Scent of God

This is Beryl’s fascinating story and interview.I think you will fall in love with her as I did! Thank you, sweet Beryl.Your life and journey has inspired me!

K---As a young girl, you had a calling to follow God. Can you tell the readers ­what transpired? What sort of epiphany you had? Did God audibly speak to you?

Beryl---I’ve often wished that God did speak to me audibly; it would have made that decision much easier. But, no. I heard no audible voice. Instead I listened to what was happening within me.

As a child, I felt drawn toward God who seemed to offer more love and constancy than the volatile and erratic love I encountered at home. As I grew, I turned more frequently toward that constant and comforting love, especially when we moved to Puerto Rico when I was a young teen. It was in Puerto Rico, where I felt most an outsider, that significant events propelled me toward a life dedicated to God:

~Witnessing the drowning death of a young boy my age and confronting the need to find the purpose in my life; and

~the subsequent “experience” of being overwhelmed by God’s unconditional love.

~Yearning to be absorbed into that love, I chose to enter a cloistered order which offered the quickest and most certain route to God.

Life since then has never dulled the pull toward the divine that has made my life a pilgrimage.

­K---I appreciated the honesty about your resentment about “taking care of your father.” Can you elaborate a bit about your relationship with him?

Beryl---My father was a brilliant man who found greater reward in work than in his family. He also drank too much which turned my normally loving mother into a mother whose suffering frightened us with its destructive force. When 12 years after I entered the monastery, my father had a stroke and my abbess broke with centuries of monastic tradition and sent me home to Puerto Rico to help my Mom care for my father, my vocation to religious life began to totter. I discovered that in returning to Puerto Rico as an adult, I loved life outside the cloister. I loved the island and its people. I loved my parents. And, I loved Padre Vittorio, the handsome priest professor whom I’d met on the first day of my return.

For three years, as I traveled to and from the cloister, I felt as if I were being torn apart by my parents’ needs, my desire to remain a good nun, and my love for Vittorio. I blamed my father for his stroke – that he’d done nothing to ward off that impending disaster, even after almost dying on the operating table during by-pass surgery and being warned by his doctors to change his life-style.

I resented my father until I began writing The Scent of God, when I was suddenly overwhelmed with the reality of all that my father must have suffered. Having lost his ability to speak, he’d never been able to tell his story and consequently I’d never been able to hear it.

K---While in the monastic life, your acquired an eating disorder. Was this a way to take some sort of control over your world, your every day existence?

Beryl---Poor Clares, the cloistered order I’d entered, make four vows: To live in obedience, in poverty, in chastity, and in enclosure. This first vow was primary and throughout our novitiate (the five years of training leading to those vows), we practiced what was then known as blind obedience to our superiors. In obeying our superiors, who represented God, we were giving up the greatest obstacle to union with God, our own wills.

By not eating, I was exercising my self-will -- taking control of the one small area still left to me: what I put into my