Free And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas Page A

hadn’t registered. And why would it? His writing and his thoughts were as modern as anything I had read.
    I rushed to my laptop and googled Merton’s name to see how I could contact him. And then the crushing discovery that he had died. In 1968. Accidentally electrocuted. I checked other sources in case Google had made an error. Nope. 1968.
    As my memory spun through the haze of my own history, I saw my fourteen-year-old self in 1968 sitting at the breakfast table one December morning, and my father looking up from his Globe and Mail and reporting to my mother with a mix of surprise and sadness, “Thomas Merton died.” Both of them had paused to allow the news to sink in, and there was sadness on their faces. So I had been aware, peripherally, of Merton’s death, but its impact had not registered back then. It did now.
    A maturation took hold and shook me out of my lazy religious thinking. Merton’s attitude and philosophy released me from worrying about whether I was thinking about faith correctly and orderly—do any of us get faith perfectly?—and freed me to approach religion more critically, to stop giving religion—the business of faith—unnecessary and sometimes undeserved reverence. God, not the church (any church) is the goal. Or to put it more crudely: if God is the destination, churches are the gas stations along the route. Then again, to some, God is the destination and churches are the bureaucratic city works department that erects roadblocks and sends you on frustrating detours that eventually force you to throw up your hands and say, “Oh, to hell with it; there’s got to be a better route.” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once opined, people come to church in a spirit of hope and openness but leave as if they’ve staggered from a maze of mind-boggling bombast.
    Merton was not without his criticisms of the church, and this too was liberating for me. Although I had labored under the impression that being a good Christian meant being faithful to the church, some big issues made me question why I stubbornly kept faith with it.
    On the magazine rack outside the refectory, I had picked up a copy of the New Yorker that contained an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury concerning the Church of England’s attitude toward female priests, and particularly toward the ordination of female bishops.
    The church was trying to “accommodate” (code for “appease”) “those whose theology cannot accept female priests.” The church was still talking in soft, pillowy language about the need to bring in male bishops to serve Holy Communion to the thousands of conservative Anglicans in Britain who refused to receive it from a female priest, a female bishop, a male bishop who had ordained a female, or a male bishop who had been ordained by a female. I felt the color rise in my face.
    There was a time—it no doubt exists in places today—when white Anglicans refused Holy Communion and other sacraments from a black priest. It was called racism, and the church rightly took a strong stand against it, though the cynic in me occasionally wondered whether the stand was guided by “the right thing to do” or by the fact that Africans were the fastest-growing cohort in the Anglican Church.
    Now the church was dragging its feet on the issue of gender discrimination, and from what I could see, was allowing itself to be blackmailed by Pleistocene parishioners who were threatening to withhold their weekly donations from the collection plate if a miter was placed on the head of a woman. Why didn’t the C of E have the guts to shame the blackmailers?
    I thought Anglicanism was better than that, that it had guts when it came to ethics and human rights, but it struck me now: What’s a nice girl like me wasting my time with a bunch of misogynists?
    It was fairly clear from the interview that the Archbishop was in favor of full ecclesiastical