The Biker Nun Rides Free

Pressure kept increasing.  I lost weight and had trouble sleeping as I waited for the next lesson or ridiculous assignment.  Sister Felicity was determined to prove I wasn't nun material.  I was determined to pass the tests.

I looked for ways to escape.  While exiled to Maryville, I asked my parents for a bicycle for my birthday.  Money was tight and they bought what they could afford, an old rusty English touring bike.  In my eyes it was beautiful.  I threw myself into its renovation.  Carefully removing rust and layers of old paint to discover a beautiful detailed emblem underneath that celebrated the bike's original manufacturer.  My old bike was a diamond in the rough.

My bike restoration project was so much more.  Inside, I knew that I was also a diamond in the rough.  In working on the bike I was working on myself.  With each new layer, I uncovered, I felt more whole, more capable.  Once the bike looked like it hadn't stood out in the rain for several years, I rode it every chance I could get.  For some reason, I didn't take time to change into civilian clothes.  Instead, I'd take off on this bike dressed in my habit complete with veil.

Up and down busy Farmington Road, I would ride.  Why I didn't cause accidents as drivers took their eyes off the road to stare at a modern version of "The Flying Nun", I'll never know.  I made that bicycle fly.  My veil fluttered behind me in the air current I generated as I rolled over the miles alongside busy Beaverton traffic.

My bike rides became the high point of my day.  I was alone and free.  It was the only time I could feel like a whole person.  It was the only time I could feel like me.  Being me, in the convent, seemed to get me in trouble.  I couldn't figure it out.  All through grade and high school, I was the "good girl".  Now in the convent, I'd been cast in the opposite role.  I didn't know how to play it.  The harder I tried to regain my familiar "good girl" role, the worse things got for me.  The authors of this drama were way off base.

The power structure of the order still had a pre-Vatican II frame of mind.  They were old school, demanding authority by virtue of their position.  They often ignored their responsibility to be good leaders.
I came from a post-Vatican II world.  I was part of the Baby Boomer Generation.  We walked in the age of psychology and Aquarius.  We questioned authority as we watched riots and saw blood shed at Kent State.  We saw two Kennedys assassinated before our eyes.  We lost Martin Luther King.  Vietnam's body count entered our homes while we ate dinner.  We heard and saw through the lies of Watergate.  We came from a time of turmoil and learned to question the motives of our leaders.  We watched those leaders rise and fall.  Those that clung to power had failed us.  Those that had tried to lead had been shot down.  We had seen the "man behind the curtain."  We had lost our innocence in a spray of bullets.  Our ideals lay bloodied at our feet.

What was true of my generation is not true today.  Many older people have chosen to forget.  Many younger have chosen not to see.  It will always be easier to abdicate personal responsibility.  It requires very little effort to simply believe what one is told.  It is the easy way.

That has never been part of my nature.  Questioning comes as easily to me as breathing.  It is part of who I am.  I celebrate it.  I knew that so much of what I witnessed and much of what had happened to me was wrong.  Ignoring it didn't make it right.   Not ignoring it made my life harder.  I could have been like Sister Zelda and carried on elaborate surveillance on suspects and lied to cause other people trouble while painting myself an avenging angel.  It just wasn't me.

For me, God will always be better served by an honest, questioning soul than by ignorant sheep who are too easily led by temporal leaders.  I, the poster child for "the good girl" had always been a closet rebel.  Who I was, what I believed posed a threat to the power that was.  It was in Sister Felicity's and Sister Christine's best interest to drive me out and to shame me into silence.  My biggest fault was not believing in myself more and taking so long to save myself.

Sister Christine had made inappropriate sexual advances on several occasions.  I had a right to say, "No."
I also had a responsibility to report it.  The leaders had a responsibility to act on it.  They failed.  They made me the scapegoat for their own failures.  I knew that then. 

When I rode my bike, fast, furious and free, I was beginning to understand that I would have to move forward into my future.  Those rides alongside busy traffic were showing me the world beyond convent grounds, a world that was raw and real.  It invited me into its' imperfection assuring me that I was worth saving.  There was a place for me.  It was not within convent walls.