a half of visiting with the nuns still there and the ex-nuns who’d returned, we continued to talk and laugh and talk some more about all that had happened in the past fifty years.

         Most of us had been Benedictine nuns in 1963 when the Mount celebrated its centennial. Between that time and today, so much has changed in the monastery. And it is those changes, as well as the hospitality of the nuns still there and their kindness toward each of us who returned, that I want to share with you next Wednesday when I return to my regular posting routine.  

         So my random-act-of-kindness story today is simply the graciousness of a group of nuns living in Atchison, Kansas. They reached out to those who had once prayed and worked with them and said, “You have been and will always be part of our community. Peace.”

Both photographs are from the Mount website and are shared here with the consent of the prioress.

PS: I’ll continue my five random-acts-of kindness stories on Friday and Saturday. You’ll meet Marge Tansley, who was at the Mount this past weekend, and Sister Madonna. Next Wednesday, I hope to conclude today’s posting on the sesquicentennial and the Mount. Click here to go to the monastery’s website for photographs and explanations of its prayer and work and the living of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

A Change in Plans

(Continuation from Tuesday of postings on random acts of kindness . . . )

Hello All, 

Today I had planned to write about the kindness and hospitality of the nuns at Mount Saint Scholastica Monastery in Atchison, Kansas, during my recent stay there for the sesquicentennial.

            However, that will have to wait until tomorrow because one of those Meniere’s headaches had settled in my brain and I need to lie low today. A friend was in a pickle this morning and I was glad to be able to listen and help her clarify her thoughts, but now I need to simply rest.

Matthew, one of the three cats with whom I live, lying on our bed.

            So tomorrow’s posting will be about the nuns at the Mount; Friday’s will be on Marge Tansley, whose kindness changed my life during our freshmen year of college; and Saturday’s will be about Sister Madonna and her graciousness toward me when I left the convent. Then no more posting until next Wednesday when I’ll return to my regular routine.

            Also, I haven’t responded yet to any of the comments that some of you wrote for Tuesday’s posting. I’ll get that done when the headache decides to lift itself and fade away.

            Peace.

                                                ( . . . to be continued tomorrow—Thursday.)