Friendship

All real living is meeting.

—Martin Buber

As nuns we have no personal money to purchase books, but, happily, we who teach at Cabrini live in the convent with Sisters who teach at our high school, St. Joseph Academy, and so have access to all sorts of good books, and we are passing books from one to the other and talking in small huddles about all the amazing new ideas we are discovering. As we are no longer novices, the rule of silence is not so strict for us anymore, and we are loving the new freedom to talk—about everything. I’m reading like mad, have a book under my arm everywhere I go, even to the bathroom. I think reading has to be the most amazing thing ever: to open pages and enter another’s interiority, accessing another’s thoughts, feelings, tragic mistakes, and stunning adventures. I feel like, for the first time, I’m reading what I want to read. New avenues of freedom and selfhood are opening up. I’m more curious, more focused. Pretty basic freedoms, really, but in some ways new to me. And best of all: freedom to develop friendship.

After years of trying to love only God and everyone else more or less equally “in Christ,” I know I can’t make it without a close friend. I need to entrust myself, invest myself with another. I need to get past my protected public self and open up the vulnerable parts of myself. Maybe like crabs in the Gulf, when they go deep into the marsh to molt, doing their best to camouflage themselves in the sandy bottom as they shed their hard shells and have to wait and hide in their soft, tender skins until their new shells harden. I’m longing to be able to be vulnerable like that with somebody. Isn’t that what true intimacy means?

Like those in any other lifestyle, nuns, too, can develop superficial ways of communicating, always saying the predictable, expected, “spiritual” thing. Yuck! I’m done with that. I want to get past the polite surface and delve deeply into what really matters.

I want to care deeply for someone and, hopefully, have someone care deeply for me. It’s not that God isn’t enough. It’s the opposite, really. If God truly is love, then the deeper I love, the more I know God. That’s one really good thing about the Christ-life: It’s grounded in love of flesh-and-blood people (as if a rarefied, cerebral, purely mental love life could ever make us happy). Robert Frost wrote a poem about earth being the best place for love, adding that he didn’t know “where it’s likely to go better.”

The name of my first close friend was Sister Christopher. That was her nun name. Her family name was Ann Barker, and I’m forced to write about her in the past tense because she died in 1997; we had thirty-four years of precious friendship. I don’t know what dying means. Like Yegorushka, the small boy in one of Chekhov’s stories who passes by the cemetery where his grandmother “slept day and night,” and all he knows is, “Before dying she had been alive, and she had brought him soft poppy-seed bun rings from the market, but now she just slept and slept.”

In faith I hope that Chris wasn’t zapped into nothingness, but I have to be honest; I can’t reason my way into knowing where she is or how she is. All I can do is trust that the God who called her into existence has received her in death and she’s okay. One thing I do know: I keep talking to her and listening for her, and sometimes I ask her help—in the same way, I guess, that I pray to God and the saints. I can’t stop talking to her.

It’s like breathing.

Chris was the novice who in 1957 witnessed my rather flamboyant arrival on entrance day. It’s 1963, we’ve both made vows, it’s summer and we’re both at our motherhouse, I to help with the Sisters’ retreats, and Chris to prepare for final vows. In the novitiate, Chris was two years ahead of me, so we were together for only the nine months of my postulancy before she was professed and moved to the professed sisters’ wing across the yard. Only a football field distance away, but it might as well have been China, so great was the divide between novices and professed.

After I made vows and was going to college and Chris to nursing school, we’d occasionally be together at the motherhouse on weekends and get to talk during evening recreation. I majored in English and she always wanted to know about literature, and I—very much not a nurse—wanted to hear about what it was like to run a post-op hall, what surgery was like, what it was like to witness a baby being born, and what it felt like to be with somebody dying.

Back when we were together in the novitiate a member of my entry group, Pam Crasto, was always talking about Sister Christopher—the prayerful way she came back from communion, the regal way she walked, the way she was entrusted with the special responsibility of cleaning the novice mistress’s clothes and room. (It was a very big deal to be trusted to enter the inner sanctum of Mother’s bedroom.) I had been given nothing but piddly jobs: cleaning bathrooms, mopping halls, kitchen chores. In the novitiate at recreation, Chris and I never got to talk together longer than a few minutes, and not too often. Mother Noemi saw to that in her zeal to nip “particular friendships” in the bud.

When Chris’s entry group enacted a scriptural skit, Chris often portrayed Jesus (I got to be a beggar or sing in a chorus behind a screen). She was tall and had a gentle, spiritual-sounding voice, and in the Jesus role she’d be behind a screen so you could see only her silhouette, which made it all feel shadowy and mysterious and holy.

The skits our entry group performed didn’t succeed nearly as well. In fact, we were the ones who got martyrdom scenes banned from the novitiate. All because Sister Anastasia couldn’t control herself. As the child martyr Tarcisius, she did all right crumpling to the floor with a heavy groan as Roman soldiers beat her, but not so well when the soldiers moved in for the kill. It wasn’t her fault, really. She didn’t have nearly enough dramatic training to handle the extreme emotion of dying in the bloodiest manner. (We had the wisdom not to try to show the blood.) Her only training had taken place in a short dry run carried out hurriedly just before the performance.

She maintained her composure pretty well during the first sword thrust, but after that she lost it. As the soldiers moved in with swords slashing, her groans quickly morphed into loud, unstoppable giggles, which, as you can imagine, sent all sense of mystery and pious mood to hell in a handbasket. What was worse, one of the stabbing soldiers was killing herself with laughter, too. It ended very badly, even though we amped up the recording of Schubert’s Ave Maria as loud as it would go. Even after the bell signaled night prayers and sacred silence was supposed to descend, there was no stopping periodic eruptions of giggles—even through night prayers and yet again as we mounted the steps to the dormitory. Anastasia got nicknamed “the Giggling Martyr,” and that was the end of martyrdom enactments in the novitiate.

Now, on this July night in 1963 (the sixteenth, to be exact), here comes Sister Christopher descending the stairs into the front lobby just as I swing through the chapel door. I see her coming and wait and ask how preparation for her final vows is going (final, or “perpetual,” vows take place after five years of temporary vows), and we start talking and drift out to the long, screened back porch and sit in two rocking chairs there in the dark. It’s quiet, no one is up, it’s late.

Early on, Chris and I hit on words from scripture that become the mantra of our friendship: “And the soul of David was knit to the soul of Jonathan.” I still have these words, printed by Chris on tiny strips of paper pasted inside an oyster shell.

We couldn’t be more different. She’s tall, I’m short. She’s blond and fair. My hair is brown and I have olive skin. She’s introverted, while I’m extroverted out the wazoo. I’m a chattering brook. She’s a deep well. I’m openly affectionate. She’s reserved. I like to relate to a lot of people, she likes to relate to only a few.

One example of how different we are: One time when we are together, I gush out four, five, six things I like about her, and when my outpouring is met with silence, I tease her to say what she likes about me. And all she can say is that she thinks I am “nice.” I go, “ ‘Nice’? Is that it?” And she answers that I’m the one who’s the English major.

She’s better with words when she writes to me. It’s the introversion thing. Her words come slowly from within a private place, and I learn to respect that quietness in her and wait for her to tell me about herself when she’s ready. But it takes a while, and I always have to work at it. It’s probably my biggest fault that I talk too fast and too often and don’t listen enough.

Whenever we’re together she always wants to know what I’m reading. As a nurse at our only hospital in the small town of Houma, Louisiana, with no CSJ teaching communities around, she has no access to theology books or literature, the way we teachers do. As teachers we’re lucky. We get summers off and are always taking courses and learning new things. Our nurses have to work all year with only a few weeks off for retreat and vacation. The imbalance puts her off and makes her insecure.

Chris’s vow-preparation classes are her first taste of the renewal sparked by Vatican II, and she’s alive with what she’s learning. Sister Alice Marie Macmurdo (my favorite teacher from high school) is teaching Josef Goldbrunner’s Holiness Is Wholeness, and it’s like fresh water on parched earth. Goldbrunner’s big point is that if we remain undeveloped selves—if we’re unable to give and receive love in a healthy way—we’ll always be too needy, too unsure of ourselves to risk the give-and-take that a close relationship demands. How can we be Christ-like by dying to self for others if we don’t have a developed self in the first place? Christ doesn’t need wimpy doormats.

All of us young nuns are eating this stuff up. We’ve known the gnawing emptiness of trying to live a style of religious life that cloaks over human emotions and tries to spiritualize everything. Got a problem? Sinking into a hole of depression? Take it to prayer. Want to indulge in something you like? Sacrifice it for sinners. Talking it over with Jesus was supposed to be the answer to everything. Still got a problem? Pray harder.

At last, we get to reclaim our humanness—all of it—including our physical selves, our bodies, our desires, even our sexuality. Until now, anything remotely connected to sexuality was squelched. We’re nuns, after all—consecrated virgins with vows of celibacy. Sexuality is out of this picture. The only way we ever heard the words sex or sexuality was if the word sublimation was in there somewhere. That’s what we’re supposed to do, always and everywhere: sublimate. Turn it over to God, Who will transform our steamy longings into…well…heavenly things.

Vatican II, with its intoxicating invitation to claim our humanness, is opening all these previously closed doors. And, on the philosophical front, existentialism is making its mark, with an open-ended approach to being human that says Experience life for yourself, try it out, live it, see by its effects if it’s good for you, you decide, it’s your life, there’s no blueprint. And all this is unfolding in the psychedelic, authority-challenging, war-protesting, rock-and-rolling, pot-smoking, LSD-tripping, sexually liberated sixties. Movies depict people meeting and hopping into bed just to get acquainted. The message comes from practically everywhere: If you’re not sexually intimate, you’re not alive—you’re not really human.

Know what a nun is? Got none, never had none, ain’t ever gonna get none. (Bad joke maybe, but its truthfulness makes me smile.)

In such a milieu, we nuns with our vow of celibacy couldn’t be more countercultural. Even sociology books classify us as deviants. There’s truth in there. A vow that entails forgoing sexual intimacy is not most people’s way of being human. And I’m crystal clear that if I don’t develop relationships deep enough to stretch me past my boundaries of who-I-think-I-am-and-will-always-be, I’m going to be nothing but a shriveled-up grape, dying on the vine—spiritually exalted bride of Christ or not. I am absolutely determined I am not going to die on the vine. And it is this desire to live a full life, this more than anything, that brings me to this porch late on this summer night, to talk to Sister Christopher.

A bunch of us are reading Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and I tell Chris about it, especially the part where the fox teaches the little prince about how to “tame” him—that he can’t just walk up to the fox and say, “Be my friend,” just like that, but he must “observe the proper rites.” That means that each day at the same time the little prince must approach the fox’s den so the fox can expect him and be happy at his coming, and each day he is to come a little closer with great care and respect and never in a hurry. Taming someone can never be rushed, and only then, perhaps, will the fox let him tame him.

As it turns out, letter writing will mainly be the “proper rite” for Chris and me to build our friendship. She’s in one town, I’m in another, and we don’t have the freedom to make long-distance telephone calls, or access to a car so we can visit.

But write we can, and that’s one thing I really like to do. It’s spontaneous for me, and whatever thoughts and feelings come, they flow right onto the paper—pretty much in a steady flow, and usually in a sharp upward slant on the page, which is my optimistic bent in life. The rule that superiors are to censor Sisters’ correspondence is easing up, though because Chris’s superior still reads the Sisters’ letters sometimes, she puts her letters to me in a public mailbox at the front of the hospital. I’m not as brazen. Obediently, I still put my unsealed letters on Mother Jean’s desk, trusting that she’ll respect my privacy and not read them. She’s respectful of young Sisters, which in these days of emerging personhood goes a long, long way.

Chris and I talk until midnight, and being there in the dark on the porch, just the two of us, feels private and sacred, and a deep bond forms between us.

The fox ends his instruction to the little prince by saying, “You become responsible, forever, for what you tame,” and that will become one of the main themes of our friendship.

I’m ready for the taming.

And—miracle of grace—Chris is ready, too.

In the first years of our friendship, Chris and I face a formidable challenge. She lives in Houma and I’m in New Orleans, so I mostly get to see her at community assemblies, and that’s always in a big crowd. Visits are rare, although sometimes Chris volunteers to drive her superior, Mother Evelyn, to New Orleans and sneaks over to Cabrini School to see me. And suddenly there she is—a tall, white-habited nun (our nurses wear white) gliding across the blacktop toward my classroom, and my students go, “Look! A white nun!” and me, delighted, calmly assign them a few pages to read while I step outside for a few minutes. Her surprise visits are always a thrill. I know she chooses to drive Mother on the chance that she might be able to see me, even for a few minutes. Mother Evelyn is a severe soul, and you don’t dare be even a minute late, and as soon as you get in the car, prayers begin—first the rosary, then vocal one o’clock prayers, then four o’clock prayers, and then a half hour of silence for meditation. More than fine with Chris, she says, because when you’re praying you don’t have to keep the conversation going.

My visits to Chris in Houma are never a surprise. They always entail planning of a full-fledged community outing with the superior’s permission. As I’ve said, exclusive friendships are considered the bane of community life, and it’s unheard of for a Sister to simply get in a car to go visit a friend in another town. And so, within the confines and restraints, Chris and I keep the life flow of our friendship going by a steady stream of letters.

I tell her about classroom encounters, the latest being a showdown with a red-haired hellion of a girl, whom I like—the kid has spunk—but I couldn’t have her blatantly disobeying me and causing mutiny in the ranks, and so I had to take her on. Chris tells of the bone-weary workload when one of her nurses calls in sick and she has to take on the 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift after having already worked the 3:00 to 11:00 P.M. shift. She says that 2:00 A.M. is always bottom-of-the-hole time, when her energies hit zero and all she can think is that if she could only crawl into a spot in the linen room, just curl up and sleep for even fifteen minutes, she could make it.

Our newly budding relationship is still fragile, the way beginnings always are, and in every letter I affirm the meeting of souls that happened so spontaneously in the rocking chairs, and we both know that the bond between us, though real, is mostly still only potential, only promise. No letter of mine ever goes out without my telling her how glad I am that God sent her as a friend to me, and it’s a wild, delirious, fanciful dream, but I put out the hope that maybe we might be able to pull off a vacation together at Grand Isle, Louisiana, even though we aren’t living in the same local communities. It’s the longest of shots any way you look at it, and Chris says she hopes—she prays—Grand Isle can happen, but her superior is not kindly disposed toward adjusting work schedules, or any kind of schedule, for that matter, simply because some young Sister has it in her head to go on vacation.

Chris’s biggest hope is that if…if…if she can line up her nurses to cover all the shifts for a week and not have a nurse go sick, then maybe she can come with me and a group of other Sister teachers to Grand Isle. Her responsibility for the surgery hall means that she can never make firm plans, but in a letter I’m going, yes, Chris, yes, yes, yes, come hell or high water we are going to Grand Isle, and I draw a little island with a palm tree and a beach with a starfish on it, and a bright sun with rays shining over everything.

At the convent personal mail is put on top of our desks in the community room, and my heart lifts whenever I walk in from school and see the familiar handwriting and the Houma postmark. I’m starting to learn the medical shorthand Chris uses—the way she puts “c” with a dash over it for “with,” for example—and I feel proud of all she knows about medicine and the way she’s a real professional. Mama was an RN, and I could tell from her stories how much she felt for her patients, and I can sense that same spirit in Chris.

In one letter Chris tells me about one of her patients—some poor guy with cancer who was going crazy from the pain—and one morning she walks into his room and sees him humped over in the bed trying to drive his head into the mattress. The worst situation, she says, is when a patient is in severe pain and she can’t get the doctor on call to authorize an increase of the pain medication. Maybe he’s on the golf course or something and won’t answer his pager. I tell Chris I couldn’t stand that. I’d tear out of there and hunt that guy down. I can’t bear to see anyone in pain. I’m sure it’s because I’m such a coward myself about pain.

I admire Chris’s know-how, the way she takes charge of a situation and is willing to push everything to the max to help her patients. Later, I’ll experience it for myself when I have ankle surgery and get a terrible staph infection and Chris drives to New Orleans and steps into my hospital room, and I relax and know everything’s going to be all right.

When a group of us teachers finally pulls off a visit to the nursing community in Houma and we all sit down together for lunch, we’re amazed at the graphic, detailed hospital incidents the nurses talk about while we’re eating. I mean graphic. Like the poor lady brought into the emergency room at 1:00 A.M. with half her gluteus maximus sliced off by her machete-slashing husband—blood everywhere—and their assisting the surgeon for four hours as he stitched the lady’s behind back on. I think, Now, that’s real work, and it makes teaching kids subject-verb agreement and verb conjugations seem pretty airy. There’s no end to the nursing stories, but it gets a bit hard to stomach when you’re eating delicious baked chicken and the story turns to the abdominal surgery on a very obese man and how the surgeon had to cut through layer upon layer of fat—just like yellow chicken fat, the nurses inform us (thanks a lot)—and how the surgeon got his gloves plastered with yellow yuck, and I find that the once succulent chicken in my mouth sort of just sticks there. The nurses aren’t trying to gross us teachers out, they’re just talking shop as they always do, and they’re finished eating in about fifteen minutes flat. All the nurses I know eat fast, and when Chris and I have lunch together I’m always trying to slow her down.

There’s a lot I don’t know about nursing, but I know enough to know that I’m not cut out for it. I’d be as sincere and compassionate as I could be, but I’d be messing up medications and killing patients left and right. I’m too scatterbrained. I’m also not helpful when someone is throwing up, because I’d be throwing up right alongside the poor soul. By a stretch I could call the impulse compassion, but I know it’s only my nervous-jervis gag reflex.

I remember one time in the fourth grade on the playground Sister Rosemona hurt my feelings terribly by ordering me to leave the scene when a kid was throwing up and I was there beside him, gagging and heaving. Sister Rosemona, who was always sweet and never raised her voice to a flea, yelled at me: “Helen, leave now!” It’s not like I was trying to throw up.

I’m appreciating how grounded Chris is. No fluff about her, in stark contrast with ole Fluff Queen, me, who’s always spinning big dreams of winning the young people of America and the whole entire world over to Christ. Sister George, my first principal, would say, “There she goes, that Sister Louis Augustine, her feet firmly planted in midair.”

Chris’s levelheadedness is good for me, and I hope my vibrancy and optimism are good for her. When the reforms of Vatican II make it possible to visit our families once again, it’s a wonderful thing not only to visit our own families but our friends’ families as well. And as soon as Mama meets her, the two of them are like gravy on rice, and their obvious delight in each other brings on a riff of mine that is totally efficacious in its result every time the three of us are together. The way it goes is I tell Mama, “I know it—you can’t hide it. I can see you like Chris more than me, and I’m supposed to be your own flesh-and-blood daughter,” and I cradle my head in my hands and let out a pitiful boo hoo hoo to emphasize my deep hurt. It never fails to trigger Mama’s “No, honey, no, you know no one can ever replace you.” And so, whenever we’re together—clearly to keep the peace—Mama gives us nicknames, calling me her “Chick” and Chris her “Pet,” and that’s the way it goes.

Chris’s mama—I call her “Lady Pennington”—is tall and regal and plays the piano and belongs to a book club and is a teacher and was born on the exact same day and year, September 27, 1911, as my mama. Over time they get to be friends, too, and that makes a four-way web that binds me to Chris even more.

Lady P had a much harder life than Mama. Mama and Daddy loved each other, and all I ever knew was this solid universe of love that held us all together. But out of the blue, Lady P’s husband, Chris’s daddy, left her and the four children for another woman. Chris was six, and she remembers her mama and daddy arguing late one night in the kitchen and the next day he was gone. The betrayal was deep, and Chris’s mama never talked about it, and so Chris and her brother and sisters didn’t know what the terrible thing was that happened. They couldn’t talk to their mama about it because it made her cry.

The wound of it, the brokenness, stays deep in Chris her whole life. It feels natural for me to trust her but hard for her to trust me, and we always have to work at shoring up trust between us. It takes a long, long time before Chris trusts enough to have a no-holds-barred, voices-raised argument with me, and it’s not hard to know why. The last encounter between her parents that she remembers was a loud, angry argument, and the argument broke apart everything and her father left forever. Growing up, I had my sister, Mary Ann, to argue with, scream at, and fight with—I mean, wrestling each other down to the floor and slugging it out. Then it was over and life went on. In my family a good argument simply meant a good way to get blood circulating in your brain, and the rapid-fire exchange taught us how to think on our feet and put out to-the-point, cogent arguments or shut up. Although among us kids there was also a steady stream of ad hominems hurled back and forth at each other:

You’re stupid.

You’re stupider.

You’re stupid to the “nth” power (after learning a little algebra).

You’re stupid to the “nth” power plus one.

But for Chris, arguing had always meant the end of the world.

Chris always wonders why her daddy didn’t love her enough to stay, and later on, after years of friendship, Chris trusts me enough to confide that one of the main reasons she became a nun was that she knew she could never trust a man enough to marry. Only God, her true Father, could be trusted to be faithful.

Through the steady stream of our letters, Chris and I descend into each other’s worlds. She’s so submerged in the daily practicalities of medicine, her imagination and spirit are starved. She misses being able to read—something she always had loved to do. Growing up in Houma, she’d spend whole afternoons on the screened front porch with Mark Twain and the Brontë sisters, and any historical novel she could get her hands on. She so delighted in Jane Eyre that when she knew she was coming to the final chapters, she forced herself to slow down so the book would never end.

In my letters I introduce her to J. D. Salinger, who in the sixties is all the rage. As an English major in college, I studied The Catcher in the Rye, and of all the books I’d read, hands down, the freshest voice in writing I ever encountered was that of Holden Caulfield. There it was, from page 1, this honest kid’s voice: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like…and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Later, when I write books myself, it’s this spontaneous, just-you-and-me-talking voice I’ll strive for. But all this writing-voice business doesn’t get into my letters to Chris, mainly because I don’t even know there is such a thing as having a “voice” in writing. What I am saying to Chris, though, is what a fantastic writer this Salinger guy is, how spiritual he is—the way he blends Zen and Christian mysticism—and for her to always look out for the Fat Lady and little children in his stories, and don’t worry about all the goddams—they are just Salinger’s way of spicing things up. By hook or crook, I’m telling her, you just have to get Catcher and Franny and Zooey and read them.

Sometimes I feel like a medieval monk scribe, the way I transcribe long excerpts from books in my letters to Chris. But I know how thirsty she is for imaginative ideas, and I try to give her cool drinks by passing on the new things I’m reading. It’s the most concrete way I have to show my care for her. That’s what Erich Fromm says in The Art of Loving—one of the books I’m reading: that you must practice loving the way you practice music or any art—you must perform deeds to show you care.

In what I’m afraid is exceedingly enthusiastic fashion, I share snippets of my journal with Chris, which probably bowls her over and paralyzes her more than inspires her: “Chris! The thrill of it, to record alive thoughts right as they flow out of my soul like hot lava rising—wouldn’t you love to start a journal, too? And you can record exactly how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking, and…”

Poor baby. She’s too tired to read, much less write, and she’s never been good at spelling (much to the chagrin of her mama the teacher), and it didn’t help her confidence much during novitiate at our junior college to suffer Sister Veronica’s grading bias against those who had suffered the misfortune of not attending a CSJ school. Chris attended a high school in Houma run by the Marianites of Holy Cross, and this was enough to merit an automatic “C” on every composition she wrote for Sister Veronica. It may have been one or two misspelled words that did her in. Sister Veronica saw misspelled words as proof positive of despicable laziness. “What—with a dictionary at your elbow?”

After novitiate Chris got her RN from the Mercy Sisters, and that was all practical knowledge about anatomy, biology, and pharmacology, and zip on literature or composition, much less creative writing. And so it takes a while for her to feel comfortable writing to me and just letting the words flow, misspelled or not. When she really loosens up, she starts illustrating her letters with little stick-man cartoons, so outrageously primitive they make me laugh out loud.

A year after our friendship began a very big thing happens—we finally get to go on that vacation together for a week in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Chris and I had both spent summers at Grand Isle. Our family had a camp where we’d go for weeks at a time, and Chris’s family would go to her uncle’s camp. As young girls, we might have passed each other on the beach.

Our vacation crew is fourteen strong, thirteen of us teachers and Chris the nurse. Until now it was always the rule that local communities not only lived together, prayed together, and worked together but also vacationed together. Everybody together all the time. You get the picture…and maybe you can imagine the sheer human challenge of it, especially since, grace or no grace, nuns or no nuns, human beings have a way of showing up as themselves, and old Sour Grapes at work and meals and community recreation at home is going to be her vintage Sour Grapes self on vacation, too.

I’m excited out of my mind to be going back to Grand Isle. Once I entered the convent, I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever swim and fish in the Gulf again and walk the beach and feel the strong Gulf breeze whistling through my hair. We are all still in full habits, and once we arrive at the camp and settle in, it takes us a good half hour to hash out a sizable ethical dilemma about how we’re going to cross the very public highway to get to the beach.

Should we cross the highway dressed in our habits and discreetly disrobe on the beach? Or, should we put on our swimsuits and nonchalantly cross the road in twos and threes and maybe not be noticed? (In summer the island swarms with Catholics, who know how to spot nuns a mile away.)

Poor Sister Jean, our superior, recently appointed, who is nervous about displeasing the higher-ups, has the responsibility of shepherding us through this ethical quandary. She thinks maybe the best way for us to get to the beach is to wear our habits to cross the highway, which is about as public as you get, she says: The Holy Rule makes it clear that the habit is always to be worn in public, especially when traveling.

Traveling? But, Mother, we’re only crossing the road.

True, it’s not far, but what else is it but traveling in public?

And so it goes, batting out definitions and discerning between letter versus spirit of the Holy Rule. What finally clinches the decision is that one of us lays out a vivid imaginative sketch of fourteen fully habited nuns crossing the highway to a public beach and then…well, disrobing en masse before God and everybody there on the beach. Just think of the mountain of black habits there on the beach: Can you picture it? And here come people strolling down the beach and catching sight of…What the hey is that black heap? The scene might summon an action reporter from a local television station and make top billing on the nightly news.

A week. Chris and I have a whole week of freedom and recreation on an island we both have loved from childhood. It’s very much a community affair with fourteen of us in the camp with a long table and benches on each side downstairs and wall-to-wall beds in a dorm upstairs for sleeping. Chris and I pick out the two beds at the end of the row and slide them close so we can lie across them and be close enough to talk at night without disturbing the others. Throughout the week we get up early to fish, and we swim in the surf, going out to the second sandbar in the afternoon when the tide is out. There’s a strong breeze coming from the Gulf—you can smell salt in the air and the waves are running high, and we have a giant tractor-tire inner tube that can hold six of us at a time like rub-a-dub-dub, six nuns in a tub, and a lot of squealing and yelling and laughing as we skinny ones attempt to pull up the chubby ones onto the tube, and a lot of mishaps up and down all the way around. The hot sun warms our faces and arms and the water is cool and salty, which makes you feel sticky when you get out, and you can’t wait to take a shower. Fourteen people sharing one bathroom? We hook up a hose and put out two large galvanized tubs in the yard and take turns holding the hose for each other as we suds up and rinse off sandy suits and sticky skin and hair. And then, to be all dry and clean, faces reddened by the sun, sitting around the table mounted high with scarlet boiled crabs and cold beer—tell me: Is this heaven, or what? After supper we play cards or read and listen to music, and then gather around for evening prayer before we go to bed. Psalm 42 gives a mantra for the day:

Deep is calling to deep

as your cataracts roar;

all your waves, your breakers

have rolled over me.

Each afternoon we set aside an hour for silent meditation, and once again I’m walking the beach of my childhood and trying to quiet my soul so I can take in the beauty and the joy. As a young girl I learned to swim in these warm Gulf waters, and I remember one night when our family was on the beach for a wiener roast and I walked away by myself for a while and the gray-white moon was shining across the dark, heaving water and all I could hear was the breathing of the waves, and I thought my heart would break from the joy or sadness or both at the same time. I did not understand what I felt, with my heart longing for, aching for…what? I did not know. Nor do I know even now, as I tell you about it. Something as simple as the moon shining on water has a numinous, unnameable quality about it that is unspeakable. What else to call it but Mystery?

Except for Chris, we all teach religion, and with the magma of new, exciting theological ideas flowing out of Vatican II, the books and articles we’re reading have made their way onto this island, along with musical albums and novels, and they course through our conversations during meals and on the beach and everywhere else. Chris finds the discussions fascinating, and at night, side by side in our beds upstairs, we talk in whispers about the amazing new insights.

She has brought the copy of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey I sent her, and we talk about Franny’s frenzied efforts to achieve union with God by praying the Jesus Prayer over and over—“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”—which she got from a book about a Russian peasant who took to heart St. Paul’s words about praying without ceasing. Franny is obsessed with the prayer but also in great distress and close to a nervous breakdown.

The clincher comes in the final chapter, when Zooey, her brother, draws her up short and helps her understand that praying the prayer like the Russian peasant is fine and he doesn’t ridicule it. But, he says, she’s not actually loving the people around her—for starters, her own mother, who keeps bringing her homemade chicken soup, which Franny keeps rejecting. If it’s a spiritual life she wants, Zooey says, she can keep saying the Jesus Prayer all she wants, but she’d better start recognizing the “religious action” in her mother’s soup and accept it as the act of love it is. And when she performs onstage, she needs to stop complaining about the “stupidity of audiences.” She needs to give it all she’s got, and do it for the Fat Lady who is listening to the program at home on her radio.

And who is the Fat Lady?

Zooey explains, “Ah, buddy, it’s Christ Himself.”

Off and on all week, Chris and I talk about the story and where we meet the Fat Lady, and it’s not hard for Chris. She meets the Fat Lady every day in the hospital. It’s harder for me. I talk mostly in generalities or stretch the meaning to apply to a kid I teach who has alcoholic parents, legitimate enough when it comes to human suffering, but nowhere near what awaits me down the river. (The Fat Lady is waiting for me, and with the consciousness I have, I’m doing my best to make my way to her, waiting for grace to wake me up.)

And now, these days of this miracle vacation, here I am again, the joy of it too full to take in, with this greatest gift of all, Chris, and I thank God over and over. But there’s so much frenzied excitement and energy in me, it’s hard to stop and be quiet inside so I can taste the wonder of it all. It reminds me of the way specially treated charcoal catches fire when you put a match to it. There’s a flare and the flame quickly spreads across the surface of the charcoal in a thin line of red, but only on the surface, and it takes a while for the burning to catch deep inside.

The only time Chris and I can talk privately, just the two of us, is at night in our beds in the dorm, and we have to whisper so we don’t disturb the others. Two tall stand-up fans are on at either end of the row of beds, and they help muffle our voices. We’re still only beginning to know each other, and she tells me about the tense situation she and the other young Sisters at the hospital are facing with the grueling schedule and unsympathetic superiors, and I can tell things are not very life-giving there and she and the others are suffering, but I don’t know what to do about it. We marvel at these days here on the island and how wonderful it feels to fish again and swim, and she especially loves the feel of wind in her hair. We’re both terribly excited about the changes coming about in religious life, and we talk endlessly about the new life and possibilities heading our way. It’s a good time to be alive, a good time to be nuns in the Church—the way we’re moving away from having to renounce everything good and positive, and embracing it instead.

Chris and I are at the beach every chance we get, and I’m delighted that she loves to fish, as I do, and knows how to bait the hook, cast out, and take fish off the hook—even tricky catfish with their poisonous dorsal fin.

A few of us rise at daybreak to fish in the sparkling surf, just as the sun is coming up, and, O, God, the beauty of it, with the relentless surf swirling round our knees, the undertow trying to pull us out—it takes a lot to keep our footing in the shifting sand. Cast out the singing line and reel it in, cast and reel, ebb and flow…all your waves, your breakers, have rolled over me….I look across the surf and see this new friend in my life, fishing beside me, and I sense the patience in her, the long patience that comes from knowing how to wait when you fish and that you’re never guaranteed anything when you cast your line into the enormous sea.

One evening after supper we sit around to listen to the story and music of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story—a modern version of Romeo and Juliet. Sister Kathleen Pittman had seen the musical the previous month, when she chaperoned the St. Joseph Academy seniors to New York City, and she feeds us the narrative bit by bit, interspersed with the songs, which she stops and plays, and it’s as if we’re there. We can see it, we can feel it, all the way through to the tragic ending, when Tony, Maria’s new love, is stabbed in a gang fight. As his life ebbs away, Maria kneels beside him and sings, “There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us.”

We’re all crying. The music gets to you. The sheer tragedy of it—two young people just meeting and loving and having their whole life before them—there’s a time for us…time together with time to spare…wait for us somewhere…only to have it all shattered in a stupid gang fight. How fragile life is…love is. We can’t ever hold on to anything. I’m seized with terrible longing. How do people do it, surrender themselves, invest their lives and happiness completely with another? Why am I not drawn to give myself to one person in marriage like that? Maybe, once you strip off the spiritual coating of my “religious vocation,” I’m only a sterile, little, shriveled-up, deluded…what?…bride of Christ? Nah—just an old maid, afraid to risk it all for the sake of love.

Or not.

When the pain of my solitary, me-alone-life hits like this, I’ve got to learn to face it head-on, begging for grace to cushion my fragile heart. Abide in me. This too will pass. I’m also learning that vacation time can be vulnerable time, unmoored as it is from the daily schedule that moves me in increments through tasks of the day.

After exactly one week, vacation is over, and we pack up everything to leave the island. I’m going back to the convent in New Orleans to teach at Cabrini School and Chris is going back to the hospital in Houma.

Where did the week go? School? Ugh. I’ll hit the treadmill on Monday morning and won’t get off until Friday afternoon. It makes me tired to think of it. Endless Mondays, endless lesson preparations, endless teacher-and-parent meetings. And to what purpose? Do I really think my teaching kids for nine months out of the year is going to have any kind of real, lasting effect on their lives? Why does everything feel so empty? Isn’t vacation supposed to energize, renew, and refresh?

We drive up to New Orleans, and Chris takes the Greyhound bus back to Houma. Once home, we unpack all our things, go to chapel for evening meditation, then in silence close the curtains around our beds in the dormitory to prepare for sleep. My heart feels as heavy as lead. Why be close to anyone, if it means always having to say goodbye? I think of Chris arriving back in Houma. When we hugged goodbye she could hardly talk. Back to the salt mines. She’ll be up early tomorrow for the 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. shift. Back to writing letters. All we have, really, is letters. What kind of close friendship can we sustain with letters? She’s a nurse, I’m a teacher; we’ll never be missioned together, never live in the same house.

I climb into bed. Grand Isle fades. Monday morning with my eighth-grade English class beckons. Give me your love and your grace….I can’t…make it…without…your grace. The best thing I can do this night is put this heavy heart to sleep.