But Sister, think of all the things we could research!”
The advent of the Internet and the calls from some of the younger sisters to bring computers into the abbey almost made Sister Scholastica apoplectic with outrage.
“But we need to stay current!” the young ones argued.
“We are current,” Sister Scholastica retorted. “If you want to stay current, get into the library and read the newspapers.”
“But the whole world is on the Internet.”
“You just proved my point,” Sister Scholastica said sardonically.
Pip, to her great surprise, agreed with Sister Scholastica on that point. “I’m sorry,” she said, when a group of the novices cornered her during Recreation to plead their cause. She was no longer the novice mistress, having been assigned back to the duty of cellarer a couple of months earlier, but the juniors still seemed to seek her out when they had free time.
“While there might be great promise in this Internet, who is going to arbitrate the content? Which country or which company or which powerful individual gets to decide what’s appropriate and what isn’t? I think it’s only a matter of time before people begin to misuse it. Just wait. It will become a source of as much ill as good.”
“It could be a useful recruiting tool,” Sister Xavier pointed out when they discussed it. “Doris writes that other communities are creating things called websites that advertise what their communities are about.”
“So now we need to advertise?” Pip shook her head. “Don’t you think those who want to find us will? Or God will lead them in our direction.”
“Mmmm hmmm.” Sister Xavier always saved her most sarcastic tone for these arguments. “Don’t you think God might use tools like this Internet to help him lead them in our direction?”
Pip laughed. “The women who enter this monastery do so because they’re looking for a respite from the noise and negativity of the outside world. We do not need to bring that outside world inside our walls.”
“I’m going to remind you of this conversation when we’re down to twenty nuns and half of us are in diapers.”
No matter how Pip and Sister Scholastica and others argued that the need to cling to their traditions outweighed the temptation to modernize, it was an undeniable fact that the abbey had seen a drastic decline in new entrants over the past decade.
From everything Pip could see in the papers, there’d been a dramatic cultural shift toward building material wealth at the expense of all else—“including their souls,” Sister Scholastica observed caustically.
The wave of sixties social unrest that had driven movements like civil rights and voting rights and women’s rights and had carried through the seventies and eighties had all but faded away as far as Pip could see. It was hard not to feel rather depressed after reading the newspapers, and she wondered how people living in the world could stand it.
“Maybe,” Pip mused to Sister Isadore, “in a few months, the predictions about this Y2K where all the computers will crash because they don’t recognize the turn of the new century, will wake people to the need to find something that speaks to them, beyond figuring out how to make money off of whatever it is.”
Sister Isadore laughed. “If you say so.”
“Always the pessimist,” Pip teased.
“And you’re always tilting at windmills.”
Nodding to the nuns she passed in the corridors, Pip hurried to the infirmary. How odd, she thought as she walked. Of all the places I’ve been assigned to work since entering, I’ve never done a turn in the infirmary.
The message had been sent from Sister Mary David, who was being trained to take over from Sister Angelica. When she pushed open the door, she immediately noticed the curtains drawn around one bed at the far end. Sister Mary David peered out and waved her over.
“She asked to see you,” she whispered.
“Who?” Pip asked, but Sister Mary David only shoved her through the curtains, tugging the partition shut from the outside.
When she turned, it was to see Mother Benedicta lying in the bed. “Mother.”
Pip hadn’t seen the abbess in the last week or so, but that wasn’t unusual, as Pip was often bent over her ledgers and accounts to the exclusion of all of the foot traffic in and out of the abbess’s office. She often wondered how Mother Benedicta managed to get anything done.
Mother Benedicta gestured her nearer. “Please, sit.”
Pip lowered herself into the chair beside the bed. “I didn’t know… I had no idea…”
Mother forced a smile. “I asked them to keep this quiet, but the time for that is over. I needed to speak with you while I can.”
Looking at her now, Pip noted how sallow her skin was—her face and hands, even the whites of her eyes. They were all a sickly yellowish hue.
Mother must have seen a shadow of realization in Pip’s face because she nodded. “It’s my liver now. Nothing to be done, except to make sure things are taken care of for my successor.”
Numb, Pip could only nod.
“I’m sure I don’t need to ask, but you’ve been cellarer for two years now. The abbey’s accounts are all in order? No surprises to catch the next abbess off-guard? She’ll have enough to learn without worrying about that.”
“Everything is balanced and accounted for.”
Mother closed her eyes. “Thank you. That’s one less worry.”
Pip’s unexpected sob choked her. She clapped a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, child.” Mother Benedicta held out her hand. Pip took it, noticing even more the contrast between her own flesh tone and Mother’s jaundiced skin. “I’ve been given ten extra years.”
“No, Mother, you gave us ten extra years.” Pip slid off the chair, dropping to her knees and pressing her lips to the abbess’s hand.
“Sister Theodora, I will pray for you.”
Pip raised tear-filled eyes. “Mother?”
“I pray you will find the strength to do what is asked of you.”
When the death bell tolled, Pip dropped her pencil and dug her fingers into her eyes. Four days. That’s all Mother Benedicta had lingered after her talk with Pip. She was glad the abbess hadn’t lingered, but so soon? she couldn’t help asking. Couldn’t you have given us more time?
But that was a selfish impulse. “Would you really have kept her here, in pain, just to ease our grief?” she knew old Sister Angelica would have asked.
All of the funerals at the monastery were beautiful, but the abbesses’—three so far in my lifetime—were especially poignant. And mystifying. The public chapel was filled with people unknown to the rest of the community, but all of whom apparently knew the abbess. Pip knelt in her stall, staring out at them and recognizing a few of the faces that had traipsed past her office the last few years.
“At least God gave us a gorgeous day for this,” Sister Nicola whispered from the next stall.
It was a glorious September day, the air cool and clear, the trees near their peak, as the nuns processed to the cemetery. Father William had asked permission to come from St. Dominic’s to co-celebrate the Requiem Mass with the bishop and the new chaplain, Father Victor, who had been assigned to the abbey only five months previously. He asked also to be one of the pallbearers to carry the casket into the Chapel and later up the hill.
“She wasn’t just the abbess, she was my dear friend,” he said by way of explanation.
“It seems surreal,” Sister Fabian said later, after everyone had left, and it felt the nuns had their monastery to themselves again. “Trying to imagine St. Bridget’s without Mother Benedicta.”
Pip could only nod, numb with grief. “She was our abbess for twenty-four years, the longest tenure in over a century,” she reasoned. But it was more than that.
She faced the upcoming vote with a sense of dread. Though it wasn’t monastic or proper for any to openly lobby for votes, she knew Sister Beatrice was quietly building up support.
Sister Wilhelmina must have had the same thought. “Don’t let her,” she growled at Pip in the refectory Saturday morning.
After Mass, during which Father Victor prayed that the community would be guided by the Holy Spirit as they cast their votes, the community gathered in the common room. As previously, the prioress gave the instructions for the vote.
“Vote with your hearts and your heads, sisters,” Sister Olga admonished them.
Please let us pick the right person, Pip prayed. Again, she couldn’t help adding, anyone but Sister Beatrice.
Four of the juniors passed out the ballots, containing only the names of those nuns eligible to be elected. Two nuns too young to be on the ballot were assigned to count the votes. It seemed the first ballot took forever as the nuns scanned the list. When the votes were tallied and read aloud by Sisters Danielle and Josephine, the litany of names went on and on, most with only two or three votes. Pip was startled to hear her name called with five votes.
Round after round it went, the candidates gradually narrowed to five, then three—“Sister Beatrice, Sister Scholastica, and Sister Theodora,” Sister Josephine read aloud after the latest round, with Pip having received just shy of half the votes and the other two almost evenly split.
Pip sat, staring at her lap, hardly daring to breathe, as the next set of ballots was passed around. Please, no.
Round six… Sister Beatrice was out with only six votes, and Pip and Sister Scholastica nearly even. Round seven… eight… nine… The votes shifted one direction, then the other, with neither gaining the required two-thirds. Ten ballots, then the eleventh.
Pip’s heart hammered in her chest.
Sister Josephine leaned over, whispering with Sister Danielle as they checked and double-checked the votes. Time seemed to stand still. Finally Sister Danielle stood.
“Benedicite sorore nostra, Domine. Theodora abbatissa est.”
Abbess. For life. Pip was numb, watching events unfold as if they were happening to someone else. She was taken to the abbess’s office, where the details of the vote were recorded and she had to sign the abbey’s register of abbesses dating all the way back to Mother Fiona, the founding abbess in 1820. Sister Olga murmured instructions, but didn’t seem to need a response from Pip. She led Pip from the office to the abbess’s rooms—a larger bedroom than a regular cell, a sitting area with an armchair and desk—already laid out with her few books and her pen—and a small private chapel with a prie-dieu.
“It’s too much,” was all Pip could say as she stared.
“I think you will find,” said Sister Olga gently, “that there will be times when you need this space as sanctuary.”
She bowed her head. “I’ll leave you to get settled, Mother Theodora.”
The title—hearing it for the first time—hit Pip like a slap in the face. Sister Olga closed the door behind her, and Pip stood, lost and trembling. She dropped into the armchair before her legs gave out. How? How could you let this happen?
She noticed for the first time a habit laid out on the bed. Getting up gingerly, she tested her legs before going over to inspect it. A new habit, not a hand-me-over with neat stitches to fix old tears like her current habit. A new wimple, white, starched. And the pectoral cross, brought from Scotland and worn by every abbess since Mother Fiona.
The bed was littered with small notes and little nosegays of flowers, hurriedly plucked from the garden. She picked up a few, all expressing joy and pledging prayers for her. She stared at one,
Mother Theodora, you will have my undying devotion and support.
Your daughter in Christ, Scholastica
Pip dropped the card on the bed and fled to the little chapel where she knelt at the prie-dieu and covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking with her sobs.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered raggedly. “I can’t.” Her sobs gradually slowed. You are mine. She lifted her tear-stained face to the crucifix. “I am yours.”