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NUNS AND NONES

Soon after Josh told me he might love God, I talked to my sister Sarah on the phone about a couple at our Presbyterian church growing up. They were the kind of church parents who went to all the graduation parties and chaperoned youth group trips.

“You know that Charles never actually came to church, though,” my sister said.

“What?” I said. “But he was always there! At all the events!” I ticked off birthday dinners and bell choir concerts and church basement potlucks.

“Yes,” she said. “He was always at the auxiliary church events but never in church services. He wasn’t a Christian.”

“Huh,” I replied, racking my brain to try and remember if I had ever seen his black salt-and-pepper hair in the pews.

“Well, that’s actually awesome,” I said. This was a couple I had always looked up to for their hospitality. Maybe being in a mixed-faith marriage didn’t have to mean losing our church community entirely, and yet, did Josh want that? Did he want to be an auxiliary church member?

It can’t be easy, participating in a church community always from the outside. I wondered how Charles had made his peace with activities like driving kids to laser tag when he didn’t believe in Jesus.

Still, it was enough to know it was possible.

Some couples have a permaculture gardening club. Others do home remodeling projects on the weekends and watch HGTV together on the sofa at night. Josh and me? Well, we’d had church.

In our first years in Minneapolis after graduation, our friends were mostly other young people that met for Sunday night dinners and Tuesday night prayer. Later, we started investing in an intergenerational community at a tiny Mennonite church in our South Minneapolis neighborhood. It’s where Eliza was dedicated; it’s where we brought refreshments to be served after the service and volunteered as greeters. We had potlucks and small groups and even were appointed as the young adult coordinators for a while.

But when Josh stopped coming to church, he also stopped hearing the announcements and the prayer requests from our Christian friends. Suddenly I was the sole carrier of the church community news. Then, when I left that church, we lost those familiar faces that had provided meals after our babies were born. We lost the community that still held the memory of when Josh and I were both Christians.

At Calvary, he showed up on occasion at fellowship hour, but he didn’t want to stick around for long. “Just being here makes people think I’m a Christian,” he told me, “and I’m not. It feels weird, like I have to explain myself.” I was the one signing up to bring new parents a meal or marking the upcoming retreat on the calendar. Josh was on the outside, and we were no longer investing in the same community.

Instead, he found friends in other places: in graduate school, it was the Mycology Club; later, it was fellow teachers at the middle school where he taught earth science and the Mill City Running team. I had church with the kids on Sunday mornings; I now had the nuns and the Visitation Companions, but we didn’t have much in the way of friends in common. During the week, it often felt as if we were just trading childcare—him, off to run on Wednesday nights; me, off to the monastery for morning prayer or church services. What place could we find where we both belonged?

Then, out of the blue, someone contacted me with the answer to all my problems. Katie Gordon is a leader of Nuns and Nones, a national initiative that brings together Catholic sisters and nonreligious seekers for dialogue and action. When we first talked on the phone, I scurried into my bedroom and turned on the white noise machine to block the sounds of my kids thumping up and down the stairs.

“Nuns and Nones is an experiment in community,” she told me. “In some places, the group meets twice a month.”

“Like a church,” I said.

“Like a church for agnostics,” she replied, laughing.

She explained the genesis of the project: In late 2016, a group of Dominican sisters had reached out to her in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after she wrote an article about “the rise of the nones”—the growing trend of young people leaving institutional religion. There was interest in getting the two groups together to learn from one another. As it turned out, around the same time there was another gathering of Nuns and Nones at Harvard Divinity School, exploring similar questions.

Katie told me about the unlikely chemistry in the group she started in Grand Rapids: how after walking away from church, meeting the nuns had kindled a new spirituality inside of her. We traded stories about monasteries we’d visited; she taught me the difference between an apostolic versus monastic community of nuns. (Apostolic communities’ primary charism is active ministry, such as administering schools or hospitals or serving the poor. The primary ministry of most monastic communities is their contemplative practice, like praying the daily office or adoration of the Eucharist.)

In the days afterward, my mind returned to our conversation again and again. A church for agnostics? Maybe that was something Josh and I could attend together.

I started dreaming about starting a new Nuns and Nones gathering in the Twin Cities. I imagined gray-haired Catholic sisters and tattooed twentysomethings sharing couches at the Saint Jane House. It was winter. A fire glowed in the fireplace as someone asked, “But how does centering prayer work anyway?” And I imagined Sister Karen explaining, “Don’t be harsh with yourself when your mind drifts away from your intention. Every time you turn away from God is another opportunity to turn back toward God. See it that way. Each straying thought is a chance to turn back—to turn back to God.”

“Is that what doubt is like?” I wanted to ask my imaginary gathering. “Is doubt something we needn’t be mad at ourselves about? Is it just another time, another chance, to turn back to God?”

I imagined Josh in the room, my very own none sitting beside me. We rarely sat in a church pew like this, side-by-side, arms sometimes brushing against one another. Would this be a place where he would want to be? Where we could ask these big questions together? Would he hear my question about doubt and turn to me, his hazel-green eyes locking with mine and say: “Maybe every moment of doubt is another chance to turn back to mystery.”

God. Mystery. Creator. These are all words for the divine. Could this be a place where we connect, find spiritual community? Would these discussions of spiritual practices enliven us both, sending us twirling around, spiraling inward, honing in to the great holy God?

I wanted to host a Nuns and Nones group like Katie, but first I needed to see what the Visitation Sisters thought of this plan. I sent an email about the idea to the nuns and told them I’d be at Wednesday morning Mass. I wanted to talk it through.

The kids rode their bicycles along the sidewalk down Fremont while I power walked, often giving a power shout “Stop! That’s a driveway. Watch for cars!” We avoided orange cones and walked around sandpits where construction crews were building new curbs for the sidewalk entrances. I had coloring books and My Little Ponies and a box of story cards in my bag, along with a puzzle we had borrowed from the monastery weeks ago and never returned.

I hoisted the kids’ bikes up onto the front porch, the same porch where, nearly a year ago, I had first encountered the monastery on Halloween while trick-or-treating. Inside, Mass had already started, but Sister Brenda pulled out a chair, and I gathered Rowan on my lap and pulled out his superhero coloring book. Eliza sat next to me, old enough not to need placating every few seconds, old enough to listen to the strange words and ask me questions later. I remembered to pack a few graham crackers and, when it came time for the Lord’s Supper, I passed one to Eliza and Rowan, as well as to the other little kids who’d come that morning. While the adults passed around the host in a golden dish, the children munched the sweet crackers.

During the passing of the peace, Rowan eagerly grasped the hands of the nearby nuns: Sister Mary Frances, Sister Katherine, even scooting between bodies to shake Sister Suzanne’s outstretched hand.

“Peace of Jesus,” Mary Frances said, her voice jolly and sincere.

After the priest announced, “the Mass has ended,” I walked into the dining room where people crowded around the large rectangular table, helping themselves to coffee, muffins, and buttered toast with jam.

“Stina,” Sister Karen said in her sweet, raspy voice. “Let’s talk.”

Sister Katherine sat beside us, and they told me how they had read my email aloud in the car the last night as they drove over to a dinner hosted at a neighboring parish.

“I am open to the Nuns and Nones idea, but to tell you the truth,” Sister Karen said, “I kind of wonder what the point of this group will be. There seems to be so much misplaced energy in seeking out these practices from here and there.” She reached her hand up as she said this, as if she were swatting away a fly.

Sister Katherine, no longer in earshot because of the noise in the room, turned to entertain Rowan, who was demanding more juice. He giggled as she made faces at him.

“Back in the ʼ70s,” Sister Karen continued, “I remember we tried this new liturgy in the Visitation Monastery in Saint Louis, and it was so complicated. I am glad we tried something new, but I was relieved that we could go back to something known, that we already knew was solid.”

I nodded. It does take so much more energy to go out to pick and choose religious experience—to combine kabbalah beads and centering prayer with the occasional seder or technology sabbath. I wondered if Sister Karen was right, if Nuns and Nones was just another iteration of this impulse. Why not ground yourself in one tradition instead, one religion where someone has taken the guesswork out of things a bit? Here: this is the catechism; this is the daily lectionary reading. Here: these are the words of institution for the Eucharist. No need to improvise what has been said for two thousand years.

“But let the sisters talk about it,” said Sister Karen, giving me a hug. “We need to decide together if this is something we want to try.”

After we finished our toast, I said my goodbyes and began the walk home while the kids raced along on their bicycles. As I waited for the light to turn green at the intersection with Broadway, I thought about my none—my Josh. If a gathering was grounded in Christianity or Catholicism, then the assumption might be that one attending would share those core beliefs. I couldn’t see Josh going for that. Why fake it? Why say “God” when you really mean “mystery”?

Sister Karen said that the sisters would have to talk about starting a Nuns and Nones community at their next business meeting. But even if the sisters hated the idea, I knew I couldn’t let the idea die. Not yet.