Hiding Places

When the world feels unsafe, where do you hide?  Never one to wear my emotions on my sleeve, despite my rather public breakdown,  I tried to bury my feelings even deeper.  I also found an assortment of hiding places, places I would not be easily found.  When things got too stressful, I took refuge in a number of places that served me well.  

There were a series of wooden closets that lined the long hallway of the dormitory floor.  The dorms were the first place any one looked.  The wooden closets were never searched.  I remember hiding their while listening to them look for me in the various dorm rooms.  I prayed they wouldn't find me as I remained just feet away, hardly breathing.  Not being found felt like a small victory.

There was an empty room at the end of the hallway that most assumed was locked.  It was not.  I often hid there because once inside I could lock the door.  During one search, one of the posse called out my name saying,
"Sister Carol, if you're in there, open this door."
I kept perfectly still and waited.
When she left, possibly to return with a key, I slipped out and fled to another of my secret hiding places.  Animal me was learning to elude my predators.

My favorite hiding place was an old unused library.  It sat at the end of a long hallway on the bottom floor of the grade school.  Crammed floor to ceiling with books, the books flowed out of the shelves and into piles, piles everywhere.  It was a maze made of books and a perfect place to hide.  It smelled dusty and musty.  I often had to stifle sneezes but being in the company of those books felt oddly comforting.   The sane part of me was ashamed of my childish hiding.  The crazy part of me just wanted a safe place to regroup before the next onslaught. 

At this point, I must clarify that the vast majority of the Sisters had no idea what was going on in Formation.  Most of the Sisters seemed to genuinely like me and were often genuinely kind.  When I eventually decided to leave, they were sadden by the loss.   Unfortunately, having made enemies in higher places within a system that controlled communication, and bringing a fragile vulnerability with me, I became a perfect target for the powers that be.  They saw their treatment of me as "guidance".  To me, it felt like torture. 

For many years, I've viewed this part of my past as a "me vs. them" scenario.  The impersonal "they" were the enemy and I the victim.  As long as this was how I saw it, this was how it felt.  It was never that simple.

For purposes of telling the story, I often fall back into viewing things this same way.  Sister Zelda sounds like a royal pain in the tail feathers.  Sister Felicity may sound like the perfect soul-less villain.  This is only part of the larger truth.  The larger truth often lies just beyond my grasp but I believe it is there.  It smiles at me from the edge of my awareness.

How do you tell a story from all perspectives?  How do you tell a story where everyone is at once victim and victimizer?  If it were easy, wouldn't we have more stories that do just that?  But if we did, would anyone be interested in reading them?

We all create our own stories.  I hope that in your story, you are the hero and that at the end of whatever quest you pursue, you remain the hero and are better for having made the journey.  Life, other people, sometimes even we, ourselves, often interrupt our stories.  Everything we have known up to that point, changes.  We change.  How we view ourselves and our lives is dramatically altered by things outside our control.  How easy it is to see those things beyond our control as evil.  And, sometimes they are.

Creating dichotomies helps us cope, helps us fight against something which in turn helps us define who we are. We see ourselves as opposite the evil we reject and yet who would we really be without it in our stories?  Seeing someone who caused us harm or opposed us, as human beings like ourselves is a constant challenge.  How often have some of us heard, "Love the sinner, hate the sin?"
Humans seem to have a horrible time living up to that, this one included.   We are more complicated and yet more simple than we imagine. 

There were injustices against me during the convent years.  Things happened that should not have happened in a perfect or more ideal world.  But they did happen, right, wrong or hopelessly indifferent, it's up to me to take the raw elements of this story, this particular way I view my world and my life and turn it into a story that helps me live a slightly better life than I did the day before.  My experience is simply my experience.  There are other ways of seeing it, there are other ways of being in it.  Remain ever aware of that and your life, your story will never read quite the same again.  Your life will become a richer story, with more color and complexity than you can imagine.  Enjoy the unfolding of the tale.

The Dark Valley

The sequence of events is still clouded by a gray haze.  I was bounced around between assignments which were more like punishments than anything else.  At some point, the stress caused me to break.  Writing about it is still difficult because I still carry strong feelings of shame.  If I step outside myself and look at the situation more objectively, I would only feel compassion for someone in my position.  Inside I still feel embarrassed.  Why couldn't I have been stronger?

I don't remember the when or whys of it but one night while living back at the main convent, I started crying hysterically.  Sister Zelda who was my roommate at the time was irate.  She went to summon Sister Christine.  Sister Christine's idea of comfort was not mine.  The nightgown I was wearing tied at the front of my neck.  Sister Christine would untie it and try to fondle me. I kept fending off her advances which only made my hysteria worse.  I felt like I'd died and gone to hell.

News of my scene spread like wild fire.  I was now officially the resident crazy.  Sister Felicity ordered me to see a diocesan priest who also counseled local religious.  From the start I viewed him as part of enemy forces.  He would soon give me reason.  After more than several sessions,  Sister Felicity, came up to me and told me what she and this priest had discussed in my regard.  It was a blatant violation of client confidentiality.  Fortunately, I still had enough sense of self to know that I'd been violated.  I didn't hesitate to let Father know the next time I saw him.  I gave him a good lecture on trust and his responsibility as a licensed counselor.  He apologized and told me he'd been wrong to discuss me with Sister Christine.  I tried to believe him.

This person who was supposed to help me was not to be trusted.   Part of me really could have used some sane guidance.  Many sessions were spent with my sitting in an angry silence while he fell asleep.  Even though I wasn't talking having the person who is supposed to listen to you fall asleep doesn't feel good.  It certainly wasn't the way to gain my confidence or trust.  Eventually, I felt sorry for him, the exhaustion he brought to his job, the impossible position we both seemed to be in, and finally having me for a client.  Young, damaged, immature but smart enough to know how to push his buttons.  He really wasn't a bad guy.  He was a guy with two feet in a system that wasn't always sane or healthy.

What I did tell him about the situation didn't exactly inspire admiration of how the Sisters were running Formation.  He often couldn't disguise his frustration and disapproval.  In retrospect, he was probably amazed that I'd want to stay and eager to determine why I was so self destructive.    I was as much a riddle to him as I was to myself.

After this incident, things were never the same.  Sister Zelda and her latest posse of troublesome admirers were convinced I was dangerous and unstable.  This was the same situation that played out with the young nun who disappeared shortly after our arrival as postulants.   The writing was on the wall.  Inside I felt hopelessly broken and confused.  I knew it was crazy to stay in this crazy place.  Sister Christine had gotten bolder with her advances but I couldn't report it without suffering the consequences.  Mentally and physically I was suffering.  I started to loss weight.  My stomach was upset all the time.  Headaches were frequent.  I lived in fear of what would come next and I knew that whatever was coming was not going to be good.

Explaining why I stayed is something I can not do.  At the time, I had my entire life invested in staying and becoming a nun.  Broken, sleep deprived, feeling physically sick, made thinking clearly a challenge.  I'd spent months being told how awful I was and how arrogant and I believed it.  I believed it.

What Dreams May Come

Last night, Sister Felicity showed up in my dreams.  I'd gone to bed thinking about how I felt when months ago, I read her obituary.  Reading it, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach.  My anger remained alive and well even though she no longer walked this earth.  Troubled by such ancient anger, I feel asleep thinking about how to let it go.  My waking self didn't have many answers but my sleeping self was busy working things out.

In my dream, I'd heard some of the Sisters, including Sister Felicity were going to be in town.  I dressed up in a habit even though it was long after I'd left the convent.  I wanted to flaunt it just to irritate Sister Felicity.  Initially, it did but soon, I discovered that one of the Sisters for whom I always had a special place in my heart, had suffered a traumatic brain injury.  She was left with the mind of a two-year old.  She was with Sister Felicity and her small band of nuns.  I took the injured Sister out of church, where she was misbehaving and took care of her just like I would have taken care of my children when they were young.  In caring for her, my anger left me. I forgot about my personal vendetta and became very interested in what was being done for this Sister, now child.

At the end of a long dream, I bid them all a sincere goodbye and asked Sister Felicity to have someone contact me now and again to let me know how they were all doing.  She looked at me, with the face and mind of 30 years ago, smiled and said, "Yes, I'll be happy to do that.  Take care, Carol."  Sister Felicity and I finally established a truce for a greater good.

Anger still burns within my human side.  There are things worthy of good clean anger.  Yet, anger is a two-edged sword that can easily slice into one's peace of mind if it is allowed to get out of hand.  Anger often tells us something is wrong.  It causes us to rally our defenses against a perceived threat.  It can energize and motivate.  It can fuel a passionate intensity that can burn brightly and light the way for others.  It can also destroy much of the good we humans carry within us.  It can interfere with our sense of justice and reason.  It can blind us to the unpleasant truths about ourselves.  At its worst, it can cause us to implode and block us from achieving what we were created to achieve.  It can fuel a fire within that makes kindness and gentleness kindling, leaving only a bitter old shell of what we might have become.

Anger itself is not bad.  It simply is.  How we allow anger to transform us makes all the difference.  Letting go of anger is one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do as a human, especially a human coming from a long line of rather dour German American descendants who show anger more easily than any other emotion.    The Sisters themselves were largely from a very similar background and mind set.  "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was a standard practiced in their homes when they were children.  They were a product of their environment.

Stepping outside the box each of us was born into is no easy task.  Opening our minds to other ways, new ideas, causes us to leave our comfort zone.  We desperately search for something familiar to grasp.  Opening one's mind and broadening one's world, considering other ways of doing things is not for the faint-hearted.  Giving up is easy.  Clinging to one's believe system with a blind fervor that views differing viewpoints as a threat betrays fear, fear of the unknown and unfamiliar.  It's very hard to let go. 

Last night in my dreams, I understood how hard it was for these women to change.  I was almost impossible for them to consider alternatives.  They had too much invested in the way things were.  They were filled with fear.  This fear could only be calmed by adhering to a rigid belief system, a belief system that had clear enemies.  To them, I must have been perceived as a threat.  Playing a scapegoat was familiar to me.   I also had a terrifying habit of asking "why" and wanting to understand.  Questions in a closed system pose big problems.  Questioning authority is an even more dangerous thing.

Sister Felicity wasn't evil personified, although there were moments when I actually wondered if she might be. She was a product of her environment.  I was perceived as a threat.  Eliminating that threat wasn't as much a personal reflection on me or my worthiness, it was a reflection on her and the system.  I couldn't see that then.  It was too close to me.  I was too hurt and angry.

Last night my anger dissolved when the Sister I had admired had become a child that needed me.  Children make mistakes but we love them anyway.  Last night as Sister Felicity walked in my dreams, I came full circle.  My experience in the convent makes a lot more sense to me today, long after I had given up on trying to understand it.  Thanks, Dream Sister.  I hope you slumber well in heaven.  Prepare a bunk some where near for me.

Saints and Sinners

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.

Not Smart Enough

As second year novices, we began attending Portland State.  I was taking general college survey courses to add to about a years worth of college work that I had done prior to entering.  It came time to discuss which area we wanted to study and prepare for a teaching certificate.  I wanted an endorsement in English and to teach high school.  This did not serve the Sisters needs.  I also wanted to minor in Theology.  I could see that a lot of the Sisters really didn't have a very good basis in this area.  We were religious after all.

The Sister who coordinated the education for all the Sisters met with each of us.  My meeting didn't go anything like I expected.  When I expressed my interest in English and theology, I was immediately shot down.  She laughed at me and said, "What makes you think you're smart enough for either of those subjects?

I was stunned into silence.  I was living at the convent, keeping its crazy schedule and also going to school.  I was bringing home straight A's and my GPA, that first year was 4.0.  If I hadn't proven already that I was "smart enough" I didn't know how.  After scoffing at my misguided ambitions, I was told that theology was a useless degree and that I would be teaching grade school.  Inside,  I felt like I'd been sentenced to Siberia.  My closest friend in the convent was on track to teach high school history.  We'd talked about how fun it would be to team teach and use our subjects as companions to learning.  We wanted to open up new worlds to our students and both of us felt very passionately about our subjects of interest.  I hadn't expected they'd want me to teach elementary school. 

Summing up the courage to protest, I made a plea to study English and unknowingly opened the door to the first of the punishments for reporting on Sister Christine.  After consulting with the Grand Poobah, Sister Felicity, it was decided that I would be sent to Our Lady of Good Counsel.  It was a convent that housed the Sisters who staffed Christ the King grade school and La Salle High School.  I was going to be observing English teachers so I could see what was required and to prove to me that I couldn't do it.

At first, I viewed this "assignment" as a mixed blessing.  I would be away from the craziness in Formation but I'd also be away from any friends.  I would be isolated.  I'm sure that this was the intent of the powers that be.  I also knew that I could easily become an English teacher and that I was definitely smart enough.  Part of me was anxious to prove it.

Our Lady of Good Counsel was staffed by a handful of final professed Sisters.  The head of the house was a distant and extremely difficult to read woman who never made eye contact.  It's very likely that she had what we now know as Aspergers.  Also, in the house was a very temperamental Sister who can only be described with the words "Super Bitchy".  She was a holy terror and I tried to avoid her at all costs.  You could never please her and never knew when she'd lay into you and "rip you the proverbial new one".

The remaining three Sisters were composed of one adorable and gentle first-grade teacher who was very kind, a kindly older Sister who had some grasp of the "lay of the land" and a Sister who taught at the high school but was rarely there.  It was pretty obvious why she made herself scarce.  The role of Cinderella seemed to be cast for me the day I moved in.  The older Sister was my fairy godmother and tried to protect me from the wicked step-sisters when she could.  The kindly first-grade teacher was an older Cinderella who commiserated at length about the evil deeds of the step-sisters.  This commiseration was actually hard to bear.  Knowing that a fully professed Sister was still victimized daily was a frightening reality.  Was I looking at my future?

As for my school assignment,  it was soon obvious that I was basically useless.  The students soon sensed that I was being punished and we quickly bonded.  A few of the younger teachers became friends.  I got along well with most everyone and was soon well liked.  The Sister who was teaching there acted jealous.  I began to help some of the students with their work when possible just so that I'd have something to do.  Being away from the mother house, I thought I might escape the attention of the powers that ran my world.  This was not the case.  They hadn't forgotten about me and soon decided it was time to really rock my tiny boat. 

Memory fails me as to the reason for what I would call "The Grand Inquisitions."  Not long after I was settled in to a daily routine and finding kindred spirits among the faculty at La Salle, I was summoned to a visiting room at Our Lady of Good Counsel.  There sat Sister Felicity, Sister Christine, and another Sister associated with Formation.  I was placed in a chair a few feet in front of them and the three of them began telling me how awful I was.  I left in tears hoping that this would never happen again.  But it did, only then with some advanced warning, I tried to assemble an advocate on my team.  Unfortunately, my advocates never knew how to respond to the situation.  It was probably too surreal to them.   God knows it was surreal to me.

After a few months of this, I was a nervous wreck.  I suspected trouble everywhere.  I felt completely powerless and trapped in some bizarre nightmare.  I wanted it to stop but this nightmare just  seemed to keep on going.  I came down for breakfast one morning, not yet awake.  I don't wake up in a bad mood but I'm not very chatty first thing in the morning.  The resident "bitchy" nun shouted at me,
"Don't you have anything to say to me this morning?"
Inside I searched my brain for the answer.  I couldn't remember any obligation to report to her.
She let out a huge sigh of disgust and said,
"You're supposed to greet me.  Don't you know how to say, Good Morning, Sister."
I mumbled a meek, "Good Morning, Sister,"
and quickly sat down.  I had completely lost my appetite and wanted to excuse myself so I could slink away and cry but I knew that would not be met with approval so I choked down some cereal that tasted like sawdust.
Later, the kind Sister apologized for the mean one's remark.  The kind Sister rarely stood up to the mean one.  We were doing our best to try to live with our wicked step-sisters.

At this time, it may be said, that I was not smart enough to leave.  I certainly wasn't smart enough to tell them where they could shove their good morning.  I was not yet ready to really understand that I was looking at my future.   It would take time before I was able to find the courage to leave this nightmare and no longer be complaint.

Crescent Moons of Shame

As long as Sister Zelda's main enemy was Sister Emily Marie, my life was a bit easier.  As I anxiously waited for the fall out of my reporting Sister Christine, I watched more drama unfold between Zelda and Emily Marie.

In the Formation wing of the building, there was a large rec room at the end of a long hallway.  There were a set of swinging doors that opened into the room at the end of this hall way.  One day, I was in the rec room when I heard the thunder of running footsteps.  Sister Emily Marie, hit the doors, slid slightly and did an amazing U-turn and ran the opposite direction.  Sister Emily Marie's expression told me that she was running for her life.  In hot pursuit, the larger and much less agile, Sister Zelda came thundering after.  Sister Zelda's  legs pumped madly as she tried to maintain her balance and execute a turn.  Her black nun shoes made a huge black skid mark on the floor.  She came flying through those swinging doors and landed on her side.

She wasn't down long but up and running after Sister Emily Marie.   Fortunately, Sister Emily Marie was able to elude her pursurer.  I sat stunned into silence for a while.  Then decided I just had to find someone so I could tell them what had just happened.  As I headed out the doors, I met Sister Felicity.  Felicity spied the huge skid mark on the otherwise perfectly waxed and shined floor and demanded to know what had happened.  Never one to rat out a colleague, even a rather frightening and sometimes despicable one, said,  "I don't know, Sister."

I felt sorry for Sister Emily Marie.  Later when I should have felt sorry for myself, I felt shame instead.  Sister Zelda seemed to require an enemy among the ranks.  It was soon my turn to fill that role for her.

I have no memory of what we were arguing about that day in the rec room.  We were alone.  No witnesses anywhere.  Zelda was hopping mad at something I said.  She raised her arm to strike me.  I was tiny then.  Sister Zelda outweighed me by close to 100 lbs. but I had grown up with lots of siblings who had often engaged in hand-to-hand combat.  My reflexes were lightening quick.  Before she could hit me, I had firmly grabbed both wrists.  With tears in my eyes, I begged her to think about what she was doing.  In my fervor and iron-like grip, my fingernails happened to pierce the soft skin on the inside of her wrists.  I had emerged unscathed.  Zelda had signs of physical attack.

Zelda didn't have live by the same code of honor as I.  She was quick to rat me out and make me look like the aggressor.  After all, it was a bit hard to believe that I could have held off my Amazonian-built classmate. A little adrenaline can do wonders.  She got sympathy for her cuts and I received another nail in my coffin.  The powers that be were now convinced I was unstable.  In fact, I heard one of the Sisters say that
"Insanity runs in her family.   Old Sister Mechtilde was her great aunt.  Remember that Mechtilde spent the rest of her life in the state hospital."

Had I had my wits about me, I would have bailed at this moment and said, "The hell with all of you."
I didn't.  I felt terrible that I had hurt Sister Zelda, even though it was a clear case of self-defense.  After all didn't Zelda bear my "crescent moons of shame" on her arms?  Unfortunately, getting someone to believe me didn't seem possible and I began to question myself and of course my sanity.  I had to be at least slightly crazy to stay.  By then I had invested a significant amount of time not to mention, blood, sweat and tears.  Part of me knew that I wasn't what they were making me out to be, in fact, at times, I knew that I was probably the sanest one there.  Unfortunately, when you're trapped within a crazy system and things happen that defy logic and reason, it's hard not to fall prey to the "group think"   Ah, the Stockholm Syndrome again.
"Patty Hearst you did what you had to do in my book.  I get it!  Rock on, Patty, rock on!"

Obedience

Obedience is one of the three vows, that I took as a Junior Professed. 

(Junior Professed was another "grade" or stage in the succession to Final Vows. It took about 8 years to reach that final step. Up until then vows were temporary and for a specific time.  All the women who had not yet made final vows were considered part of Formation.)

The code of Canon Law defines obedience as:

"The evangelical counsel of obedience, undertaken in a spirit of faith and love in the following of Christ who was obedient even unto death requires a submission of the will to legitimate superiors, who stand in the place of God when they command according to the proper constitutions."


I apparently stunk at keeping it.  I can see now that I really did.  That's very ironic given how obedient and compliant I was all through school.  I can count on 2 fingers the amount of times, I was actually "reprimanded" in grade school by one of the Sisters.  Even then, they knew my record and my behavior and their reprimand was surprisingly mild.  They could really haul out the big guns on the normal trouble makers.  All they had to do was say my name and give a cross look and I was obedient putty.  Pleasing them meant everything.  That desire to please didn't end when I entered the convent but my ability to do so was so damaged, that I began to lose my sense of self.  As a school girl, I'd always known how to please the Sisters.  As a young religious, I could never seem to get it right.  Who was I and what had happened to the girl I was?

Once the epitome of obedience, now I was labeled a rebel and an insolence and arrogant one at that.  I'm sure there were moments when those attributes did describe how I felt.  After all, my Formation Director/Boss had gotten away with fondling me and making me the bad guy.  I often felt a righteous rage.  I also felt a profound sorrow.  The lofty ideals that had once filled my head and beckoned to my heart were crashing down to earth and bursting into flames.  While in the convent, I witnessed my innocence die.  There are moments, even now, when I wonder if the aftereffects would still be as profound, if there had been an actual physical violation.  My mind was raped on a daily basis.  As dramatic as that sounds, it feels so true as to be very disturbing.

There is still anger in me over many of the things that happened there.  I doubt that any of the perpetrators were acting freely.  They were victims of the system and the process.  They were damaged and often dangerous because of that damage.  They saw nothing wrong in teaching lessons and reprimanding us harshly.  Personal attacks on our character, our intellect, our looks, our singing were a daily occurrence. 
I was often told,  "This is for your own good."
I wasn't able to see it.  It looked pretty bad to me.

"Moved by the Holy Spirit, they subject themselves in faith to those who hold God's place, their superiors. Through them they are led to serve all their brothers in Christ, just as Christ ministered to his brothers in submission to the Father and laid down his life for the redemption of many. They are thus bound more closely to the Church's service and they endeavor to attain to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Decree on Renewal of Religious Life, 14).

Sounds like a great ideal, but what happens when corruption sets in?  What should a moral individual do, when he is commanded to act in an immoral manner or to ignore an immoral situation?  Would my keeping silent have been the right thing to do?  I will never be able to answer, "yes".   
Maybe I've always been a closet rebel at heart.

Actually, in the end, I could thank the Sisters for teaching me something about the vows in the strangest and most backward way.  I could not accept that I was arrogant and disobedient. If there were any external signs of that it was to conceal my lack of self-esteem and confidence.   Digging deeper and doing some secret reading on my own,  (Remember we had to get every book we read okayed.) I developed my own understanding of obedience.  Years later, when it came time to write our marriage vows for our wedding,  (My first wedding was a civil ceremony in our backyard.  The second was a quiet blessing by the Church.  Both times, the same groom.) I decided to include obedience in the vows I wrote for our backyard hippie wedding.  Not because I'm not a capable and independent woman but because the root of the word has power and meaning to me.  I know that it sounded old fashioned.  Part of me probably included it as a sign of protest for all those years when those defining obedience seemed to be missing the point entirely.

 β. The old Lat. form was oboedire.—Lat. ob-, prefix (of little force); and audire, to hear, listen to. 

To listen to my spouse, to listen to my life and the people in it and to try and hear God in those human communications seemed the best way to understand obedience.  At least it was and is the best way for me.

Real life in the real world has taught me more about obedience than I ever learned in the artificial enviroment of the convent.  Life has a way of handing us all sorts of things that are beyond our control.  We don't need to create artificial circumstances for obedience.  Life does that for us.  Those things that happen to us that are outside of our control provide us with a wonderful opportunity.  How is this experience serving me, a greater good, God, Allah, Vishnu?  If something is beyond our control, the best way to deal with it is to accept it.  It's easy to curse fate, become bitter, blame other people, even blame God.   Over the years, I have done all of these things.   It's much more difficult to learn to surrender and accept what life and ultimately what God has dished out for us.  The challenge is to find God within the experience and to emerge from it a better and stronger person. 

"Watering sticks" was a collosal waste of time and human potential.  It missed the point.  To demand obedience from others, a person must be worthy of it.  It must serve a greater good.  It must help the obedient become a better person.  Watering sticks in a blind obedience is foolish.  It does nothing to glorify God and everything to protect the hierachy and their positions of power.  It completely misses the point.
For me obedience means "to listen."  God knows I need all the practice I can get in this department.  He seems to be serving up lessons every day.  Lately, I end my day with the same prayer, 
"I surrender.  This is out of my hands.  I can't let this ruin me. Help me find a way to see the good in this situation. Help me accept what is."
Since God is "up all night anyway"  I figure it's His job to worry about it.  I'm kept very busy working on the surrender and maintaining a helpful attitude.  This is what obedience means to me.