Free And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas Page B

parity for women, but he could not muster the moral courage to push it through.
    The argument is frequently made that the Archbishop of Canterbury is not the Pope; nor does he have authority for the entire Anglican Communion. But the fact remains that the world’s 85 million Anglicans regard the incumbent as head of the faith and are therefore influenced and guided by what he says. It is true that the Queen of England is head of the faith, but when was the last time she addressed the church’s members? With two effectively mute leaders in the Anglican Church, who actually speaks and answers to church polity?
    That’s the difference, the tension, between faith and religion: faith is belief; religion is the institutional arm of faith. Can one be fundamentally opposed to church policy and still be a cloistered monastic? What would Merton do?
    ( 2:xi )
    â€œTELL SISTER Constance Joanna what you told me about wearing a nun’s habit,” Sister Elizabeth Ann goaded me as I sat between the current reverend mother and the former one during recreation one evening.
    Recreation was a bit of a misnomer; like all of convent life, it was structured. I thought it might entail kicking around a soccer ball on the convent lawns or playing croquet. Instead, the sisters and our Crossroads group were seated in a large polite circle in the conference room. Most of the sisters were engaged in various types of needlework.
    Sister Elizabeth Ann was crocheting a rosary while nudging me to dish out my anecdote from a few decades earlier when I had worked in the marketing department of a record company. One of our promotions involved a British novelty rock band called The Monks, who sang such catchy tunes as “Nice Legs Shame About Her Face,” “I’ve Got Drugs in My Pocket (and I Don’t Know What to Do with Them),” and “I Ain’t Getting Any.”
    Sister Elizabeth Ann knew of The Monks and even hummed some of their songs when I first regaled her about it. The story went like this: As part of the promotion for The Monks’ album (we called them albums or LP s in those days), my colleagues and I decided to make the rounds of radio stations and deliver the LP s dressed as religious—the men as monks, and me, the sole female manager in the entire company, as a nun. It was the early 1980s, and the men I worked with were foul-mouthed, drug-snorting, sexist boors. (Trust me, I am being kind here.) But when I emerged from my office dressed in a traditional nun’s habit, they suddenly turned all gentlemanly. Their tone softened; their swearing stopped; they ran ahead to open the door for me. I did not see a line of coke near any of them the entire morning. As we walked out of the office building together, one of them confided to me a bit sheepishly that he had once been an altar boy. I inclined my wimpled head receptively; it looked as though he was working up the courage to ask if I would hear his confession.
    Our first stop was a radio station at the busy intersection of Bay and Yonge Streets in downtown Toronto. As I made my way from the black stretch limo (we always traveled in limos in those days) to the office tower where the station was located, several people on the street genuflected before me; two asked for a blessing. Never have I had so many people falling over themselves to assist me. Who knew that a nun’s habit was the ultimate power suit and that it was such a guy magnet?
    Sisters Constance Joanna and Elizabeth Ann guffawed at this story.
    â€œWhen I had on that habit, I was overcome with a serenity and goodness that I had never felt,” I told them. “Somehow I knew I was meant to wear a habit.”
    â€œWell, just remember that vocations come from the heart, not from the head,” smiled Sister Elizabeth Ann as she returned to her handiwork. She was working on an Anglican rosary, braiding sapphire blue thread and tying it into thick knots to resemble beads.
    My