Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
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as I was only twenty, whereas most others in the convent could vote, but showed little interest in doing so, not least because both candidates were Protestant.) The civil rights movement was on the move, too. Watching news broadcasts on the march from Selma to Montgomery in spring 1965, I saw nuns walking with all the rest. Why couldn’t I be doing that, I thought. I went around singing “We Shall Overcome” in my head and taught it to the kids in my class.
Nuns were treated like goddesses, not only in the parish, but on the streets. I found it especially awkward when old women would get up to give me, a healthy twenty-year-old, their seats on buses. I was happy to volunteer for any errand that would take me on public transport and into the streets—always, of course, in the company of another sister. One day I went into City Hall and looked up some of my old mentors. I had a particularly fine visit with Judge Alexander. My companion was quite charmed by him too, astonished by an encounter with such an elegant and educated black man. It was a bit beyond the bounds, especially as he was not a Catholic. From then on he regularly sent me books and letters and called when I was at Corpus Christi. One day, walking around the parish, I spotted a girl, the older sister of one of my pupils, playing guitar and singing in an alley. As I listened to the lyrics, I was mesmerized. It was as if the world was speaking to me with utmost urgency. Every word was weighty and expressed exactly what needed to be said about the world as I saw it. It was “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” I stopped and asked her about the song and told her how moved I was. This, of course, was yet another instance of “unnecessary intercourse with seculars,” which I had been doing a lot lately.
Eventually I reached the conclusion that virtually everything in me that was natural and human and healthy violated some convent rule, and my relation to the whole monastic ethos came to a point of crisis. The times they were a-changing, and I wanted to change, too. Around this time, Greg came to see me at Corpus Christi. He celebrated mass for the sisters in the convent chapel. It was the first time I had seen him say mass, and he did it in a manner that was more expressive, more meaningful, than any mass I had ever attended. He said my name and looked me in the eyes when he gave me communion. He came to my class and taught the kids to sing “Kumbaya.” Then we talked for hours and I let loose all my stress, my questioning, my frustrations, my crushed aspirations. He listened. He sympathized. He affirmed me in my refusal to repress my thoughts or my passions. He held me. After he left, I stayed up all night crying, praying, pushing myself to the point of decision. By dawn, I had achieved some sort of clarity, and I decided to leave. The next day was one of the most difficult days of my life. I had a day’s work to do as a teacher, but everything was different. I was still wearing a nun’s habit and being addressed as Sister Helen Eugenie, only I didn’t feel it was me anymore. I still had to arrange my departure and finish the school year, but I no longer abided so strictly by the rules. I made phone calls and mailed letters without permission. I couldn’t live this way for long. I couldn’t bear the feeling of not being at one with myself.
My superior was bewildered by the reasons I gave for leaving. She told me not to mention it to any of the other sisters or parishioners and sent me up to the mother house to explain myself. She was only one of many who were oblivious of the change about to sweep through the Church like a tidal wave. There were not many leaving then, but just a few years later nuns and priests would be leaving in droves. It was arranged for me to leave on the last day of the school year. I would not come to class that day, which was hard, as I couldn’t say goodbye to my pupils. The other sisters were to leave for school as usual without noticing my absence, When my mother arrived with clothes, the superior brought them to me and sent me into the nearest lavatory. To be asked to remove this habit, which had been given to me in such splendor, in such a desultory fashion, infuriated me. I took it off, remembering what each part of it symbolized and how carefully I had always handled it, and left it in a heap on the lavatory floor.
I believed I was leaving for all the same reasons that I entered. I still felt called. I even considered joining another order more in tune with the whole spirit of aggiornamento. I did not anticipate that the questioning that had brought me this far would ultimately lead me not only away from the convent, but out of the Church altogether. People later told me that I had been “ahead of my time,” that I had come too soon, that if I had waited, the institutions around me would have changed, and everything would have been all right. But by then, I too had moved on. I may have been moved by history, but I was tossed and torn at the crest of each wave and not dragged onward at the tail end of each unavoidable advance. For the time being, I still burned with the faith of our fathers (and mothers). When I sang “We shall be true to thee to death”, I meant it. I felt that I would stand up for it “in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.” However, not all promises, no matter how sincerely made, can be kept.
P.S. ON SSJS: ALTHOUGH I PARTED WAYS with the Sisters of Saint Joseph, whose way of life has dominated this chapter and I had little to do with them after 1965, these years decisively marked my life. Various episodes throughout subsequent years brought these years and those who shared them with me back to my attention. I saw the film The Nun’s Story many times and I could never see it without tears. No other film has ever captured an aspect of my life experience so accurately. The convent eventually become more like what I had wanted it to be back when I was in it. Nuns could read newspapers and watch television. They could receive and read books without permission, write and receive uncensored letters, articulate their own preferences regarding their studies and their mission. They began to aim for self-actualization rather than self-abnegation. They could form healthy relationships without secrecy or suspicion. They modified the habit several times and then abandoned it, although sisters could choose to keep it. They could go back to their original names, although they were free to retain their religious names. Gone were chapter of faults and acts of humility. Summer schools became dating and mating fairs for priests and nuns. In my post-exit encounters, they told me that I was ahead of my time, that I should have stayed and all would have gone my way. However, I had moved on and it wasn’t my way anymore. One of my group became mistress of novices and then left. In the 1990s, my text Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun, which had been published in various versions in a journal and an anthology, became available on the World Wide Web, generating a steady stream of email about convent life in the past, even from some SSJs. One forwarded me a list of the thirty-three of the ninety who entered with me who remained. In 1999, I visited Chestnut Hill and met sisters I knew from the past. Some were wearing shorts and sneakers. The congregational photo directory of 1998 showed page after page of pleasant-looking older women with short gray hair, glasses, and normal clothes. Among them were my former teachers, my contemporaries, and our mistress of postulants. A sprinkling of them were wearing short veils, some of them in a later modified habit. Numbers had declined drastically, as in most other orders. In 1998, they had no novices. According to their projections forward to 2007, they expected to have no sisters under forty and more than half of their membership over seventy. The days of the congregation are numbered.
This chapter bears witness to that lost world.
3
Bridge over Troubled Water
The day that I left the convent was another one of those days when the sharpest line was drawn between one way of life and another. Unlike the day I entered, when my mind was more on what was beginning than on what was ending, this day I was overwhelmed by what was ending and had no idea of what was beginning. As my mother drove us away, I could not talk to her about how I felt, but confined conversation to practical matters. We stopped and got an application for a learner’s permit, so I could drive, and an application to summer school, so I could continue to work toward a degree. We talked about jobs. I was considering VISTA, a domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. I liked working in the inner city. I arrived home, a place I had thought I would never see again. It was still a hectic and difficult household and I once again felt trapped in it. Sometimes I heard my mother talking on the phone about why I left. She would say I didn’t have a vocation after all, or that I decided it wasn’t for me. Once I shouted at her that I had decided it wasn’t right for anybody. My parents had been proud of their daughter who was a nun and assumed their problems with me were over. Little did they know that worse was ahead. I got all sorts of reactions from others: What a shame. What a waste. Aren’t you glad it’s all over? Do you regret it? Come on and tell me