In America, Ruth traveled from city to city, from convent to convent, like a medieval pilgrim, making notes about the changes that were taking place in the lives of nuns. She had been awarded a six-months’ traveling scholarship for this project, but when her time was up she felt that she had only scratched the surface of the subject and wrote home for permission to stay longer. She relied on the religious communities she visited for food and accommodation, repaying their hospitality with whatever work was appropriate. She did substitute teaching in schools, auxiliary nursing in hospitals, helped look after senior citizens and mentally handicapped children. Sometimes she donned her habit and gave talks about the Roman Catholic church in England to parochial groups. Afterwards people would come up to her and shake her hand warmly, sometimes pressing into it a large-denomination dollar bill “to help with your expenses, sister.” At first she was embarrassed by these gifts, but after a while she got used to them, and indeed came to rely on such gratuities for her pocket money.
American nuns, she soon discovered, were in a state of upheaval that made England seem quite tranquil by comparison. In Cleveland, Ohio, she came across a community that had until recently been enclosed, supporting itself precariously by embroidering priests’ vestments, and had suddenly decided to train all its members in chiropody and turned itself into a foot clinic. In Detroit, Michigan, a nun in high boots and a mini-skirt ran a free school for juvenile delinquents and led a successful rent-strike against profiteering landlords. In St. Louis, Ruth interviewed a sister who was secretary-general of an organization dedicated to opposing male chauvinism in the church. She wore a trouser suit and scattered words like “crap” and “bullshit” in her conversation. On the wall behind her head a poster depicted Moses telling the Israelites: “And She’s black...” In Texas, Ruth visited a community of nuns who came down to breakfast with their hair in huge plastic curlers. After a hasty grace, (“Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat”) they tucked into hot cakes and bacon; then, immaculately coiffed, and clad in smart clothes, they swept off in huge shiny convertibles to their jobs as personal secretaries in downtown Houston. In the evenings they had dates with priests, who took them out to restaurants and movie shows.
Ruth herself had adventures. Traveling through the night on a Greyhound bus, dressed, as was her custom now, in ordinary clothes, she realized that the man in the next seat had placed his hand on her knee. She froze, wondering what to do. Scream? Cut and run? Stop the bus? After half an hour she dared a look sideways. The man was asleep, his limbs limp, his mouth open. Slowly, carefully, Ruth lifted his hand from her knee and restored it to his own. Eventually she slept herself and woke to find her head on the man’s shoulder. “I didn’t like to waken you,” he said with a smile, chafing his numbed arm. Ruth blushed crimson and muttered her apologies. “You’re welcome,” said the man. At the next rest stop he insisted on buying her coffee and doughnuts and telling her the story of his life. He was a shoe salesman, recently retired, going to spend a vacation with his son and daughter-in-law in Denver. “You’d really like them,” he assured her. “They made a trip to London a few years back. You’d have a lot in common. Why don’t you plan to stay over in Denver a whiles?” When they got back into the bus, Ruth took a seat next to a black woman with a baby on her lap and pretended not to see the hurt and longing look the shoe salesman sent in her direction across the aisle. At the time, this episode distressed her, but afterwards she was vexed to think how upset she had been, or “uptight” as the feminist nun in St Louis would have put it. When, some time later, an ugly but genial man tried to pick her up at the Dallas airport, she didn’t panic, but waited patiently for an opportunity to mention that she was a nun. “No kidding!” he said, staring. “Hey, I wouldn’t have made a pass at you if I’d known. Jesus—sorry—wow! Hey, I went to a parochial school myself, you know? I mean, I was taught by sisters.” He seemed almost afraid that they would rise up out of the past to punish him. He took out his wallet and tried to press a donation on her. Fending off the proffered dollar bills, Ruth glimpsed a woman on a nearby bench observing them with disapproval. “Put your money away, you’re giving scandal,” she said, giggling. She dined off the story more than once.
At last she came to the coast of California, which seemed as far as she could go. Her Mother Superior wrote reluctantly, agreeing to a three-month extension of her leave. The letter was fretful and discouraged. One nun had just left the community and another was on the brink. There had been only two new postulants admitted to the motherhouse that year.
II.
RUTH wrote home for a further extension. It was refused. Come home, her Mother Superior urged, you are needed. Sixth Form science is suffering. Ruth procrastinated, equivocated. She did not want to go home. She felt that she was in the middle of some spiritual quest that could not be abandoned, though she did not know where or when it would end. As for Sixth Form science suffering, that was all rot. The real reason why Mother Superior wanted her back was because two more nuns had left the convent and morale was low. One of the women concerned had written to Ruth. “I’ll make no bones about it,” she wrote, “I left to get married, and not to anyone in particular. I woke up one morning and realized that I couldn’t face the rest of my life on my own, without a man, without children. I’m going out with a nice fellow now, a widower with two boys, we met through an agency. I’m taking cookery lessons. When I tried to cook a dinner for John and the children he said it was the worst meal he had ever had in his life. I suppose that after a number of years in a convent your taste buds get anaesthetized ...”
Ruth herself did not suffer unduly from the pangs of frustrated sexual and maternal longing, but she did feel that there was something missing from her life as a religious, and that she had to find it before she returned home. She wrote back to her Mother Superior: “I am going through a crisis about my vocation. I must see it through over here.” Mother Superior wired: “RETURN immediately.” Ruth ignored the summons. She did not know whether she had been suspended. She did not greatly care.
It was a time of intense political activity in America, and priests and nuns were throwing themselves into the struggle for civil rights, for peace in Vietnam, for the protection of the environment. Ruth marched and demonstrated on behalf of the Berrigan brothers, Catholic priests jailed for burning draft cards and alleged conspiracy against the state, and was herself arrested and jailed for a night. She hitchhiked to Southern California to support the strike of exploited Chicano grapepickers. Her picket line was broken up by thugs hired by the employers. Ruth was hit in the chest and pushed to the ground, screaming, “You cad!” at her attacker. “Those mothers are mean-looking mothers, ain’t they?” said the worker who picked her up and dusted her down. After that experience, Ruth wore her habit on demos and enjoyed a certain immunity from assault, though an element of risk remained. Thus attired, she stood among a crowd of two thousand on a college campus at the height of the Cambodian crisis, chanting, “Pigs out! Pigs out!” and fled from a charge of police dressed like spacemen, her eyes streaming from tear gas. “Mean-looking mothers, aren’t they?” she gasped to a startled fellow demonstrator. This term of abuse, which she privately interpreted as a contraction of “Mother Superior,” had rather caught her fancy, and she continued to use it freely until enlightened as to its true derivation by an amused Franciscan friar during a sit-in at a napalm factory.
From these experiences Ruth emerged proud and self-reliant. Her life before America, dull and orderly, seemed like an album of monochrome photographs in her memory. But still she hadn’t found what she was looking for. The euphoria, the inspiring sense of solidarity with one’s brothers and sisters, that was generated by marches and demonstrations, soon evaporated. Eventually the columns dispersed, the marchers went their separate ways. “This is the darnedest time,” said Josephine, a Paulist sister from Iowa, on one such occasion, just after a big peace rally in San Francisco. The two of them were drinking coffee out of paper cups in a bus-station automat in the middle of the night, waiting for their connections. Blue strip lighting bleakly illuminated the Formica tables and the littered floor. “While the rally’s going on, you feel just great, right?” Josephine went on. “Like, people are really digging each other, the barriers are down, and when everybody’s singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ or ‘They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love,’ you feel it’s really true. You think to yourself, gee, this is really great, this is the New Jerusalem, this is what it’s all about. But it doesn’t last. Soon you’re in some lousy automat, zonked out, and the party’s over.”
“I suppose it couldn’t last, in the nature of things,” said Ruth, philosophically. “You couldn’t keep up that intense emotional pitch for long.”
“It’s not just that. The others on the demo, ordinary people, have got homes, real homes to go back to. Husbands, wives, families. Folks waiting to welcome them back, wanting to hear all about it. That must be real nice.” Ruth nodded sympathetically, knowing that Josephine’s community did not approve of her radical activities and would not want to know anything at all about that weekend’s demonstration. “Whereas, for us, it’s just an anticlimax, going back. Anticlimax and loneliness. Gee, I get so depressed after one of these rallies. . . . D’you know what I do, Ruth?” Josephine looked around, and although the automat was empty apart from themselves and a black soldier asleep in the far corner, lowered her voice. “I buy myself a little miniature bottle of Southern Comfort and then I fill me a big deep tub, very hot, and I have a long, long soak. I lie there for hours, taking a sip of Southern Comfort every now and then, and topping up the hot water in the tub. I usually wind up giving myself another kind of Southern Comfort, you know what I mean?”
“No,” said Ruth, truthfully. Josephine looked at her with a strange expression—quizzical, skeptical, slightly wicked— and suddenly Ruth guessed what she was talking about, and blushed vividly. “Oh,” she said. “D’you think I’m going crazy, Ruth?” said Josephine. “D’you think I should get out before I’m totally screwed up by this life?”
“I don’t know,” said Ruth. “Don’t ask me. I don’t even know about myself.”
Ill.
STILL RUTH lingered on the coast of California. “I take it you have severed your connection with the Order,” her Mother Superior wrote, “No, still looking for an answer,” Ruth wrote back. She received no reply.
One day she had a letter from Josephine, the Paulist nun who flashed upon her inward eye every time she saw an advertisement for a certain brand of bourbon. Ruth opened the letter fully expecting that it would announce that the writer had left her Order, probably to get married. To her surprise, Josephine wrote: “After I got back from San Francisco I nosedived into the usual pits. Then I started to go to a prayer group and it changed my life. I’ve been baptized in the Holy Spirit, and I’ve never felt so calm, so happy, so sure of my vocation.”
This was not the first testimony Ruth had heard to the growing prayer group movement, or Charismatic Renewal as it was sometimes called, but it was the most impressive.
At this time, in the early summer of 1973, Ruth was earning her keep helping in a residential institution for mentally handicapped adults near Los Angeles—or perhaps it was in Los Angeles—she never quite knew where the sprawling city began and ended. The institution was lavishly furnished and equipped with the conscience money of the families who had dumped their defective dependents there, but the work was demanding and sometimes distressing. The place was run by a diminutive red-haired nun called Charlotte who generally wore training shoes and a track suit. She was a Judo black belt and sometimes she needed to be.
Ruth showed her the letter. “What d’you think about this charismatic business, Charlotte?”
“Me? I couldn’t exist without it.”
“You mean you actually go to one of these prayer groups?”
“Sure. Haven’t you tried it?”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be my cup of tea. I’d just be embarrassed.”
“Everybody’s embarrassed at first. You soon get over that. You wanna come along with me one evening?”
“I’ll think about it.”
Later Charlotte said, “Hey, Ruth, next weekend there’s a Day of Renewal over in Anaheim. A big affair, folks from all over coming to it. There’s plenary session in the morning, then small groups in the afternoon. Wind up with Mass. Whaddya say?”
Encouraged by the prospect of a large gathering in which she could be an observer rather than a participant, Ruth agreed to go. The following Sunday Charlotte drove them over to Anaheim, a dull satellite of L.A. chiefly celebrated as the home of Disneyland. Some two or three hundred people were gathered together in the assembly hall of a Catholic junior high school. There were few seats vacant by the time Ruth and Charlotte arrived, and they had to separate. On the stage, which was festooned with banners declaring “JESUS LIVES” and “PRAISE GOD,” was a small band of guitar-and-accordion players dressed in jeans and plaid shirts, and a priest MC at the microphone who led the assembly in hymns and prayers. Ruth was faintly reminded of a concert party at a Girl Guide rally she had attended many years ago: there was the same air of determined joyfulness and good fellowship about the proceedings. When the MC instructed everyone to hold their neighbors’ hands as he prayed for the Spirit to descend upon them all, she stiffened in recoil and surrendered her hand reluctantly to the clammy palm of the stout woman sitting next to her. It seemed such an obvious gimmick to create an illusion of togetherness. The MC invited any of those present to pray aloud as if they were in their own homes and to share their thoughts with others. Several people obliged. The accepted mode of prayer was highly informal, personal, intimate, speaking to God as though he were another person present in the room. “We praise you, Lord, simply because you’re alive and with us, and that makes all the difference.” “Lord, I just have to tell you that I think you’re really great.” “Lord, you make the sun shine and the flowers grow, you made everything. You’re so wonderful, Lord, you lift us up when we’re down, you comfort us when we’re sick, you rejoice with us when we’re happy. We really love you, Lord. We really praise you.” Listening to this drivel, Ruth felt herself burning in one big blush.
The MC introduced a speaker evidently well known to the audience, who applauded him vigorously. He was a tall, bony, middle-aged man, with flat hair combed back from a tanned, wrinkled face. He wore a sports jacket and slacks with a collar and tie. He looked as if he might be a salesman for something agricultural. First he relaxed the audience with a few in-jokes. “Did you know that Bishop Fulton Sheen and Cardinal Mclntyre were traveling to the Holy Land for a Charismatic Congress and the Cardinal said to the Bishop, ‘If you’re going to speak in tongues, I’m going to be walking on the water.’” The audience laughed and clapped. Then the speaker asked if there were any Britishers present. Charlotte, seated a few rows ahead of Ruth, looked back at her expectantly, but Ruth kept her hands clasped firmly in her lap. A few hands went up among the audience. Well, said the speaker, they would know that the British had an airline called British European Airways, BEA for short, and it had struck him when he was on vacation in Europe and flying BEA from Amsterdam to London that those letters could also stand for true Christian faith: “Believe, Expect, Accept. Believe in God. Expect Him to come to you. Accept Him when he comes....” After talking for a while on the power of prayer, and the difference it had made to his own life, he led the congregation in his favorite hymn, “Oh, the love of my Lord is the essence.” When they had sung the words of the last verse, he continued to hum the melody into the microphone, and the congregation followed suit, modulating into a variety of strange noises, keening and coaxing and crooning sounds, harmonized like a humming top, punctuated with occasional ejaculations—“Amen!” “Hallelujah!” “Praise Jesus!” Ruth glanced around her. Most of her neighbors had their eyes shut and were swaying in their seats. The stout woman had her fists clenched and was muttering over and over again, “Praise Jesus, Praise Jesus.” Suddenly, from the back of the hall, a voice was raised high in some foreign language, a strange, barbaric-sounding dialect, full of ululating vowels, like a savage chant. So it was true: people really did speak in tongues at these gatherings. How childish it was, just like abracadabra, anyone could pretend to do it. But in spite of herself Ruth felt her skin prickle with the strangeness of it, the high, confident, fluent tone of the utterance. It stopped abruptly. “Thank you, Jesus,” said the speaker at the microphone casually. “Thank you, Jesus,” the congregation echoed. “Could we pray for an interpretation?” said the speaker. There was silence for a moment, then the stout woman beside Ruth stood up and said, “The Lord says, ‘If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.’ The Charismatic Renewal is the new creation. It is everyone’s chance to be born anew. We can be like newborn babes in the Spirit.” She sat down. “Thank you, Jesus,” said the speaker. “Thank you, Jesus,” murmured the rest. “Could we pray for a healing?” said somebody. “Could we pray for my sister’s little boy who is seriously ill with a suspected brain tumor?” The speaker asked them all to join hands while he prayed with them. At this point Ruth got to her feet and left.
Charlotte hurried out into the lobby behind her. ” What’s the matter, Ruth?” she asked anxiously. “You OK?”
“I just couldn’t take any more,” said Ruth. “I felt faint. Something about the atmosphere.”
“Yeah, it is kinda stuffy.”
“I mean the emotional atmosphere.”
“Take a little walk outside, you’ll feel better. This afternoon it’ll be the small groups. Quieter. You’ll maybe feel more at ease.”
“I really don’t think I can take any more today, Charlotte.”
Charlotte eyed her quizzically. “You’re sure you’re not fighting something, Ruth?”
“Only nausea. Look, I don’t want to spoil your day. I’ll meet you back here at four, all right?”
“What will you do till then? Why not join a small group this afternoon, huh? Give the Holy Spirit an even break.”
Ruth shook her head and left the building. For a while she walked aimlessly along the rectilinear streets of one-story houses, each with its little plot of coarse grass over which the sprinkler hoses plied monotonously, then through a commercial district of shops, gas stations, motels and funeral parlors. Most of the shops were shut, as it was Sunday. Ruth felt hungry and thirsty, but there seemed nowhere suitable to go, only drive-in hamburger places which she felt self-conscious of approaching on foot, or dimly lit bars advertising topless dancers. Eventually she found herself among crowds converging on Disneyland, and thinking that this would be as good a place as any to kill time, passed through the turnstiles. There was certainly no shortage of refreshment inside—the only problem was deciding in what architectural facsimile you wanted to consume it: a Wild West saloon or a wigwam encampment or a space-ship or a Mississippi paddleboat. It was a world of appearances, of pastiche and parody and pretense. Nothing was real except the people who perambulated its broad avenues, fingering their little books of tickets, patiently lining up for the Casey Jr. Circus Train, the Peter Pan Flight, the Jungle Cruise, the Monorail Ride. Music filtered from loudspeakers concealed in the trees and fountains played and the Stars and Stripes hung limply from a hundred flagpoles. Huge grinning plaster figures of Disney characters proffered litter baskets at every intersection of paths. Children ran about with balloons, ice-cream, candy-floss, and popcorn under the complacent eyes of their parents.
One such couple, overweight, brightly dressed, festooned with cameras, sat down on Ruth’s bench to rest their feet, and the wife volunteered the information that they had come all the way from South Dakota. “Not just to see Disneyland?” said Ruth, with a smile, but they didn’t seem to see anything amusing in the idea. “Well, we’re seeing a lot of other places as well,” said the woman, “but this is the high-spot of the vacation, isn’t that right, Al?” Al said it was right. “He’s always been crazy to see Disneyland,” said the woman fondly, “ever since I started dating him.”
It struck Ruth that Disneyland was indeed a place of pilgrimage. The customers had an air about them of believers who had finally made it to Mecca, to the Holy Places. They had come to celebrate their own myths of origin and salvation—the plantation, the frontier, the technological Utopia—and to pay homage to their heroes, gods and fairies: Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck. The perception at first pleased and then depressed her. She looked at the crowds ambling along in the smog-veiled sunshine, from one fake sideshow to another, chewing, sucking, drinking, licking, and was seized with a strange nausea and terror. For all their superficial amiability and decency they were benighted, glutted with unreality. Ruth began to recite to herself the words of Isaiah: “For the heart of this nation has grown coarse, their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and be converted and healed by me.” But she must have spoken the words aloud, for the woman from South Dakota turned to her enquiringly. “I was just thinking,” said Ruth, “that if Jesus really lives, you wouldn’t know it in here.” The woman stared. “Well, I don’t go much on religion, myself,” she said, uneasily. “My husband used to be a Christian Scientist, didn’t you, Al?” Al gave a sickly grin and said they ought to be getting along. They left Ruth sitting alone on her bench, staring back at her over their shoulders from a safe distance.
Ruth got to her feet and walked rapidly in the opposite direction, to the Exit turnstiles. She hurried back to the school. In each of the classrooms a small prayer group was in progress. She went from room to room, looking for Charlotte through the little observation windows in the doors. One door had no window, and she opened it. Half a dozen faces turned in her direction. Charlotte’s was not one of them. The stout woman who had sat next to her in the assembly hall smiled at her. “Come and join us. Where have you been?”
“I’ve been to Disneyland,” Ruth said, closing the door behind her, and joining the circle of chairs. The others laughed uncertainly.
“And what did you think of it?”
“I thought it was like the world must have been before Christ came.”
There was a surprised silence.
“Walt Disney was a good man, a god-fearing man,” said someone, a shade reproachfully.
The stout woman said, “I don’t think Ruth is really telling us about Disneyland. I think she’s telling us something about herself. Isn’t that right, honey?”
To her astonishment and acute embarrassment, tears began to roll down Ruth’s cheeks. She nodded and sniffed, groping in her handbag for a Kleenex. “All my life as a nun there’s been one thing missing, the one thing that gives it any point or sense, and that’s, well, real faith in God. It sounds ridiculous, but I don’t think I ever had it before. I mean, I believed in Him with my head, and I believed with my heart in doing good works, but the two never came together, I never believed in Him with my heart. Do you understand what I mean?”
The stout woman nodded eagerly. “Would you like us to pray over you, honey?”
Ruth knelt, and the other people present clustered round and put their hands on her head. Even before the woman began to speak, Ruth felt a profound sense of bliss descend upon her.
That night she began to pack her bags for the journey home. She wired her Mother Superior: “BY THE WATERS OF DISNEYLAND I SAT DOWN AND WEPT STOP HAVE FOUND WHAT IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR STOP RETURNING IMMEDIATELY.”
