Sleep did not come easily last night. I lay awake and struggled with what I should write about next. Remembering my experiences has made old wounds painful. I'm sure that my recent attack of shingles and its lingering impact on my physical equilibrium are based on a deeper psychic wound. How do I purge myself of this sickness that lies dormant in my soul? Why does this still affect me so?
My experiences in the convent has been the most difficult thing I've ever gone through because I had so much invested in becoming a nun. Despite whatever psychological reasons predisposed me to choose to enter a convent and despite whatever I was running from in life, I entered with a very idealistic motive. I wanted to contribute something to the world. I wanted to touch other people's lives in a positive way. I knew what it was like to be an underdog, to not fit in. I easily empathized with other people's pain. It was that pain, I wanted to ease. I wanted them to know and to feel that they weren't alone. God would always be on their side. They were deeply loved.
While my emotional health was rapidly crumbling under the strain and the mind games that were implemented to "break me down" I never believed that God had given up on me. I did, however, begin to give up on myself.
Remember, I wasn't the most stable or happiest of young ladies. I carried an exagerated sense of guilt and shame. This is precisely what made me a good target and a good victim. Sister Felicity and Sister Christine has smelled my "blood in the water". They knew exactly where and how to strike to to do the most harm.
Am I perhaps slightly paranoid? That is a question I asked myself then and now. It's very difficult to believe that women professing to follow Christ in living a good and holy life would be guilty of some of the things I have mentioned here. Even if stripped from the emotional lens through which I view the past, the facts speak loudly for themselves. How I wish what I am writing about was not true.
Last night as I lay awake trying to decide what to pull out of my memory next, I realized that there are many things that were said to me that remain forever obscured by time and by the trauma of those words. The "Grand Inquisitions" of which I spoke are hopelessly clouded. I can only remember sitting in front of them while, three woman took turns telling me how awful I was. I have no solid memory of what was said. I only vaguely remember how horrible it felt.
Last night, long after midnight, I pondered why a woman, who was head of an entire order of over 180 women, would take time out to collect several other Sisters and drive across town on an evening to tell one little novice how worthless she was and not once but on at least 3 different occasions. What good did she possibly believe she was serving? If I'd been an employee or a student and had witnesses or better yet a tape of the event, I could have taken them all to court and won a lovely settlement. I was some one even more important and less powerful. I was a simple young woman who genuinely wanted to follow a religious life. They should have been fostering my good qualities. If I really wasn't nun material, time would have revealed that to me. I saw a lot of women who weren't nun material that had been nuns for years. It didn't make sense.
My motives should have produced a nurturing and encouraging environment. Instead I received the polar opposite. "Why" haunted me for many years. Over time, I realized that I will never understand all the "whys" of it. I've worked hard to let it go. Reliving it now isn't easy as witnessed by last night's bout of insomnia.
I did take my impossible situation to God. That God whether real or imagined helped sustain me. I chose to continue to believe in God probably just to spite the meaner nuns. I will always hold open the notion that God may have been a figment of my imagination. Knowing the twists and turns of the human mind, it seemed a real possibility. I prefer living in a universe with a God and my personal feelings seems to connect with a power beyond myself. But as far as proving God is real or gives a rip about humanity, I can not. I couldn't then and despite the fact that I was living and dressing like a nun, I never felt it was right or ethical to impose my belief system on any one else. Saving the infidel wasn't my thing. Getting to know the infidel, being friends, I'm all about that.
Maybe I clung to this belief in a benevolent God in order to feel superior to the craziness I saw all around me. Living with the Sisters was a much worse environment than growing up in a non-demonstrative home with siblings who seemed forever locked in combat of one kind or another while our parents hovered in the distance. I prayed to God that "He would use this hell to make me a saint".
I realized that to spare myself false arrogance I also had to add, "Oh, and don't let me know I am a saint if I ever become one."
Saints who knew they were saints must not be saints at all.
Crazy, probably, but given the circumstances, it became my only solid lifeline in a vast ocean of crazy.
I knew I was a sinner. Thinking that sainthood might be within reach while I walked this difficult path seemed my only hope. I'll never know if and when God might answer that prayer.
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