of ‘home’ is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away, and becoming insubstantial. Their ‘world’ – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end.
Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my ‘home’ in the convent of my own free will, and was not languishing in a camp, but I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the 60s’ world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction, not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St Anne’s, where we bought newspapers and sweets.
I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college. She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature, and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well, because – as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns – I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his ‘giant leap for mankind’, and jump on to the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what Planet Earth had become for me.
It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-monthly intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory. Visits to the convent parlour were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with ‘seculars’, so my parents had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea and making polite conversation, while I went off to eat with the community in the convent refectory. My sister Lindsey, who was three years younger than I, had hated these visits. As she watched us process into the chapel, genuflecting before the altar with near military precision, and kneeling motionless in the pews, the underlying tension, the humourless rigidity, and the fear that somebody might ruin this perfection by making a mistake so petrified her that, to the amusement of some members of the community, she often passed out, and had to be carried outside, even though she never fainted anywhere else. My letters were little better. We were never allowed to speak of what happened inside the convent, and since for years I scarcely left the enclosure, I had to confine my remarks to anodyne descriptions of the countryside or reverential accounts of church services.
My parents, therefore, had no idea what my life had been like for the last seven years. At a deeper and more worrying level, I found that I simply could not respond to their affection. I shied away from any intimacy, could not bear to be touched or embraced, and could speak to my family only in the rather formal, distant way of nuns. Naturally my parents were hurt, I felt bad about hurting them, and there was an impasse. The training seemed to have worked, after all. My capacity for affection had either atrophied or been so badly damaged that it could not function normally. I felt frozen and could see what people meant when they said that their heart had turned to stone. I could almost feel this new hardness within, like a cold, heavy weight. I had become a person who could not love and who seemed incapable of reaching out to others. Whether I liked it or not, I was now a garden enclosed, a well sealed up.
Leaving the religious life in those days was not like changing your job or moving house. Our novitiate had not simply provided us with new professional skills, and left our deepest selves untouched. It was a conditioning. For about three years, we were wholly isolated from the outside world, and also from the rest of the community. The door of the Noviceship was kept permanently locked, and we spoke to the other nuns only on very special feast-days. This meant that the novitiate became our whole world; no other existed for us, and the whims and moods of our Mistress acquired monumental importance. When we were punished, it seemed a cosmic event; when we were lonely or miserable, there was no possibility of comfort. The atmosphere was frigid, and sometimes even frightening. At night in our long dormitory, we often heard one another weeping, but knew that we must never ask what was wrong. We lived together in community, cheek by jowl, but were so lonely that we might as well have been living in solitary confinement. We became entirely dependent upon our Superior’s every move, and accepted her worldview and her opinion of ourselves as gospel truth. I was so young that I could draw upon no experience to counter this regime. So the world receded, and the tiny dramas and cold values of Noviceship life filled my entire horizon.
This type of isolation is central to the rituals of initiation, practised in the ancient world and in many indigenous societies today. On reaching puberty, boys are taken away from their mothers, separated from their tribe and subjected to a series of frightening ordeals that change them irrevocably. It is a process of death and resurrection: initiates die to their childhood and rise again to an entirely different life as mature human beings. They are often told that they are about to suffer a horrible death; they are forced to lie alone in a cave or a tomb; they are buried alive, experience intense physical pain (the boys are often circumcised or tattooed), and undergo terrifying rituals. The idea is that in these extreme circumstances, the young discover inner resources that will enable them to serve their people as fully functioning adults. The purpose of these rites of passage is thus to transform dependent children into responsible, self-reliant adults, who are ready to risk their lives as hunters and warriors, and, if necessary, to die in order to protect their people
Our training had been an initiation. We too had been segregated from the world, deprived of normal affection, and subjected to trials that were designed to test our resolve. We too were to be warriors of sorts – soldiers of God, who practised the military obedience devised by St Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, whose Rule we followed. The training was designed to make us wholly self-reliant, so that we no longer needed human love or approval. We too were told that we were to die to our old selves, and to our worldly, secular way of looking at things. Of course, we were not buried alive in a tomb or anything of that sort, but we were constantly undermined, belittled, publicly castigated, or ordered to do things that were patently absurd. As Ignatius’s Rule put it, we were to become utterly pliable to the will of God, as expressed through our superiors, in the same way as ‘a dead body allows itself to be treated in any manner whatever, or as an old man’s stick serves him who holds it in every place and for every use alike’. Dead to ourselves, we would live a fuller, enhanced existence, as Jesus had promised in a text that we liked to quote: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will remain nothing but a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit.’ On our profession day, while the choir sang the Litany of the Saints, we lay under a funeral pall, symbolically dead to the world, and to our greedy, needy, selves that clung, infant-like, to ordinary, worthless consolations.
Now, it seemed to me that I had indeed died, but I was certainly not bringing forth much fruit. I felt as though I had entered a twilight zone between life
