modified the habit several times and then abandoned it, although sisters could choose to keep it. They could go back to their original names, although they were free to retain their religious names. Gone were chapter of faults and acts of humility. Summer schools became dating and mating fairs for priests and nuns. In my post-exit encounters, they told me that I was ahead of my time, that I should have stayed and all would have gone my way. However, I had moved on and it wasn’t my way anymore. One of my group became mistress of novices and then left. In the 1990s, my text Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun, which had been published in various versions in a journal and an anthology, became available on the World Wide Web, generating a steady stream of email about convent life in the past, even from some SSJs. One forwarded me a list of the thirty-three of the ninety who entered with me who remained. In 1999, I visited Chestnut Hill and met sisters I knew from the past. Some were wearing shorts and sneakers. The congregational photo directory of 1998 showed page after page of pleasant-looking older women with short gray hair, glasses, and normal clothes. Among them were my former teachers, my contemporaries, and our mistress of postulants. A sprinkling of them were wearing short veils, some of them in a later modified habit. Numbers had declined drastically, as in most other orders. In 1998, they had no novices. According to their projections forward to 2007, they expected to have no sisters under forty and more than half of their membership over seventy. The days of the congregation are numbered.
This chapter bears witness to that lost world.
3
Bridge over Troubled Water
The day that I left the convent was another one of those days when the sharpest line was drawn between one way of life and another. Unlike the day I entered, when my mind was more on what was beginning than on what was ending, this day I was overwhelmed by what was ending and had no idea of what was beginning. As my mother drove us away, I could not talk to her about how I felt, but confined conversation to practical matters. We stopped and got an application for a learner’s permit, so I could drive, and an application to summer school, so I could continue to work toward a degree. We talked about jobs. I was considering VISTA, a domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. I liked working in the inner city. I arrived home, a place I had thought I would never see again. It was still a hectic and difficult household and I once again felt trapped in it. Sometimes I heard my mother talking on the phone about why I left. She would say I didn’t have a vocation after all, or that I decided it wasn’t for me. Once I shouted at her that I had decided it wasn’t right for anybody. My parents had been proud of their daughter who was a nun and assumed their problems with me were over. Little did they know that worse was ahead. I got all sorts of reactions from others: What a shame. What a waste. Aren’t you glad it’s all over? Do you regret it? Come on and tell me all the gory details. Did I regret it? This was a question I asked myself. As I caught up with events and trends in the world, I did regret that I missed the early days of SDS, that I had not been marching for civil rights down south, that I was not further along toward a university degree. However, I knew things had to play out in the way they did, given who I was and the world into which I was born. Moreover, there was a sense in which I felt that I turned negative to positive. I had survived a years-long, near-total assault on my intellectual, emotional, moral, and bodily integrity, and was stronger for it. Not that I knew yet how to bring such strength to bear upon my life. All I knew was that I wanted to continue my education and be socially and politically involved.
The year 1965 was the most difficult year of my life. I turned twenty-one in turbulence. I struggled not to drown in the tides threatening to engulf me and to find a bridge across troubled water. On so many levels, I felt like a misfit in the world to which I returned. It was not just the Rip van Winkle effect of discovering how things had changed while I was gone. It was a feeling of being neither here nor there, of being thoroughly out of joint with my surroundings, of belonging to no clear place. Even on the most superficial level, life was strange. I struggled to adapt to wearing ordinary clothes again. I kept feeling the lack of the long flowing veil and the swish of the long heavy skirts. I was a frightful sight. I had less than a half an inch of hair on my head, having been shaved so recently. My mother bought me a wig just the right shade of red as to look like my own hair. When I went down the shore one weekend with some of my classmates from high school, I was miserable. I had found them irritating and frivolous in high school, but I had even less in common with them now. On a deeper level, I plunged into darkness. The questioning that had unsettled the foundations of convent life for me was now unleashed full force, tearing relentlessly through my whole Catholic worldview. I grew obsessed with the question of the existence of God. I went over and over all the answers in the apologetics textbooks. I struggled with logic. I prayed for faith. I managed to continue to believe, but only by a thread and through the new theology. I responded most fully to the work of Teilhard de Chardin. I loved his passionate affirmation of matter, his respect for science and reason, his world-historical and teleological grandeur.
I got a summer job in Operation Discovery, a project of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” intended to offer enriching experiences for inner-city kids. I was teamed up with a handsome seminarian with whom I got on well, and we took the students, all of them black, on excursions all over the city and state. We went to concerts, museums, and art galleries. The banter with co-workers and kids was so freewheeling, so easy, without all the rules and regulations and stress that stifled my interactions with pupils, parishioners, and sisters at Corpus Christi. My new freedom was heady. I could decide how to spend my time, what to read, whom to see, what to wear. I delighted in things that others took for granted.
I started summer school. I had enough college credits from my three years at Chestnut Hill to count for one year at St. Joe’s. I was, unsurprisingly, exempt from all theology requirements. To qualify for any degree in a Jesuit university at that time, students were to take courses on theology and even more in philosophy. A total of twenty-four credits in philosophy was required, which suited me just fine. I started as required with logic and then proceeded to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. I also registered for classes in biology, psychology, sociology, and literature.
My first philosophy teacher was the witty and clever David Marshall, who used the classroom as a platform to talk about whatever was on his mind. As well as entertaining us with his views on everything under the sun, he managed to make logic seem fun and fascinating, and I mastered the principles and procedures of both syllogistic and symbolic logic. I also had him for philosophy of science, ethics and aesthetics. In all these courses, he ranged through the whole history of philosophy in sweeping strokes. My next philosophy teacher was John Caputo, an ex–Christian Brother and still a postgraduate himself, who taught epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of man, and philosophy of religion with far more rigor, demanding tighter analysis of the arguments of each thinker and less of the broad sweep. With exacting clarity, he guided me through the prime texts of modern philosophy, a fateful experience for me. He later became an academic star and advocate of postmodernist theology, a position that held no appeal for me, but he was an excellent teacher for me at this stage of my development. My literature teacher was John Mullen, well-organized, sardonic, and demanding a high level of critical reasoning and clear writing. He believed that philosophical questions were often dealt with more meaningfully in literature. He also thought that some works of science or philosophy were themselves fine literature. He introduced me to the work of physical anthropologist Loren Eiseley, through his book The Immense Journey. It formed my sense that factual writing could and should be as creative and as literary as fiction. Outside class, I read Maslow, Frankl, and Fromm for an alternative view to that offered by Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner in my psychology classes. The former thinkers’ emphasis on the whole person, on the flow of lived experience and the search for meaning, were urgently important to me as my life world was undergoing a total transformation.
A battle of ideas was raging in most Catholic universities at this time, as the relativizing effect of Vatican II was unraveling so many accepted principles. The divide was especially sharp in philosophy, where the hegemony of scholastic philosophy was cracking. The old guard, mostly priests, considered the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
