Word: conventions
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...been assigned to them. This is the first time in the day that they are permitted to talk. From 9 to noon, and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., the sisters work. Many attend classes (Maryknoll operates an accredited teachers' normal college). Some take courses outside the convent in nursing, social work, medicine. Those not studying during work periods may be building a new terrace, or working in the kitchen to help Sister Gregory, who spent 26 years in Hawaii and can manage a graceful hula. Maintenance Chief Sister Jeannette always has plenty of odd jobs going begging...
...training. After six months a postulant may receive the habit and white veil of a novice together with a new name. For the next two years she leads the full life of a Maryknoll sister, but also studies Catholic doctrine, the essentials of religious life ("Emily Post in the Convent,"as the course is jocularly known), and the Mass responses and Gregorian chant."When they first come, nowadays," says Sister Jeanne Marie, the novice mistress, "their singing is a cross between a howl and a wail- I guess it's a torch-song background...
Granted a valid vocation and a healthy body and mind, what does the postulant find in a cloistered convent? The group she has joined gives a family's sense of solidarity and protection. Silence does not exclude communication, and a world that talks from morning to night may not appreciate the gaiety of the recreation hour after a day-long silence. Barring homesickness, the postulant is likely to be happy during her first few convent months. But, as New York-born Carmelite Mother Catherine Thomas puts it, in her autobiography, My Beloved, The Story of a Carmelite Nun, "Postulants...
...contemplative convent is far more than a quiet place to provide the opportunity for prayer. It is also a kind of operating room where prolonged and drastic surgery takes place to free the individual from those things that stand between her and the love...
...Walled Town. This is the life of Mary, the cloistered life the world does not see, and it is part of the plan of Maryknoll that its busy Martha body recognizes its dependence on what the sisters call the convent's "hidden heart." For the apparent separation (and even conflict) between activity and adoration that seems to bifurcate Christianity is not real. Many great figures of the church, beginning with St. Paul, have combined both elements without conflict. "Laborare est orare," said St. Benedict (work is prayer). The Maryknoll sister hacking a kitchen garden out of the Bolivian jungle...