Free And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas

vibrating buzz of the cicadas. An airplane jetted by, and I wished I were on it.
    I could feel my faith wilting. The intensity of the Crossroads program had become as heavy as the heat. Compounding it was the headache-like pressure that comes from indecision. The idea of being a nun no longer struck me as borderline lunacy, but what I wanted and needed was someone who had already been on this quest, someone as kooky and mercurial as I was, who was devoted to God, who yearned for monastic life and yet struggled with its restrictions. I truly wanted to be a nun. Indeed, I felt like one. But I wanted to be a different kind of nun, a more active one, and one with fewer limitations placed on my freedom. I loved all the sisters, and I felt extremely comfortable in my surroundings, but there was something... elusive... missing.
    I wandered down the empty, silent hall to the library. The drapes had been drawn as a shield against the oppressive afternoon sun and the effect of the humidity, but a few narrow gaps in the curtains made it look as if the fires of Hell were within reach.
    I perused the rows of book spines on the shelves wishing, willing, for something to grab my attention. My eyes landed on The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. Merton’s name was vaguely familiar, but I knew next to nothing about him. I pulled the book from the shelf: it was thick and looked as if it might take a while to read. It’s not as if there’s a lot competing for my time right now.
    I sat down, opened the book resignedly, and began to read. Within twenty minutes, you could not pry the book from my hands. I was hooked. With every page that I read, my heart expanded and my excitement mounted.
    Merton was a sensitive and conflicted figure. Born in France to artist parents, an American and a New Zealander, he had a peripatetic upbringing. I could identify with that. Although my parents did not move across the globe like Merton’s parents, they moved frequently within a single city, Toronto, inching gradually to the fringes and then to its outlying rural towns. The constant upheaval engendered in me a sense of transience.
    Merton’s mother died when he was very young, a loss that was to forever color his relationship with women, and by the time Merton had reached his mid-teens, his father, too, had died.
    A brilliant student, young Merton gave in easily to passion and excess, drinking and screwing his way through boarding school and later Cambridge University. After a serious indiscretion (Merton never fessed up to it in his autobiography, but I later learned it was a pregnancy that was hushed up by Merton’s wealthy guardian), he slunk back to New York, where remnants of his family lived. Migrating into writing and into Columbia University, he taught by day and continued to lead a desultory life by night. He was searching for his place in life, for something to connect to his wandering soul. He flirted with spiritual matters—he had been raised in both the Quaker and Church of England traditions—and after one of those glorious epiphanies that are the stuff of religious lore, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church. He entered the Trappist Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky—“the four walls of my new freedom,” as he poetically described it. His abbot insisted that Merton write his life story as an exercise in shedding his ego, and the result was The Seven Storey Mountain. Ironically, the book catapulted both the monk and his silent order to loud international fame.
    Neither the fame nor the spiritual transformation attracted me as much as did his style of writing and his struggles and ideas. I suppose the choppy journey of his life resonated because my head continuously bobbed in recognition of many of the sentiments and doubts he laid bare.
    This was precisely the kind of role model that could help me with my own vocation. The date of his birth—1915—mentioned in the first line of his book