The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [132]
But wearing a habit was always a renunciation in that it publicly identified you as a nun, forcing you to give up any sense of privacy. As one sister told me, “The habit totally objectified you. You became all nuns. Some men would be turned on, and sexually proposition you. Or a drunken businessman on a plane would slobber all over you, and say, ‘You sisters are so good, you made me what I am today.’ Someone who was beaten by a nun in third grade might call you a sadist.” One woman told me that when she was a novice in the 1950s, she’d been asked to escort an older nun to the doctor. As they boarded a bus in their Minnesota city, a man, his face contorted with rage, his fists clenched, came up close to the women and hissed, “Lesbians!” The older woman, who was hard of hearing, hadn’t heard the remark, and, the sister told me, might not have comprehended it if she had. But she had seen the hatred in the man’s gesture and it frightened her. Perhaps this incident, and the anonymous hate mail and obscene phone calls that Benedictine women sometimes receive, indicates that when a woman stands for anything in this culture she makes herself a target.
I’ve long been interested in the fact that most monks I know wouldn’t dream of wearing their habit for travel, and many who are priests won’t even wear a clerical collar. “I grew weary of hearing so-called confessions from drunks,” one monk told me. Some women who wear a habit in public are resigned to the more troubling aspects of the experience. “I think I would be recognized anywhere as someone consecrated to God,” one wrote to me. “I may not get a positive response,” she said, “but that’s what I stand for.” Another woman, a member of an urban monastery, feels strongly that the public witness of the habit is important, as it offers her possibilities for ministry that otherwise would be lost. “The airline ticket agent who asks me to pray for her and her husband. The young father on a city bus, deeply troubled by burdens he cannot voice. The well-dressed woman on Madison Avenue [who] looks around as she asks for prayer, hoping no one she knows sees her doing this odd thing, and yet aching for some companionship and support in her trouble. Two teenagers dressed in the latest fashion, who want to know why some people who work in the church do unkind things, and what they can do about it.” She said that while she’d been active in her church before joining the monastery, “No one ever stopped me on the street to ask me for prayers. This was not because I was not a woman of prayer, but because no one could tell that I was a woman of prayer.”
To be accepted in public as “a woman of prayer,” must a woman cover her entire body, head to toe? It would seem so, given the sexualization of women’s bodies in our culture, the bizarre idolatry of body parts. But many Benedictine sisters feel that the asexuality of the old habit contributed to unhealthy attitudes about the body, both among themselves and in the broader culture. “We are no longer embarrassed to be recognized as women,” one sister said, “with women’s bodies, made in the image of God.” But as always, with the issue of the habit, there is a double edge. One sister told me that “some sisters feel that to express themselves as women, they need to wear bright colors, make-up, and jewelry, but I have a hard time with this. Even if we’re not spending much money, the fact that our nice clothes are hand-me-downs or from the second-hand store isn’t obvious to others. I wonder if we’ve bought too much into what society holds up to us as beautiful and acceptable in a woman.” As for herself, she said that she found herself increasingly drawn to simple, inexpensive clothing, denim skirts and dresses, more black and white and fewer colors. This seems to be something of a trend among Benedictine women. One order of contemplative