How to be a Nun!
A handbook for Intrepid Explorers,
Scared Survivors and Those who Don't Know
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Let
the Spirit be your guide. Galatians 5:13-25
Please bring
the willingness to learn,
to hope,
to trust,
and to live on Godıs promises.
Good will is more essential than ability.
Please do not wait until you are a Saint before you try. Canonisation
is a life-project. If you are willing to be open to the Lord, his
power will work in you.
The
Lord makes his choice in his time. It makes no
difference whether you are 17 or 70. When he calls; jump!
Do not let well-meaning people put you off. Very likely,
when they fell in love they did not ask your advice. When the Lord
looked lovingly at the rich young man, that look lingered on his face.
Those who have met God's invitation will be able recognize its
reflection in you. Religious life is not a career, it is an
adventure in love.
Please do not bring
six suitcases of anything,
your entire wardrobe,
every letter you have ever received,
a years supply of household goods,
your cell phone,
an absolute resentment of any authority but your own,
a 2 metre statue of Buddha or a 4 metre statue of the Sacred
Heart,
an intolerable prejudice against any other race, nation or culture,
invincible self-regard
or your scuba diving suit.
It is easier to fly travelling light.
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You cannot help bringing your past.
If we say we have no sin we are lying. 1 John 1:5-10
The Lord is tenderness and compassion,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Exodus 34:6-9
In order that you should know this, every three years, your community,
after prayer and fasting, chooses one of their number to help them
discern how the Holy Spirit is leading them. This is meant to help
you, too. On the cross, Jesus could not see his Father - but he
could see his Mother.
It does not matter what you might have had to repent of, your community,
who happen to be human, is willing to forgive your past - and your
future. If your community cannot forgive, it is a
fundamentally unsound investment.
Remember:
every Saint has a past and every sinner has a future!
You are my witnesses. Luke 24: 44-49
Be prepared to stand up and be counted.
Ask and it shall be given you; information, direction, discernment,
survival kit, support, encouragement and challenges.
Be prepared to change and change often.
Be prepared be called by a new name.
Be
prepared to wear things that mark you out conspicuously as God's
property.
You might be content with, or at least accustomed to yourself as an egg,
but if you hatch there will be an uncomfortable era of uglyducklingness
before you make the front line of Swan Lake. Be open to the gift of
loving appreciation.
It is not that we love God, but that he loves us. 1 John 4:10
He wants to give himself to us, pressed down, shaken together and
overflowing. But before that takes place, his seed has to fall into our
ground and die; then it can bear fruit - a hundredfold.
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Pray at all times. Luke 11:1-13, 22:39-46.
Prayer is learning to listen, to respond and to perceive the actions of
the one who loves you.
Come, if you want prayer with your whole heart.
It does not matter if you think you do not know how to start. It
can be taught and it can be learned.
Looking
and listening is the beginning of prayer, but you wont see anything if
you don't open your eyes, and you wont hear if you don't take your
fingers out of your ears.
Prayer is the highest relationship with God and others. Sharing a life
of prayer is the ultimate gift. It is becoming part of the
instrument of peace in the hand of God.
Prayer can make you the best friend of someone you have never met.
It can make a life spent doing time-consuming and not immediately
successful things, pass like a gracious dream. It can make even
struggling with your own and other peoples sinful humanness like living
in the antechamber of heaven.
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It is the biggest thing that happens to anyone.
I have called you friends. John 15:15
You are going to live in a community. You are going to live in a
family of people with whom you have nothing in common but God and the
nose in the centre of your face. Do not try to love all people as
your brothers and sisters; if you had any, your relationship may well
have been atrocious: Love one another, the Lord says, as I have
loved you. John 15:12. In this way you will heal the sins of
a shattered and broken world.
Loving those whom God has selected for you as your religious family is
the first prayer.
In this world people make relationships and destroy them. They
move on, they get another job, another partner, another divorce. Now,
if your relationships break down you will learn how to repair them
instead of running away from them.
You may have heard this before, but, every three years we beg the Holy
Spiritıs enlightenment to elect one amongst us who can help us to do
this. God makes himself visible in the Church. When the Lord
says in the Gospel that Peter - an incompetent, over-excited and
unstable Average - was the Rock on which he built his Church, he meant
what he said.
Jesus promised to build his Church on the person of Peter, not simply on
the faith he professed.
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Obedience to the Word of God has a human face.
A community has to be built on truth and justice. To maintain
this, God's will inevitably manifests itself with a human face. We
call ours Mother [and, very, very occasionally, Abbess] she is necessary
to our fidelity to the Gospel.
Saint Peter was a liar, a fool and a coward; yet after he experienced
the death and resurrection of Christ the Son of the Living God they put
sick people where even just his shadow might fall on them for healing.
Self-regulating communities do not work on the stock market - or
anywhere else on this earth. Where there is no objective authority
- obedience, truth, freedom and justice have very little hope to
survive in the life of a community.
Do not lay up treasures on earth.
Matthew 6.16
Sell what you have and give it to the poor.
Mark 10:17-19
Take nothing for your journey.
Eat what is set before you and
proclaim the Good News. Luke 10:5-9
You are the salt of the earth:
salt prevents good things from rotting,
it makes bland things taste interesting,
bleaches out stains,
dissolves easily,
imparts buoyancy,
appropriately applied, it filters smoke out of the atmosphere
- and you can be all these things!
You
will not make heaven on less than the ten commandments. This life
is not for minimalists who just want to do enough to be saved; it is for
lovers who want to do as much as they possibly can.
You made need a whole new set of manners and you will at least need what
you've got tuned to a new frequency. Nicely veiled malice and
covert vindictiveness are unacceptable. Ridicule, contempt and all
the other little techniques for cutting your neighbour down to size are
out. You have to want to weave your life on forgiveness; your
friends need it and you absolutely demand it. This is not optional.
No
community will let you get away with part-time religious life.
Live for others. Go out and meet trouble half way. Go
the extra mile.
Calculated revenge is the most destructive of all reactions. Leave
it outside the door.
Seek the kingdom first, and every thing you need and hope for will be
given to you.
Build your life on the rock of God's Word; read him, pray him,
sing him, stand on him, eat him, adore him, wrap your heart around him
and nothing will knock you down.
This
is what poverty, obedience and chastity work out as. If this
sounds like the Sermon on the Mount - it is. Read Matthew
5:1-7:29 and look up the other references in this handbook, too.
The Lord is with you. Luke 1:28-35
Religious life, married life and the single secular state are
vocations. Shoemaking, bookmaking, matchmaking, teaching and
professional boxing are jobs.
The things required to make a good wife, single person and nun are
exactly the same. Choosing to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly
is just as necessary in religious life as in married and single life.
The
same qualities of generosity, courtesy, chaste-mindedness,
self-forgetfulness and creative energy come off equally well in all
three, just as selfishness, greed, manipulation and arrogance are
equally trying.
There are no special extras that nuns need and mums don't. What
mums and nuns both need is a specific directive from God. A
vocation. A call. An invitation to that line of action with which
he wishes to privilege them. The choice is his. Many are called
but few are chosen.
This does not mean that the Lord hauls in the old fishing net and, after
inspecting the catch, arbitrarily throws the majority back into the sea.
He gives his vocation to the many, just as he gives his Body and Blood
for the many. All but the incorrigibly bone-hearted get called -
of those called a few get chosen for something else. The called
are no worse off than the chosen. The many are called to the Good
News. The chosen are selected from them for the purpose the Lord
has in mind. Potential nuns frequently look and sound like
everyone else. But they have been endowed - a fact possibly hidden
even from themselves - with a heart big enough to take on God's plan for
them.
Top
The
door is open.
By reading this book you have conceded that God has something to say
to you. 
The next step is walking on water.
When the two disciples asked our Lord where he lived he said:
Come and see. John 1:35-43.
Practically speaking -
you have to be free to act,
and you must be doing so from good motives.
This is your bit.
The third step does not depend on you: it is finding a community
that will discern the Lord's call and his choice in your life and is
willing to accept you and give you a try.
Some
footnotes
On
getting nipped in the bud
You
may find Priests, Religious and even Bishops who will advise you that
religious life, or the style of it to which you feel called, is a waste
of time. Respect such people and thank them, but do not take their
advice.
Top
For scared survivors
You may have tried religious life and it has not
worked. Look first at yourself and the human social and personal
luggage you took with you. Discern what you have learned from the
experience. You can make resounding failure a state-of-the-art learning
tool.
And, you may have hit a pitfall. Matthew 23:27-28.
Pitfall communities generally come in two sorts.
1. Geese painted white
Earnest, sincere, loving, liberal people who work
enthusiastically and often with great generosity at something that, when
really analysed, is not he fullness of the truth, the Gospel or the
teaching of the Church. You should never stop loving such people
or praying for them. Those who sincerely seek always find. But
you may not be able to stay with them on their journey.
2. Whitewashed groundhogs
Ostensibly all is calm, bright and orthodox.
But it is a self-sustaining orthodoxy built on broken bones and
not on the rock of freedom that is the Good News. Groundhog
communities split into little groups and talk spitefully behind each
others backs. Lip service is paid to authority, but it is not
respected. There are dozens of rules, but they are for some one
else to keep. You may imagine you could re-form them. You
are likely to be wrong, reform has to come from within. Get out
before you go under.
Experiences like these are devastating - but not as
devastating as discovering the truth about yourself; use it to grow
closer to God.
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So, whom do you seek
A community worth a try should have For
Sinners Only written [albeit invisibly] over the door. Every
one in it is a potential goose and a potential groundhog. But they
are struggling to work towards truth, freedom and obedience [yes, they
have elections every three years...] Forgiveness and loving
support have a high priority, even when they are honoured only by
repentant failure.
A good community is a community that makes mistakes
and can admit them.
True religious life is directed to an encounter with
the Lord. On this earth we meet him in his Word, in his sacraments
and where two or three are gathered together. Whatever its charism, a
good community will have a good balance of these channels -
because Jesus is there.
Because Jesus is here
Lesser priorities are understood and interpreted
differently by different religious families, in the light of the graces
they receive - especially through their founders [and they may have
elections at longer intervals...] Look for the presence of the
Lord and listen to the guidance of his Holy Spirit.
This book was written by sisters of an enclosed
religious community and it naturally reflects the priorities of their
own life which is, above all, a life of repentance and conversion.
Ty
Mam Duw
means, House of the Mother of God. It is an enclosed community of
Franciscan women from different cultures and backgrounds who try to
follow the Gospel in the Poor Clare Colettine way of Life.
My God and my All - words of Francis to the Lord.
I will always protect you - words of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament
to Clare.
Set your mind on living well and dying holily - words of Colette to us.
You are welcome to visit us in person at:
Ty Mam Duw
Poor Clare Colettine Community
Upper Aston Hall Lane
Hawarden, North Wales
CH5 3EN
Phone 01244 531029
Some
Comments
on
this book by amused friends!
I
wish I'd read this book before. A.B. mother of 9.
I
got the brochures of all the convents I though might suit me in all my
dimensions, and then I visited them all rating them 1-10 on my points
scheme. After reading this book I can, now, dimly, begin to see
why my approach didn't work! C.D. ex-postulant.
Until I read this book I though I was too old to try.
E.F. Granny.
Until I read this book I though I was too old to try. Now I know
I'm just too hard-hearted!
G.H. Pedigree Groundhog Breeder.
It makes me very happy to know that there are at least some places that
might consider people who have been married and divorced. I.K
Divorced Marriage Counsellor
This book seems to me to be politically incorrect on numerous
issues.
J.K. a man.
Despair can be very near if you have messed with sex and drugs and
done just about everything you can to run away from God. Reading
this book has given me the courage at least to ask if there is anyone
out there who would let me try to be a nun. L.M. Magdalen