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Catholic sisters, also known as nuns, were my teachers for twelve years.
No matter what the Whoopi Goldberg movies and the "Sound of Music" might have put out there, very few of them wore the traditional habit by the time I hit the scene, in what I call the "felt banner and butterflies" era of the Catholic church in the mid-1970s. There was also, unfortunately, very little spontaneous singing and even fewer huge song and dance competitions to raise funds right before the, er, credits rolled. Mostly we sold chocolate bars like everyone else.
Sister Margaret Mary, our tiny, taskmaster elementary school librarian, was still in the full black and white habit. The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur ran the school, mostly Philly expats come south to Maryland, with whom one's green-plaid-clad self did not mess (especially algebra and gym teacher Sister Mary Pat and her ever-present dogs, Bobo and Gretchen.) They were football freaks who let us out of school to go downtown for the parade after the Redskins won the Superbowl, and sponsored the first writing contest I ever won - a poetry competition about, again, the Redskins. I had then and still maintain little interest in or understanding of football, but I learned how to fake it in the name of minor fame early on - which in this case amounted to an assembly announcement and an envelope full of two-dollar bills that I still have somewhere.
The Religious of Jesus and Mary, a French-Canadian order who lived and taught at my high school, were a bit more warm and fuzzy - except, again, for Sister Yvette in the library. Yeesh. She'd utter a terrifying, sing-song "SOMEone is EA-ting in the LI-brary" when my friend Barbara insisted on chowing on her Hot Fries just to irritate her. (The best urban legend at my high school involved Sister Yvette pointing at a table full of girls and shrieking, "THAT TABLE GET UP AND LEAVE!" The girls picked up the table, and carried it out the door.)
Fast forward twenty years, and I am an eternal seeker - a non-practicing Catholic with a healthy respect for most of the things I learned, a firm grasp on my right to reject them in favor of other things that make sense for me and the world as I understand it, and a general disdain for plaid. I was too young at the time to really contemplate or much less question the choices of the women who taught, and occasionally, admittedly, scared the daylights out of me. It didn't occur to me to ask why they opted for a life of poverty, chastity, and service when it was increasingly less common, seemed to my young self to be a real drag, and to my adult self still seems like a really rough road to walk.
It didn't occur to me that Sister Margaret Mary's life was not just about stamping Oscar Owl bookmarks, or that she even pondered deeper questions inside or out of the library that was the size of my current bedroom. I know now that she must have. And although she may have kept a diary, or just a running internal dialogue between herself and God, one thing she couldn't do at the time was keep a blog.
This is no longer the case, and I'm here to tell you that the sisters are blogging. A lot. I don't know why I was so surprised to find the numbers of blogs written by women religious in various denominations. If a community exists these days, chances are it has at least some Web presence. I was surprised, though, perhaps because "Do nuns have blogs?" was a question I'd never considered, asked, or investigated before. Now that I have, I've gone beyond surprised to simply impressed.
Sister Bloggers was the first site to set me straight. Susan Rose maintains this collective for "sister bloggers" and also blogs at Musings of a Discerning Woman, where she describes herself as "a Catholic School Girl turned Agnostic turned Church Geek turned Nun." She has the distinction of being the first novice I've ever heard make reference to the Clash and sign off with "Peace out." She's just landed in a new house in London as part of her first novitiate year.
My Sister housemates here have been very gracious, making me feel right at home. I have a lovely room overlooking the garden. I’ve already consumed lots of tea. And it feels
