The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [105]
Monastic women do sometimes suffer from their own naivete, and from the fact that most monastic formation programs, at least until recently, gave short shrift to the issue of celibacy. The remark of one sister is typical: “We were pretty much left on our own to work it out, because sexual matters simply were not discussed.” A former prioress who said much the same thing about her own days as a novice, added, “I now see that this was utterly foolish, considering that celibacy is something that has to be formed in us. It is not a simple part of our monastic vow, but a part of the long conversion process that lasts a lifetime.”
Loneliness is one of the issues that all the women said had to be faced in learning to be a celibate. A sister who works in formation said, “That’s a big part of adjusting to life in a monastic community, to sit and face your loneliness, your emptiness, and not let distractions turn you from the task. If a young sister comes to me and says that she’s been masturbating, the question I want her to address is: Why? Why now? Is she lonely? Is this a pattern she’s establishing? Has there been some major event in her life—the death of a friend or family member, or an experience in the monastery that’s left her feeling alienated? Is she infatuated with someone, and using this as a way to find sexual release?” The latter situation, the sister said, “makes me rejoice. If she’s falling in love, then she has an opportunity to grow past the romantic image of what it means to be a nun. I know this from my own experience. The questions she’ll need to ask herself, if she wants to remain a nun, are: How does Christ’s love show through this person she loves? How can she best show her love in return—for the person, for the community, for Christ? Chances are it’s not by masturbating.”
Many sisters have said that they felt it was important for them “to be able to talk about and learn about our bodies and how they function. I do not think that ignorance is any kind of holiness.” But in the years before Vatican II, sexual ignorance was often accepted as a given for monastic woman. One sister who worked for years as an obstetrics nurse said that she chose that specialty in part because she was appalled that so many sisters had no knowledge of their own anatomy. “So much of Catholic moral teaching has to do with knowledge, intention, and consent of the will,” she said, “and these women had so little knowledge, I felt that they had no way to grasp the basics of sexual morality as their own church understood it.”
Sisters have told me of pathetic attitudes toward sex that were largely the result of such ignorance. Several mentioned being disturbed as young sisters to hear older women say things like, “Babies are so beautiful; it’s too bad they come into the world in such a disgusting way.” Such an attitude would be incomprehensible to most parents, and serve only to reinforce the idea that nuns are otherworldly. It also reflects, in a most unpleasant way, the notion that virginity is equated with divinity, and that on the scale of holiness married people are inferior to those who have taken religious vows. I once heard a Benedictine woman say that gynecological exams made her feel violated, as if she’d been raped. It was not a casual remark; her whole body tensed as she said it, her disgust became physically apparent. I was stunned to think that a grown woman might not comprehend the difference between