Feminism and Religion

When I was 19, I fell hard into the kind of deep depression that hits college kids whose unstable upbringings, rife with inconsistency and trauma, left them ill-prepared to face the self-direction and responsibility of independence. I didn’t grow up religious despite my father’s attempts to turn visitation weeks into conversions, but had started attending the local Episcopal cathedral months earlier after seeing its stunningly beautiful windows on a historic tour. Having taken basic stained glass courses when I was 18, I’d been mesmerized by the artistry and would sit in a different pew each week, drifting into and out of awareness of the service, eyes trained on the nearest window, lost in contemplation, love pouring in.

When the darkness became too much and I sought more of that love through spiritual care and reflection, I walked into the church library and thumbed through the directory looking for resources, and was hopeful to discover that the Episcopal Church had convents. That afternoon, I dialed the number for the nearest convent, and in that especially dramatic way of depressed 19-year-old artist types with backgrounds in theater, I declared that I couldn’t handle life in the world anymore and that I might want to become a nun. Sister Ann told me that their order was less an escape from the world than a new way of being fully present in it, but invited me to spend Christmas at the convent.

What started out as a holiday visit became several months of me spending every day that I wasn’t in class or at work at the convent, living in the guest house, attending five services a day, helping with maintaining the grounds, and spending as many waking hours as I could in the library, face buried in the works of medieval women mystics. Over the coming years, I’d spend many long weekends in retreat at the convent, and the sisters became my second family. I visited with women I was dating and later with a Muslim boyfriend, and everyone was always welcomed with love. When my first child almost died as a newborn and I called to ask for prayer, two sisters drove to be with me in the hospital. I still cry now, twenty years later, when I tell people the story of a parish priest leading the small group gathered in my hospital room in prayer after my son’s first surgery, and how my heart swelled when halfway through the Lord’s Prayer, teary eyes closed, I began to hear the familiar lilt of women’s chanting over our soft-speaking voices. Continue reading “On Being an Occasion of Joy by Chris Ash”