Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story. Karen Armstrong
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and its high, arched windows. And just to the left of that was the squat fourteenth-century tower with a rose window and crenellated battlements. A flag floated gracefully on its summit, the white and gold Papal arms in honor of the feast day. That tower, I knew, was now part of the Noviceship, and if I moved to the extreme right of the drive I would see—yes, there it was—the low modern building that was the Postulantship, skillfully hidden so as not to disturb the view. A little to the left of the main building was an old wellhouse. The grey buildings spoke of another world. To the right, hidden slightly now by the arms of an old cedar, but growing clearer all the time as I walked up the long drive, Victorian buildings cavorted crazily, a medieval fantasy in red brick of towers, turrets, mighty windows, and domes, stretching on and on, which housed the boarding school.
From somewhere a clock broke the silence, a sonorous but restrained chiming. Quarter to five.
I pulled at the bell rope hanging over the front door and heard it clanging and then fading back into echoing silence.
Strictly speaking, the nuns of the Order I joined are not really nuns at all. The term “nun” originally applied to enclosed orders of women who remained in their convents through their lives, never venturing out, devoting their lives to prayer and contemplation. It was St. Vincent de Paul who in the last century founded a quite different kind of female religious: the Sister of Charity who went out of her convent to work in the world among the poor. The Catholic church—always hot on red tape—objected. Female religious—nuns—had to be enclosed. Vincent’s reply was that the Sisters of Charity were not nuns at all but “religious sisters”, and the distinction, I believe, is still adhered to by canon law. Following the Sisters of Charity a spate of similar religious orders sprang up in the nineteenth century. The sisters were, of course, referred to as nuns for convenience’ sake, and they took simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and devoted themselves to prayer and good works.
My Order was one of these. It had been founded in the 1840s to meet a specific need. The Catholic revival in England was under way. The great Catholic boys’ schools at Stonyhurst and Downside were reestablished and the Catholic gentry dispatched their sons there. It was felt that their daughters needed a similar type of boarding school, and it was for this purpose that the Foundress was invited to open her first convent at Derby. The number of nuns and schools increased rapidly and by 1962 the Order boasted some seventeen convent schools in England, a substantial number of convents in the American province, missions in West Africa, and odd convents in Ireland, France, and Rome, which held the Mother House. Like many of the orders founded at the time, it had adopted very largely the Jesuit rule, and the prayer life of the nuns was founded on St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.
When the Order had been founded the nuns had worn a simple black dress, in the style of Victorian women, a cape and a veil. The idea was that they should look unobtrusive. In the outside world fashions changed drastically but the habit of the Order did not. Similarly many of the rules and customs were based on the conduct considered appropriate for Victorian women. The religious life in the Order was originally intended to be an extension of their normal lives, not a complete divorce from everything they had known before. Many other religious orders of nuns were in a similar state: the anachronism of their lives, which had developed by a type of historical accident, had become endowed over the years with a weighty religious significance.
As I walked up the path that day in 1962 I had no idea that I would be one of the very last postulants to be trained along the old lines of severe Victorian discipline. Pope John XXIII had already summoned the Second Vatican Council, and a few weeks later bishops from all over the world were to congregate in Rome to begin Pope John’s work of aggiornamento, of renewal. The Council, as it was originally conceived, did not mean to initiate new measures but to restore primitive simplicity and fervor to the Church in the modern world. One of its tasks was to renew the religious orders in the light of John’s vision, which, sadly for the church, he did not live to see through. A year or two after the opening of the Council the bishops published a document in which, among other things, they urged religious orders of women to go back to the original spirit of their founders and discard the weight of unessential customs and practices to bring themselves more in tune with the world around them. Already Cardinal Suenens in Belgium was preparing his book The Nun in the Modern World, in which he was to urge nuns to discard their traditional habits and return to a simpler style of dress. The modern girl, he said, was too often stifled in the religious life by unessential practices that had developed many years ago. You could not train girls of the 1960s to be Victorian women.
But that afternoon no one had any idea that all this would happen. And I had no idea of what I would have to face before the convent, confident in its long-established rituals and secluded from the modern world, did at long last move out of the Victorian era.
“And here’s Karen!” A tall, angular nun bore down upon me. I caught a glimpse of a long, beaky nose, thick spectacles, and a wide, thinlipped mouth. Then I was enveloped in black serge as she pulled me to her in the ceremonial embrace of the Order. Her fingers jabbed into my shoulders, gripping them tightly, and her hard, smooth cheeks pressed themselves abruptly and fiercely against mine. One press per side. Then I was pushed away and held at arm’s length.
“Splendid!” she said, her voice deep and rich. “Did you have a good journey?” and then, not pausing for an answer, she rushed on. “She’s arrived exactly on time! What a splendid start! A model of religious punctuality already!”
A little gust of laughter rose around her. Nuns’ laughter. I recognized it. A quiet, controlled trill that fell on a descending scale and then died away. I glanced at the black-robed presences surrounding her and then looked back up at the sharp face that beamed down at me. It was the Provincial. She ruled the twenty or so convents of the English Province of the Order and had been responsible for admitting me to its ranks.
“Did you leave your parents well?” she asked.
“Yes, thank you, Reverend Mother,” I smiled back at her. Well, yes, but happy …?
“Splendid!” she said again. “And now you must meet Mother Albert, the Postulant Mistress.”
A shorter, round-faced nun with glasses bobbed up to me. She seemed to be bubbling inside, laughing at some private joke. Once more my cheeks were struck with hers in a gesture of welcome and affection.
Then other names were called and I gave up registering them. The members of the Provincial Council, the superior of the convent, and other dignitaries of the Order embraced me. Dazed and drowning in their musty blackness I submitted to their arms, turning my cheeks obediently to meet theirs, my hands hanging awkwardly at my sides. Often their cheeks never actually met mine and I felt myself poked in the eye, in the mouth by the starched borders of their wimples. Their lips, carefully avoiding all contact, moved in embarrassed little messages of greeting: “So glad, dear!” “Welcome to Tripton!”
“Ah! I remember Karen!” one of them said jauntily, as she held me away from her. “Do you remember me?”
I looked blankly at her crumpled white face, the mouth that seemed to move independently of the rest of her, the shrewd, rueful black eyes. A kind face. I thought frantically. I can’t start off with a lie, even a white one, I told myself in the silence.
“Of course she remembers Mother Greta!” Reverend Mother Provincial came to my rescue. And just then, I did remember her. She had come to Birmingham years ago for a term. She had taught me Latin. I remembered that her hands had been shaking while she tried to write the principal parts of diligo on the board. A gentle, birdlike nun with a sharp mind. I smiled at her in relief. “Mother Greta will teach you theology,” Mother Provincial explained. “But not yet. Not until the second year of your noviceship.”
“Oh no!” someone said, laughing. “There’s a lot to go through before she gets to theology!”
Again that gust of laughter, teasing now, withholding something from me. What? I wondered shiveringly, feeling outside the little circle.
“Now, Mother,” Reverend Mother Provincial’s voice was firm and commanding as she turned to Mother Albert. “I think the others