The Nun Run

Authenticity. It’s such an illusive quality. The more you try to grasp it, the less it seems to be within your reach. It was the first word that came into my head on my visit this spring to Regina Laudis Priory, home of the famous cheese-making Benedictine Nuns in Bethlehem Connecticut. But it wasn’t the last.

I discovered Regina Laudis via Michael Pollan’s documentary “Cooked” on Netflix. In the last episode he visits the abbey to explore their crafty cheesemaking abilities. He interviews Mother Noella—a nun biologist who outsmarts state inspectors with science to safeguard ancient french cheesmaking techniques employed in the abbey’s workshops. It reminded me of Walter Miller’s dystopian novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, which was written in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It explores a future where, just as monastic orders preserved literature and learning during the Dark Ages of Europe, so in the coming post-nuclear dark age, monastics again do the same thing. Only this time they save science and technology too. Mother Noella seemed like an incarnation of one of Miller’s future monastics. My curiosity was piqued.

A month or so later a close friend confided she was considering applying for a farming and land stewardship internship offered at Regina Laudis — and later still I discovered that a friend of my broader circle of acquaintance had not one, but two sisters, who had joined the community. When something comes up in your life three times — you know its time to follow some of Jesus’ best least quoted advice, “Come and see.”

I made my way to the priory on a May morning, with my two eldest teenage daughters in tow. It was not the sort of spring morning that beckons one to the open road. Rather than breezy sunshine and birdsong to stir the blood, it was of the overcast drizzly sort that invites multiple cups of coffee in a puffy armchair with a book. I always feel reluctant to leave home at the last minute before a journey, but this time it felt even stranger to venture out into the unknown. For the first time in my adult life, travel arrangements had been conducted entirely by correspondence of the physical kind: stamped addressed envelopes passed in and out of my mailbox. A series of letters had been exchanged between the abbey and myself, arranging a date. I couldn’t back out now. Appointment finality, in our day of last minute apologetic cancellations via text, rattled the comfort zone.

In the final hour of our six hour car trip it began to occur to me that I had no idea what I was actually doing. I told my Catholic friends I was going on retreat. I told my homeschooling friends I was exposing my daughters to female religious communities. To everyone else, I just said I was visiting the cheese nuns. But really I had no idea what I was actually going to do once I got there.

By the time I pulled into the priory parking lot, a muddy area under some pine trees, I had worked myself into a pretty little stress sweat. I felt pretty sure I had communicated a rough window of afternoon arrival that was two hours ago (I couldn’t actually even remember what I had told them because that letter had been written two whole weeks ago. Turns out letters are sneaky that way.)

I exited my car, unsure of how to handle our tardy arrival. There was one nun crossing the lot, a couple of random tourists pulling up in their car, and a young intern ringing a bell and being admitted behind a large wooden wall with a gate. Nobody seemed to be waiting for us and we couldn’t just walk into a nun enclosure. Awkward. I decided to walk over to a red tavernish looking building (it was RED red) There was a sign on the door. The sign said “Call for the portress—phone in the hallway.” I had my first instructions.

A nun answered the phone and told me to wait outside — someone would come out shortly. In about five minutes a middle-aged nun in a denim work habit and white wimple greeted us. She introduced herself as Sister Gabriel and said she was “my nun.” Immediately she turned to my daughters to relay in a matter of fact tone, “Don’t worry, you each have nuns too — they will find you,” as if having your own personal nun who would in some mysterious manner “find you” was quotidian business. I found out later the sister assigned to you was called your “holding nun.” Sweet.

At this juncture, I expected to be handed a weekend itinerary with an hourly schedule and a run down of what to expect. Instead Sister Gabriel pointed to a white house through the trees and told me to go inside and I would find my room. I was to come to Vespers in the chapel at 5 and meet her back at the red house afterwards. Roger that. I later discovered that two hours in the future was about as much information I was ever given as to my own whereabouts during my stay. This simultaneously felt like permission to live deliciously in the present and like being seven years old again. I moved my van over to the guest house and unpacked the car with my daughters.

The guest house, an old New England farmhouse, was all Benedictine hospitality is cracked up to be. Saint Benedict wrote his famous Benedictine rule over a millennium ago and set the bar pretty high. “Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ,” he said. This translated to ample amounts of tea and toast, daily meals prepared by the sisters and laced with their famous artisanal cheeses, and a quiet room to myself.

I poked around the guesthouse and found some old breviaries. I grabbed them to bring to Vespers. Just as I was getting into my car an SUV pulled up with another nun accompanied by a workman. They got out and headed towards a the barn. She had on the same denim habit, but belted into puffy denim pants that were likewise tucked into knee high boots. She held a chainsaw mask in one hand and a blue bandana was tied over her wimple. The overall impression was rather more that of pirate than professed religious. “Can we take these into the chapel?” I asked, holding up the breviaries. She turned around replied, “I’m sure it doesn’t matter, but you can ask Mother Gabriel if you are really worried it.” in the tone one would expect of a pirate-chainsaw-wielding nun being pestered about breviaries by an over-scrupulous ninny.

Vespers was held in the chapel, a high sloped ceilinged building with large airy windows through which a canopy of trees filtered light. All the surfaces were paneled with luminous honey colored wood and a large iron grille bisected the room separating us from a round semi-circle of choir seats. A bell rang and the nuns filed into the room each taking their place in their stalls, like bees returning to the hive. They sang the Latin of the Divine Office in high airy sounding voices. My thoughts wandered in contemplation supported by the strains of Gregorian chant, and I continued to muse on the similarites between bees and nuns. At first glance, the sisters all seen to look the same, but then you notice there are different kinds. Only instead of drones, workers, and a queen, there are novices, professed sisters and an abbess. I even found myself explaining to my daughters while walking back to the guest house, that when an abbey grows too large, the abbess appoints a group of nuns to leave the enclosure and establish a new community somewhere else. Basically, they swarm.

Apian musings were interrupted by the realization I was almost late for meeting with my holding nun. I rushed over to the red house to find Sister Gabriel. It was my first “parlor.” A parlor is a chance for you and your personal nun to chat — that’s right — in a parlor.

Sister Gabriel was wrapped in a wool shawl and guided me into a room, lined with bookshelves. We situated ourselves in two armchairs, very cozy and Mr. Tumnus like. Her first words were “What do you need to talk about most in your life?” Turns out, that’s a great conversation starter. As we chatted, I found her to be one of the most refreshingly honest and authentic women I have ever met. Our conversation started with my own mess of personal demons, but we covered a broad range of subjects, including, well, things one never anticipates discussing with seventy year old nuns. Never judge a nun by her habit. Sister Gabriel talked just as much about her own life as I talked about mine.We laughed and cried. As we parted, I realized. . . I had just made a new friend.

The next day we rose early to join the sisters for morning chant and mass. Afterward one of the sisters came out from behind the grill and gave us each little notes from our holding nuns.

I had another parlor and then lunched with the farming interns. This was followed by our work for the afternoon. I was assigned to the gardens and for the first time, was able to go behind the enclosure. I worked with a young novice with a nose ring and one of the sub-prioresses who had been at the abbey a long time. The story another visitor told me was that this sister and her friends had discovered the abbey by accident on a road trip back in college in the 70s and decided she never wanted to leave. I looked around at the landscape, a patchwork of human dwellings, animal pasture, scupltures, tended gardens, wilderness and a chapel. I could see why.

I worked in the garden, planting cauliflower and brussel sprouts and poppies. The sisters seemed so delightfully caught up in the practical and the present. In spite of living an avowed religious life behind an enclosure away from “the world,” they seemed to spend more of their time fretting about things like compost and chainsaws. I guess it depends on your definition of ‘worldly,” but it may also have something to do with the unique Benedictine spirituality. Benedict required his monastics to take another vow in addition to the regular vows of obedience and chastity — a vow of stability. This means that Benedictines are married not only to one another in their community life but also to the place where they are, to the land. The line between the two — the community and the land — is a blurry one. Benedictines are straining toward heaven but with their feet firmly rooted in grubby earth.

Even stranger, with all this community and stability and enclosure, and obedience and wearing of identical habits business, one would expect Benedictine nuns to all feel like little cloned cult members. But instead, the opposite seemed to be true. Individuality abounded. Sculptures, pottery, illuminated calligraphy, paintings, and stained glass projects littered the landscape at the abbey. I would ask who had made them and the answer was always one of the sisters. Apparently, when a sister feels called to take on her own personal project, with the approval of the Abbess, she simply does so. The community becomes an incubus for creativity and innovation. Orchards, preserving, bee keeping, dairy, cheesemaking, gardening, baking, shepherding, woodland management, sculpture, stained glass, pottery, theatre, historical restoration, painting, music, and birding, were just a few of the projects I could see firsthand. There seemed to be more projects than people and yet they all seemed to be managed joyfully in a sort of organized chaos.

What we did at the abbey for our brief stay was not very different in type from the things we do at home, although decidedly less hurried and minus all the meal prep and little folk. I gardened and sang and prayed and spent some hours reading and writing and watercoloring. My daughters stacked wood, visited the newborn calves went on a birding walk and and journaled and read. And yet something inside me shifted imperceptably. My first day at the abbey, I dressed myself and didn’t put on any makeup. It felt freeing — there really is something to this all female community thing, I thought. My last day was a Sunday. As I dressed for chapel I got out my toiletry bag and put on a little eyeliner and some mascara. I wanted to wear make-up. I wanted to look beautiful — for the nuns.

By the end of my stay at Regina Laudis, authenticity no longer seemed like the perfect word. It was a bit too self concious — or maybe just too narrow. The word that best described the community was one used by someone much more qualified after many years of life in the priory than I to describe their life. It was one of Sister Gabriel’s choosing. Her word was vitality. This community of women, living joyfully in a patch of Connecticut woodland, enduring one another’s faults, sacrificing some potentialies but embracing some larger ones, making cheese from today’s milking and singing the chants of past milleniae, was vital.

(NOTE: Unless available to the public, sister’s names have been changed to respect the privacy of their enclosure)