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the habit by saying that she felt it had become a crutch, a prop for many women in her community. “They were not mature enough to stay in monastic life without it,” she said, adding, “It had become a form of protection.” Another prioress—who believes that distinctive clothing is “an essential part of the monastic archetype, in Buddhism as well as in Christianity,” and that “to take it off diminishes the monastic impulse”—also says, “We had to take it off and dump the medieval baggage that went with it.” A nun who does wear a habit—a plain long-sleeved dress with a long skirt, scapular, leather belt, and simple veil—says, “I believe that sisters who work for a secular agency, such as a school, are better off in lay dress. The sweet, stupid nun look had to be radically thrown off. But as for a monastic life, I think serious monks wear a habit.”

The history is compelling. One sister wrote to me, “In the ancient world, to ‘take the habit’ meant to become a monk.” Benedict received a habit from the hermit Romanus, and habits were worn by the earliest monks known to us, such as Anthony and Pachomius of Egypt. The scholar Peter Brown notes that in the early church monastic dress was so recognizable that small children in Egypt had a game of “monks and demons,” with one child dressed as a monk in black being harassed by other children playing demons. What people today think of as the traditional Benedictine women’s habit comes not from this early era, but from the medieval period. As one sister explained it to me, “It was the dress of the poorer classes, adopted precisely because it did not distinguish monastic women from laywomen.”

For her, and for many other Benedictine women, the motivation behind wearing distinctive monastic dress is of prime importance. They’re wary of the romance of the habit that still attracts women to more traditional communities. When I showed her what one such woman had said about her clothing—“the cord reminds me that I am bound to my Redeemer in poverty, obedience, and purity, the veil echoes my choice to be sanctified for God’s purposes, and that in my life I am to be modest and obedient to God’s Word”—she sensed without my telling her that the woman was new to the religious life. The younger woman’s statement, “I have made a radical choice of lifestyle, and believe that I am responding to a call from God to live this way,” did not surprise the older woman. “This is exactly the danger,” she said. “Clothing ceremonies and the habit help to form a person in monastic life—for instance, the prayers said over each piece of clothing as you put it on—and some symbols and rituals are essential in binding us to a community. But they can also give younger members a dangerous sense of security, of being special, separate, elevated to a new level of holiness automatically without doing the long, hard, tedious work of conversion.” In monasticism it’s always a struggle to maintain a balance between the symbols and practices a person needs to be formed in the life and those that tend to become ends in themselves.

One Benedictine woman summed up for me the reason why the subject of the habit remains important, even for women who have never worn one (this would include women entering most Benedictine communities from the early 1970s on). “I suspect that behind the issue of the habit,” she said, “are different, perhaps even warring, theologies, worldviews, and understandings of monastic life. Different assumptions about how one follows the gospel. Is holding to traditions like a medieval habit always an authentic reflection of the gospel?” Like many Benedictine women I’ve talked to, she feels that while some form of religious garb might be appropriate, it should not be something as “totally alien” as the old habit. “I think we can express our identification with the rest of the body of Christ,” she says, “and with the poor of the world, in other ways than as an elite group receiving special treatment by virtue of our dress.” She and others have said that in their experience what was meant to be a symbol of renunciation