First published in the Baptist Times - OUTSIDE EDGE column - 23 April 2010
I’ve been blessed by being part of two wonderful Baptist churches.
The people are warm, the focus on Jesus is great, and I love the fact that anyone and everyone pops up to the microphone, to read, pray or share what God’s doing with them.
So it’s tentatively and with great respect that I venture that something is missing.
It’s just a personal opinion. But I think we need a few nuns.
Nuns have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Their discreet redistribution of gifts and donations was a lifeline to my mother, bringing up two children on no income; likewise their prayers. Letters from Sister Monica, with assurances of being remembered and prayed for, punctuated our childhood and adult life.
Sister Monica was ex-headmistress of the Catholic convent school to which my mother had been sent by non-churchgoing Anglican parents because it was ‘ladylike’. They were horrified when their daughter wanted to become a Catholic and told her to wait till she was 21, by which time she would have left school and outgrown the environment.
She waited, took instruction, and was received into the Catholic Church at a ceremony attended by no one except one friend and Sister Monica, who stayed in contact with our family till she died.
The school my sister and I attended was run by a ‘mixed’ order - not male and female but part active, part contemplative, so even the teaching nuns spent lengthy periods in prayer. One nun, coming straight from an hour in chapel to teach a maths class, suddenly halted in the middle of long division to talk, with tears in her eyes, about Jesus’ love in suffering such agony for us.
Tiny birdlike Cockney Mother St Dorothea ruled the junior school with a brisk no-nonsense approach and called everyone ‘duckie’ - or everyone except Reverend Mother, tall, graceful and French, who once congratulated me on an essay on prayer. When, embarrassed, I blurted, ‘But I can’t do it!’ she burst out laughing and said, ‘Oh, neither can we! But we try!’
There was Mother Oliver Plunkett, who turned little boys into angels and little girls into weeping wrecks, and Mother St Anselm who roared down the corridor, ‘Who has taken the keys to my linen cupboard?’ but was tender towards the boarders, getting up at night to bathe their feet when they had chilblains in winter.
As an adult, I once conducted a healing service in an enclosed, contemplative convent. It was strange, laying hands on veiled and wimpled heads, and struggling for answers as the rule of silence was lifted and the nuns made up for lost time with a barrage of questions.
Two of them later left the convent, one to go to a sister-house in the States, another for secular life. The first sent me a photo of herself, in full mediaeval habit, on an exercise bike. The second joined me and some friends at Center Parcs for a day on the water slides, arriving with a swimsuit ‘providentially’ left unclaimed in her local church. ‘What if it isn’t your size?’ I asked. She was stunned. ‘Why would God give me a swimsuit that didn’t fit me?’ It did. At the end of the day it disintegrated. ‘Well, I’m not going to need it again.’
‘Active’ nuns are very active: in parishes, nursing homes and community projects working long hours and allowing themselves few comforts. But servanthood doesn’t mean doormat-hood: nuns are strong characters and many don’t suffer fools gladly. Our local young priests bribed each other to do the Masses at a convent they nicknamed ‘The Daughters of Dracula.’
One of the ‘Daughters’ started a charismatic prayer group and though the other nuns thought we were strange and went on too late they said they liked hearing us singing while they lay in bed.
None of them fitted the pious or psychopath stereotypes.
I think we should import a few nuns into Baptist churches; they add a certain vibrancy to life.
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