And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas Read Free Book Online Page A

romantic bubble some of us had envisioned, but neither was it austere or humorless. Not with people like Sister Jessica around. What’s more, nuns were not the saintly, virginal beings we assumed they were. Any one of us could be nun material. Even me.
    ( 2:v )
    â€œAT LEAST we’re getting a cardio and strength-training workout,” said Lorraine, our feet shuffling along a dusty concrete floor as we lugged a six-foot wooden altar from one end of the basement to the other.
    As part of our daily labor— Laborare est orare (to work is to pray) was St. Benedict’s ethos—Lorraine and I had been assigned the job of sorting through a jumble of old furniture and knickknacks discarded by the sisters and then cleaning and pricing it for a garage sale that was to take place in two weeks. It was the first garage sale the sisters had held.
    I was glad to be paired with Lorraine. She was a strong, good-humored woman with wavy shoulder-length hair, and like me, she was divorced and in her fifties. She was working toward a theology degree: her thesis argued that Western churches had misinterpreted the gospel when it claimed that justice was central to Jesus’s teaching, and she was comparing the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible to support her theory.
    â€œBut the Anglican Church in Canada is all about peace and justice at the moment,” I said slightly puzzled.
    â€œDon’t get me started on that,” Lorraine said, gritting her teeth. But usually she would get started on it and rant a little to explain her point.
    â€œThe church has hijacked Jesus’s call to righteousness and created an assumption that it’s a call to social justice. I don’t believe that it is. Did you know that in the King James Version of the Bible— the Bible of the English-speaking Protestant world for several hundred years—the word ‘justice’ doesn’t appear once—not once—in the New Testament? And it appears only twenty-eight times in the Old Testament. And the word ‘justice’ is almost never defined by the people who use it: What does it mean? Fairness? Equity? Equality? And what’s the relationship between justice and the law? The whole social justice thing is a great deflector, a patronizing finger-pointer that says ‘The problem is with systems and not within us.’ It’s easier for the church to talk about social justice than to talk about the inner journey or the inner work that individuals need to do.”
    In the early hours of morning, Lorraine and I would often bump into each other in the small library down the hall from our cells. When the sisters and some of the more devout among our Crossroads group were tuned to private prayer, Lorraine and I would be in the library checking our email. (The convent had Wi-Fi.)
    Lorraine loved books, and she was forever recommending titles for me to read. Occasionally, while sitting across from one another in the library, my laptop would ping with the arrival in my inbox of yet another book recommendation from her. By the time I left St. John’s, the list had grown to about twenty-five books. (The sheer number of books about faith that are published each year is staggering. The moment you express an interest in a religious vocation, everyone has a dozen books that “you absolutely have to read.” They are rarely loaned and seldom stocked in public libraries; you can find them only in religious book centers. It required a self-imposed vow of poverty to save me from the tyranny of book recommendations.)
    I looked forward to Lorraine’s suggestions because she would often throw in a title that had nothing to do with religion, and once in a while she would email me a joke, which sent us into uncontrollable giggles during what was supposed to be the Greater Silence.
    In the basement, as we sorted, cleaned, and hauled furniture, we chatted and joked some more.
    The other thing that made our basement