A Pure Floating of Dark Habits
Worshipping alongside communities of nuns offers a reprieve from devotional practices weighed down by obligation, and invites a new perspective on the Church as the bride of Christ.
By Elizabeth Hansen
Technically, they’re not nuns.
There are usually five or six of them in the tiny chapel, filing in for Mass in matching black habits and veils. A couple of them are young—maybe younger than me, in their early or mid-30s, I would guess. Others have mostly grays visible along their browline before their veil takes over.
They serve in a Catholic Charities-run community center and health clinic a couple miles from my house, and this is where the distinction of who is or is not actually a nun comes into play: A nun is a woman who takes and lives out vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience behind cloistered walls.
Nuns work, pray, and live in seclusion—what some might call retreating from the world, and what others would see as shoring up the world on shoulders that learn to bear a lifetime of prayer.
But more on them later.
Today, the women I find myself kneeling with on my lunch hour are more properly called religious sisters (although, in Catholic parlance, you would still refer to and address both nuns and religious sisters as “Sister”–I’m sorry, I don’t know who made the rules). These sisters are still vowed to a life that foregoes marriage and personal possessions, still under obedience to a mother superior—but they serve in the world as the hands and feet of their Bridegroom. In this case, one is a pediatrician (my children’s, in fact); the sisters here serve a neighborhood where the poverty rate is three times the national average and nearly every child under the age of six receives public medical coverage such as Medicaid. On Fridays, there’s a noon Mass offered in a small chapel just across the hall from the clinic, and by small, I mean if more than a dozen people show up, it feels full.
I work from home, so when my schedule allows, I attend. Noise from the hallway comes muffled through the door: a raucous greeting from a regular client, a mother chiding her children in Spanish to stop running. The area priests rotate through, but the sisters are a constant, their clear voices resonating in this space as the opening call and response of the liturgy begins.
One Friday, kneeling after Communion, I watched the pediatrician sister assist the priest in putting away the vessels that had just been used to distribute the Eucharist. She deftly handled the paten, chalice and finally the gleaming ciborium—a lidded container that holds consecrated hosts—before she reverently restored it to the tabernacle, and I recognized the same swift, sure movements that flex my children’s joints and palpate their small bodies during their examinations.
There is a kind of steadfast devotion that moves with confidence no matter what’s in front of you—because fundamentally, you are always facing the same way. You are always beholding Christ.
I am someone who makes coffee first thing in the morning more religiously than I set aside time to pray. When it comes to this orientation of devotion, I have a ways to go. I leave Mass most Sundays feeling not particularly nourished, not at home, and more like I met an obligation than had an encounter with the Lord. I have struggled to love the Church.
But these Fridays with the sisters help.
This was something I must contrive, I must show up for and make happen for the sake of a relationship with Jesus.
For Catholics, daily Mass is the same liturgy we celebrate on Sundays, albeit about half the time length, thanks to two Scripture readings instead of three, a stripped- down homily and music offering (if any) and, of course, a much smaller congregation. Typically clocking in around 30 minutes, it’s often doable to make it to a nearby Mass on a lunch break, and for a time—college, then my first couple years working before kids—I made it my habit. Eucharist first, then scarf down my lunch, then back to work.
Scruples were part of it. What do you mean you can think of something else to do, like read over lunch or have a longer conversation with friends? Shouldn’t you choose something even better? Do you know how many people around the world walk miles or risk their lives just to get to Sunday Mass?
But truthfully, something even stronger pulled me in. To step out from the middle of a busy weekday and into a place where, for half an hour, the world revolved around an altar, a piece of bread, a Psalm, the Gospel—I found myself centered in a way I never did when it was up to me to craft my own devotional time. “Time alone with God,” we called it in the evangelical circles I grew up in.
“Have you had your personal prayer time?” we would ask. “When do you do your daily devotion?”
There were themed devotionals, formulas or acronyms to jumpstart your prayer (ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication), journals with prompts, Bibles with devotions built in, and more. I did it all. I imagine for many, these practices help ground their routines and nourish their faith. For me, they only ever felt like a box I was checking to continue being a good Christian. The scruples were there as well (Every time you feel like not picking up your devotional, it’s Satan’s voice tempting you to stop), but also something of a frenetic current underneath: This was something I must contrive, I must show up for and make happen for the sake of a relationship with Jesus.
Most daily Masses are you, a handful of retirees, maybe a couple people coming from their office, and a priest with a three-minute homily. If this paltry congregation is bold, or at least has one member with strong enough opinions about music and the confidence to lead, you might sing an off-key verse of an opening hymn. Otherwise, there is nothing for you to create or make happen. You step into the current of the liturgy and let it carry you.
I’ve felt this even more strongly in these intimate Friday Masses, where I am outnumbered by those who’ve dedicated their entire lives to God. There is a literal veil delineating where my devotion ends and theirs begins, but perhaps I can be swept along, sliding into their wake.
Within this pared down liturgy, it feels like there is less room to carry baggage that I might bring on normal, crowded Sundays, fewer opportunities (a dragging homily, a four-verse song during the collection) for my thoughts to run and hide behind.
There are usually a couple other lay people with me. Some weeks, I cannot tell whether someone is a client of the food pantry or a volunteer or, like myself, just a neighbor looking for a place of prayer. I suppose they could be all of the above, and despite not knowing names, there is a companionship in this disparate group of worshippers.
Together, you strike your breast acknowledging your sins against God and the stranger next to you. The opening Collect recalls you from the distractions of five minutes ago, as if you are a preoccupied child being gently turned toward her father, so that when she looks up he will fill her sight. You respond to the prescribed Psalm, which may or may not resonate with your concerns or spiritual state today, but perhaps tomorrow it will. You stand for the Gospel. And, in what I’ve come to think is one of the greatest gifts the liturgy gives our modern selves, you kneel.
The majority of the time, I kneel with a thousand thoughts still zooming through my head. Still, when your very posture already acknowledges your smallness and inadequacy, this at least feels honest. Well, God, I tried. I came. And he feeds you anyway.
Through their wounds and vulnerability, they interceded for the world outside their walls—or for the young mother and baby in their chapel.
One Friday at the clinic chapel, I was staring at the back of a row of veils, when something felt familiar—I’d stood in a similar place before.
Fifteen years ago, we were renting a condo in the middle of condo sprawl, one dated development among several others. The only place to walk—other than laps around the parking lot—was down the main road that led to other condos’ parking lots and dead ended at a private, tree-lined drive. I had heard the building hidden at the end of that drive and tucked in a small patch of woods used to be a hospice, but was now used as a monastery by a small congregation of Benedictine nuns.
The Internet did not give me any clear guidance such as, “Yes, there is a Cloister: No Trespassing sign near the road, but visitors of good will are welcome with open arms,” so one day, massively pregnant, I simply screwed up my courage and walked down the drive.
I found a one-story building with two short wings and what was once an entrance lobby in the center. A paper sign taped to the door announced the daily Mass schedule to visitors—we were welcome!—and I began to attend.
The nuns had turned the lobby into their chapel, which required some architectural creativity, and if you were a couple minutes late, you would open the door and walk directly into the priest saying the opening prayers at the ambo. I learned to not be late.
Five minutes before Mass, the nuns would start filing in from the cloistered wings—or rather, most of them whirred in on electric wheelchairs, while others limped and hobbled with walkers and canes. I remember one nun with a headful of bright white hair who was nevertheless clearly designated the spry one, capable of getting from one side of the chapel to the other the fastest and without assistance.
The nuns, whom I soon learned came from all over the world, were part of a French order founded in the 1930s for women who felt called to religious life but were excluded from other communities due to physical disabilities. Able-bodied women also joined, and they lived their vows together, ardently praying and uniting their suffering to their crucified Lord.
Now, they were even less mobile than when their community came to my small town in Connecticut, but as I was not feeling particularly mobile myself, their sanctuary seemed a fitting place to wait and pray for my baby’s delivery.
Bathed in natural light and pregnant with silence, that chapel was a place of anticipation—of the impending baby, yes, whose due date rudely came and went with hardly a stir, but also the anticipation of the Gospel’s virgins, keeping vigil for the groom’s arrival.
There is a tradition in Catholicism to pray the Angelus at noon, a prayer interlaced with Scripture that recalls the angel’s annunciation to Mary. At the verse and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, one is meant to genuflect, but of course, when most of the congregation can barely stand, accommodations are made. And so, every day before Mass began, the nuns would recall the moment when heaven kissed earth, and they reverenced it with a slow bow of their veiled heads. They remembered. They kept watch.
After Lucia was born, I learned that the rules of silence and cloistered life are easily bent by elderly nuns eager to see the baby up close. On special feast days, they would wave us into a visiting area where they could fuss over her more licitly, and the stronger among them would hold out their arms for her. Somewhere, there is a picture of my chubby-cheeked daughter in the middle of being passed from wheelchair to wheelchair. The Spry Nun strokes her cheek while a tiny, withered—and absolutely beaming—Filipino nun holds Lucia in her lap, serving as her throne.
I have heard that nearly all these nuns are dead. The last ones went to a care facility, and the monastery is closed. I think of these aging brides offering their thin, shaky voices to their Lord. I think of them bringing their scarred lungs, crippled limbs and unseen frailties to the hidden life of the cloister, where, far from disabling them, they became the means by which these women answered the call to the wedding feast. Through their wounds and vulnerability, they interceded for the world outside their walls—or for the young mother and baby in their chapel.
Their daily life was starkly different than the sisters I find myself worshipping with today, but their posture was the same: They faced the one they loved.
One cannot escape the messiness of the bridal metaphor when the priest is both Christ and one of us.
When hurt, disillusionment and scandal roil through the Church, from the upper ranks of hierarchy to the pews where my children have learned to pray, it is hard to see how she is the Bride of Christ. And then there is the added layer that in the Catholic tradition, we believe that when our priests administer the sacraments, they act in persona Christi, a type of Christ continuing to carry out God’s saving work and make his grace present in the world.
So when the priest, the one who made you groan when you walked into Mass and realized it was his day to preach, stands at the altar and confects the Eucharist, it is not simply Fr. Bill with the superiority complex or questionable views on women, it is also somehow a figure of the Bridegroom offering his life for the Church. Bad or even damaging sermons are not the same as horrific abuse or its coverup, but my point is, one cannot escape the messiness of the bridal metaphor when the priest is both Christ and one of us.
There is no separating a Church that wounds from a Church that is the hospital of sinners.
Over the past few years, I’ve appreciated many Protestant writers who’ve wrestled their way through the deconstruction narrative, especially those who come out on the other side with a faith that has dangled on the precipice and stared into the chasm until something, or someone, restored their footing. It is a faith that doesn’t come with pat answers or shy from uncertainty or uncomfortable tensions. I wish more Catholics were writing the same, because there are times I’ve gone to Mass, wanting belief to overcome my unbelief, but not knowing how. At some of my lowest points, my relationship with the Church has taken on the feel of a dying marriage, one poisoned by the fruits of Eve’s curse: distrust, manipulation, fear.
Yet worshipping with religious sisters who so visually represent the Church as a Bride brings flashes of clarity, at least in my eyes.
Sometimes we get priests who seem so intentional about setting themselves aside, so keenly aware that they must not stand in the way of the one they represent, that when we all face the altar and I stand behind a row of veils, I do see the Bride and the Groom, not staring each other down in mutual suspicion or hurt, but gazing at the one who brought them together.
Sometimes I hear a freedom in these women’s voices that I think comes from both a clear-eyed understanding of the way things are and a supernatural hope in what is to come. Outside, someone wheels a cart to the food pantry. Over 700 miles away, an abandoned monastery sits empty, and somewhere, the broken bodies of its former residents lie in the ground.
But this is their calling: to point to a kingdom where the hungry will be filled with good things, and all will be made new.
There is a veil between where I stand and the feast before me. But sometimes, something shifts, and I see through.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark
from photos by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash, Matea Gregg on Unsplash, Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash, Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash, & Josh Applegate on Unsplash
Elizabeth Hansen is a writer and editor in Michigan, where she lives with her husband and four children. Her writing has appeared in Magnificat, Our Sunday Visitor, Dappled Things, Plough, and other publications.
