Word: nuns
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...resolutely highbrow listeners of the BBC's Third Programme, where these dramatizations were originally heard. Tightly edited, translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill (TIME, Aug. 11, 1952), this first album contains the roll call of the Pilgrims in the Prologue, and the tales of the Monk, the Nun's Priest, the Reve, the Manciple and the Man of Law-a cross section of stories gay and gloomy, garrulous and risqué. A fine item for a long winter's night...
...read your cryptic but perceptive Oct. 28 review of Monica Baldwin's The Called and the Chosen. I would like to express a few deep-rooted convictions on these notorious "ex-nuns" and "ex-priests" who, through some psychological guilt complex, delight in tearing to shreds the consecrated cloisters and convents they had no right to enter in the first place. As an ex-nun, I am thoroughly aware that anyone can make a mistake about his or her vocation in life. But why, in Heaven's name, do so many feel impelled to take up a poisoned...
...Clammy Toad. Sister Ursula joins her order in her late teens, is assigned to a convent in Belgium. Like Sister Luke of The Nun's Story, she suffers the shock of initiation: an austere cell so cold that the holy-water stoup is sometimes frozen; the regimen of the "custody of the eyes," i.e., never letting them stray from a modest downward glance; the "instruments of penance," ranging from a scourging cord to metal knee and elbow bracelets studded with blunt-tipped nails. As early as her fifth day, Sister Ursula feels "a dreadful sick sensation as though...
...pictured the nun's life as "ecstatic hours of prayer . . . unrestricted conversation . . . and plenty of time for reading and writing." Instead there is a busy round of "dusting, sweeping, sewing, mending" plus spiritual duties, beginning at 4:45 a.m. Ursula is soon displaying what can only be called a lack of Christian charity and humility. Her priest-confessor "has little blue eyes like an intelligent pig. " Her choir neighbor has a rasping voice that "bores like a drill." The nun's "starched headgear not only gives one a headache but-makes it difficult to hear." And fasting "makes...
...religious vocation. She plunges from her novitiate into professed nunhood in a "gambler's spirit." uttering a pathetic, near-blasphemous prayer: "O God−if there is a God−let what I am going to do be right . . ." She persists in trying to be a good nun for yet another decade−evidently from a stubborn prideful refusal to admit to herself that she has made a great mistake...