HARRIMAN, N.Y. -- When John Steinbeck searched for America for his book "Travels with Charley," he did so with a Standard Poodle, a hefty advance from his publisher and a cache of guns, whiskey, and tools in a large, handsome truck named Rocinante, the letters written in Sixteenth-Century script on the side.
I’m a reporter and recent divinity school graduate about to criss-cross the country on a shoestring budget -- with Diet Dr. Pepper, a laptop computer, a video camera, and a backpack full of clothes. My Rocinante is a trusty old two-door coupe that leaks oil like a sieve and bears the scars of three years of on-street parking in an urban neighborhood where parallel parking is a contact sport. I thought about calling the car Hermes after the Greek messenger god. But I think it’s best to go with something less pretentious … like Bob.
I would like to go on the record right here: Bob has never failed. Still, the grim humor of the situation was apparent as I peered down dark driveways somewhere out in the New York countryside on a recent Sunday night. I was trying to ignore the thumping sounds coming from the car as I looked for signs of a convent.
It had been two and a half years since I’d seen Sister Eileen Kelly, although I’d talked with her briefly by phone and by email.
I met Eileen at Harvard, just after she returned from 25 years of service at Holy Redeemer Church on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Some events in a person’s life shape them so profoundly that to reflect on them is to realize when one has felt truly alive. Cat Island and its people -- the 31-year-old grandmother who died of AIDS, the 14-year-old mother, the family matriarchs who dispensed wisdom with a stern stare or a parable – so shaped Eileen’s life that when she returned to the states as a nun in her late 60s, she had trouble re-envisioning what life stateside was going to be like.
She was still trying to deal with the shock of transitioning from a life of tending to the spiritual and practical needs of a community without running water, fast food joints, excellent health care, or all the hundreds of things Americans take for granted.
Eileen called one day after she left Harvard. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life,” she said. It took me a few seconds to realize she wasn’t questioning her decision nearly 50 years earlier to become a nun. She was thinking what next?
And this started me thinking: What if searching for meaning is part of the human condition, no matter what age or spiritual status? What if questioning never ceases?
The Sisters of Charity convent, where Eileen lives, is really an old turn-of-the-century farmhouse, set back on a hill overlooking a busy two-lane highway. Four nuns, all over the age of 63, greeted me with open arms as I walked through the door. I had pictured tiny austere cells with single beds and bare walls. This was a warm, cozy home with sloping wood floors, rough-hewn beams, narrow wooden staircases, small parlors, packed bookcases, and a light and airy gourmet kitchen.
“This is a convent, right?” I asked later. Eileen laughed at my surprise. A convent meant a community of Sisters, she said. It could also be the buildings occupied by them.
As we ate dinner together in the farmhouse’s intimate dining room, our conversation turned to my project. We talked briefly about structured religion verses the free-flowing spirituality of people who believe in something -- maybe God or a divine presence -- but don’t attend a church. We talked about faith and about the absence of it.
I was a little nervous discussing theology with a table full of nuns, likable as they were. Maybe faith, I suggested, was about being willing to live in the gray areas of life. Absence of faith, then, would be about living in a world that is black and white. I was unsure about how such a thought would be received, but Eileen nodded.
“I have heard somewhere,” she said, “that the opposite of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.”
Email Me | Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook
Recent Comments