And Then There Were Nuns
Ellen Saxby
Copyright © 2011 Ellen Saxby
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely by chance
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
The Publisher makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any commercial damages.
2012-05-24
Dedication
This work is dedicated
to all the souls who have come forward
to work for the betterment of this planet.
Introduction
The injunction to care for the poor and the hungry is very old. There are thirty six instances in Torah where God instructs us that we need to care for the orphan, the widow and the stranger. We must feed the hungry, the Torah says. “Leave the corner of your field unharvested so the poor may come and glean.” “Pay the day laborer promptly so that the sun does not go down on his hunger.”
The consciousness of caring is not new but it has taken many forms as the centuries have unfolded. In the middle years of the Christian era, much of that process was left to women, the nuns.
The modern phenomenon, the mysterious world of nuns, began in 1630, in a small, very poor French village when a parish priest, know today as Saint Vincent de Paul, decided to put the good women of the parish to work. There were orphans to care for, poor children to be fed, hospital patients to be tended to.
He had to fool the church and just call them ‘the good ladies of the parish’. They took vows only for one year and were not bound by the rule of enclosure that had hitherto kept religious women out of the world. Father Vincent told the women that ‘you must love the poor, or else they will not forgive you the bread that you give them’.
In time there were hundreds of communities of nuns who taught school, nursed the sick, visited prisons, fed the hungry and tended to the needs of the widow and the orphan. They wore medieval garb, took vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and lived in partially enclosed communities. They tried to truly love the poor and at times they succeeded.
These stories are fiction but are all based on real women and real experiences.
These tales might show how complex and oftentimes sweet the journey of a life
of service can be.
Acknowledgements
It is clear to anyone who writes, how much we owe to the people
who patiently and generously pour over the words we set down,
in order to perfect the craft.
I am deeply grateful to
John Carney and Thaya Saxby
who found my many errors and corrected them.
To David Carney who made much better sense of my prose.
To Wendy Crockett who created the cover art
and Bonny McGowan who helped with production.
To Joe Smollen, Jack and Pat Young who read the stories
and encouraged me to continue writing them.
And then there is Debbie Heron
who guided me with the zeal of a saint,
poured over the pages again and again,
and brought the work to its present state.
And most of all to my husband Donald Saxby
whose patient encouragement made it all possible.
Sister Jonathan Becomes a Nurse
The apartment building that housed the nursing students was a city block away from the hospital. The first thing that Sister Jonathan saw, when she walked into the large foyer of St. Martin Hall, was the cigarette machine. It was in a corner tucked under the stairs and far enough away from the reception desk. The desk was always manned, but it occurred to Sister Jonathan immediately that she could easily buy a pack without being seen.
There was no decision. No inner battle being waged in her soul. Only the search for the quarter which would bring her back to Winston after all these years. She waited until she was settled into her tiny room in the back of the building and the four other sisters had each gone to their rooms for the night prayers that closed the day. Her room was at the end of the corridor and was the only one with a window leading out to a blind alley. It was so perfect.
It was five years since she had lit a cigarette and they still called to her. While still in her first year as a postulant, she often sat in her cell, rolling up pieces of paper and blowing puffs of imaginary smoke. The second year novices had told her that on Christmas Day the Novice Mistress gave three cigarettes to each new postulant who had been a smoker.
They had not meant to be cruel. They just had never been there, had never watched the curl of smoke dance with the steam rising over a cup of coffee. Never hiding on the roof of a tenement and lighting up with your best friend, never gathering pennies and nickels from under the bed to go out and sneak a pack, never finding a store that sold ‘loosies’ - three for a nickel. They just didn’t know. They couldn’t understand.
Throughout that long Christmas day, she had waited patiently. After midnight Mass she wasn’t even thinking too much about it but during the ‘after breakfast’ meeting she could hardly breathe with happy anticipation. By the afternoon she was becoming frightened that this had been a trick. By nightfall it was all too clear. While the other postulants contemplated the Holy Babe in the manger, she kept thinking about her three lost cigarettes.
The full remembrance of that horrible day came back to her as she dropped her quarter into the machine and selected a pack of Winston filtered cigarettes. “All things come to the sinner who waits,” she thought. Within half a minute she was back in her room. No one saw her. She was sure. She looked out at the blank wall. With the window open just a crack, she lit up and took a deep drag. It was pure heaven.
“I think I’m going to like nurse’s training,” she thought.
Despite this initial hope, and despite the calming effect of her nightly meeting with Winston, she did not like nurse’s training. In fact she hated it. The Chemistry class was painfully beyond her. She could make no sense of the complex formulas that were so clear to her
