Your Favorite Religious Life Video

[AnneLine]

I think Antigonos is raising some really good and valid points. It's hard to remember that it is about the period between the world wars... and Victorian and Edwardian society as a whole was totally obsessed with looking perfect, and knowing your place, and doing everything exactly perfectly. If society as a whole was doing that, imagine what it would have been like when you added that to the determination to become perfect that every sister in every convent has.... it can become jansenistic and self-absorbing....

It's interesting to me to think that St. Therese would have been canonized in 1925... and it was her autobiography, The Story of A Soul, that was published in a tiny edition as an obituary letter to be circulated to the Carmelite nun communities after her death in 1897, that really transformed how we look at God and how to serve God. Her spirituality is what made people get rid of the 'terrified of God's judgment' kind of spirituality and replace it with a spirit of loving trust and doing little things well.... which ironically, is much more what St. Teresa and many of the other great spiritual writers had in mind in the first place. The 'terrified of God' thing was a heresy... and some still have it....

But [i]the Nun's Story[/i] gives us a window to what it would have been like to have lived in that period without the insights into God's loving mercy. (Better book than movie, in my opinion, because you learn more of what is going on INSIDE of Sr. Luke, which puts all of it into better context.)

Yes, many of the practices that are outlined in [i]The Nun's Story [/i]really were done in active as well as cloistered communities up until and somewhat after Vatican II.... and some still retain them or have a modified version of them, especially the more traditional groups of sisters and nuns.

Vatican II asked the sisters to stop the division between 'Choir' nuns and 'Lay Sisters' - now in most communities everyone prays together and works together.... and that probably makes more sense in the late 20th/early 21st century, but it would have NOT made sense to the people who would have lived in the 20's and 30's, certainly not those in Europe at that time. Those class distinctions definitely were still going on at that time period -- and it is discussed well in the Rumer Godden book, [i]In this House of Brede[/i]. Ironically, I have spoken with many sisters who were 'made' Choir nuns after entering as Lay Sisters who would have prefered to NOT have to worry about the sung office... they prefered doing the housework and being quiet with God. So there really are two sides to all of this!

[AnneLine]

A bit of a tangent... but a VERY relevant one... that will help to put this into context....

If you have time, British TV has run a fascinating pair of TV series that are available on Youtube, [i]the Victorian Farm [/i]and [i]the Edwardian Farm[/i]. Exploring them has given me much insight into my own time in the convent and about the 'renewal' of religious life.

In both, 3 archeologists go back and live as they would have done at those time periods (1880's and 1905-1914 respectively), and we get to see what it would have been like to live on a farm (and a manor house) of that time period. I like history, and I enjoy the series just for themselves... but the [i]Edwardian Farm [/i]one will give you a really good context for understanding the world of the Nun's Story -- AND the world of pre-Vatican II religious life... because that is the time period that those sisters would have grown up AND would have received their training... and in which the superiors doing the training would have been formed during that period easily up to Vatican II.

I think all 12 hours are worthwhile TV, but for our purposes, I have highlighted two episodes that have relelvant content in them...

First, look at this trailer of the Carmelite life as lived in Sister Faith Cecilia's
Here's the trailer from No Great Love....

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0KZeX0fvbY"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0KZeX0fvbY[/url]

and then look at some of what Ruth Goodman does in Edwardian Farm....

Episode 6 of Edwardian Farm is a 'day in the life' based on some letters that were found near the area where they are running the farm... it sounds a LOT like the lifestyle of many religious sisters up until Vatican II.... and to some extent, even now in many of the more traditional communities.... perhaps because that period really was a more quiet, thoughtful, contemplative time. I don't know... I'll be curious to know, Marigold, how this compares with your community, which seems a bit agrarian....

I think this is a lot like what Sr. Luke would have experienced although she would have lived in the city and been from a somewhat higher socioeconomic group, I suspect, as her father was a doctor.... feel free to skip the guys and the farm chores (although I like it all!)

E6 Part 1 (and the following 3 that are part of Episode 6)
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UMvvRyXyh0&list=PLCD47E0CC9E13D536&index=21&feature=plpp_video"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UMvvRyXyh0&list=PLCD47E0CC9E13D536&index=21&feature=plpp_video[/url]

to be continued....

[AnneLine]

I've highlighted the sections where Ruth works as a domestic in the big manor house below - all of it is fascinating, but this is most relevant to the discussion:

(had to split this into a second part becuase of the links...)

This is from Episode 4 of Edwardian Farm - when Ruth goes to work as a domestic helper in a grand manor estate.

Sure looks a lot like the lifestyle we had in the 1980's in the community I was in.... even to the postulant outfits looking a whole lot like those of Edwardian servants....

I bet this is what that huge mother house would have been like in Sr. Luke's community.. and imagine what it would have been like to be a postulant in one of these places!!! Or a lay sister!

AND add on a full 3-4 hours of prayer into the mix in place of the pub time in the last episode! This would have been a VERY intense lifestyle!

Edwardian Farm Episode 4 part 1 - start about 12:15 into this part of the episode...
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jUYjvSR1w"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jUYjvSR1w[/url]

Episode 4 part 2 - from the start up until 5:54 and 10:03 to 14:10
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=1u-BJWvUoXM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=1u-BJWvUoXM[/url]

I'd be curious to see what the rest of you think.....

[mantellata]

[color=#282828]"I think Antigonos is raising some really good and valid points. It's hard to remember that it is about the period between the world wars... and Victorian and Edwardian society as a whole was totally obsessed with looking perfect, and knowing your place, and doing everything exactly perfectly. If society as a whole was doing that, imagine what it would have been like when you added that to the determination to become perfect that every sister in every convent has.... it can become jansenistic and self-absorbing...."[/color]


Right... and therefore a deformation of religious life. I still do wonder if the author (or the one who was the source for the author) was personally hurt by her experiences (and gosh golly, being that nuns are human I'm sure she had some real bad experiences) and didn't understand the value of certain monastic customs.

Even IF the infirmarian was supposed to be on the watch it is just ridiculous to think that someone wouldn't help the Sister beside her. Not everybody needs to jump up but the Sister beside her would in charity need to help her..... even to bring her to the infirmarian!


..... but even the old monastic writers will remind you that these practices are all [b]means[/b] to an [b]end - [/b] and that end is growth charity. (AKA holiness)

Some of the older Sisters I lived with, who were still "more reserved" shall we say, were the [b]most tender[/b] of Sisters and cared for each one there. They also would have likely been the first to jump and resolve a similar situation -- or ream out a Sister who was too pious to notice.


..... I just really [i]really [/i]dislike the film.



P.S. I would imagine that the other convents that did not allow the film makers would not have likely allowed [b]any[/b] film makers in. Because [b]that[/b] would be a distraction to prayer and the way of life!

Edited April 22, 2012 by mantellata

[AnneLine]

Valid points all, Mantellata.

However, I DO think it was that way in that community at that point. And in a lot of them. In the book, the Sisters who were in charge of the infirmary were suposed to go to the fainted sister's aide (and did so); but the others were suposed to 'stay on task' -- and keep on praying. I don't see it, but it probably WAS the belief at that point.

And sometimes still is, believe it or not. There are people who are convinced that if you are at prayer, you should be 'unaware' of those around you, that they are distractions. Like you, I just don't agree!

I know of several cases personally, unfortunately, where that was what was done. I think the sisters involved (and in once case, the laity involved) really do think they are 'pleasing God' by ignoring things going on around them in order to 'focus on God' - but I tend to think of St. Teresa's comment about, 'how are we to love the God we cannot see if we don't love the people around us whom we do see?' (Paraphrased from the [u][i]Interior Castle[/i][/u]) is very relevant here....

I also like your comment about,

[indent=1][color=#008000]"Right... and therefore a deformation of religious life. I still do wonder if the author (or the one who was the source for the author) was personally hurt by her experiences (and gosh golly, being that nuns are human I'm sure she had some real bad experiences) and [b]didn't understand the value of certain monastic customs[/b].[/color][/indent]

I think you are right that perhaps the ex-sister that the author spoke with may not have understood and/or internalized some of the rationale for the customs (after all, presuming she is 'Sr. Luke' she by her own admission 'wasn't in the mold'... she looked right on the outside, but something didn't get 'formed' correctly on the inside. But I think that that may have been true for a lot of sisters at that time period... even the ones who stayed (and some of those who trained them) didn't know they 'why' they were doing things, and so they just tossed indiscriminately. Very sad.

Some customs DID need modification.... A lot of the customs (such as not talking to others while you were on hospital duty, or only washing habits 2 or 3 times a year (and no I am NOT exaggerating... underclothes were changed, but not the habits themselves) had been lifted 100% from the lifestyle of the cloistered nuns from which that group of semi cloistered or active sisters emerged. (The ones for the Nun's Story actually were the Sisters of Charity of Mary and Joseph, a Belgian community that had originally been CISTERCIANS! When they first were founded, they were trying to do all the monastic customs of the cloister along with the full work of a teaching, nursing, etc. sister! They were getting up at 4AM. You can read more about it on the website for their community's archives: [url="http://www.archief-museum.zvl.org/index.html"]http://www.archief-museum.zvl.org/index.html[/url]
(That's a fantistic site, incidently!)

Some active communities even rose at midnight because that was what their cloistered sisters were doing! I have the diary of one Dominican Sister foundress (Mother Pia Backes of the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose) who was struggling with exactly that kind of questions... in the 1880s through early 1900s.

I've read a lot of the bios of sisters who came out and sisters who stayed in from many communities... and I am old enough to remember what it was like as those changes were implemented. I think that many of the sisters who were in religious life at that period had received good formation... but they were told (by those they trusted--often the very sisters who had trained them!) that the Church required that they let go of some of the 'old customs'. They didn't know (until it had already happened) that the Church wasn't asking them to get rid of everything... but to get rid of what wasn't realistic or appropriate. It can be very hard to distinguish between a custom that should be retained because it really IS important to the spiritual life (such as the value of a habit, or making prayer time and silence a priority, and setting up your house and schedule in such a way as to foster those), and an irrelevant one that can (and perhaps should) be done away with (such as not helping a fainting sister). Modify shouldn't have meant destroy, but sometimes it did. Very sad.

Really interesting discussion. Look forward to continuing it! What do the rest of you think?

[Antigonos]

[quote name='mantellata' timestamp='1335054095' post='2421761']
I still do wonder if the author (or the one who was the source for the author) was personally hurt by her experiences
[/quote]

Marie-Louise Habets never tried to return to religious life [and indeed, in both the book and the movie, it seems that one of the conditions of her laicization was that she would "never resume the habit of religious life" -- among all the other things, back then, it was immensely difficult to leave a convent, and was regarded in a very negative light]. However, she remained a devout Catholic, even helping her companion Katherine Hulme, who authored the book, to convert. She also suffered, for the remainder of her life, from depression resulting from her perception of herself as a "failure" as a nun.

Since my only contact with the term "Jansenism" came from reading a biography of Sr. Margaret Mary Alacoque [mentioned in relation to the nuns of Port Royal, described as "quaking in terror", I looked it up. The Catholic Encyclopedia's article, while very good, is also very dense and complex, while Wikipedia has a much more accessible one. Jansenist theology can be summed up very briefly as being "Catholic Calvinism" -- that free will doesn't really mean much; that either grace or its opposite is not something that depends on a person's basic choices but if God wants you to have grace, you've got it -- in other words, you are predestined to either be good or not. I don't see any Jansenist influences in Sr. Luke's order. Austerity, per se, isn't Jansenist. Neither is the concept of detachment, in which the individual soul seeks God.

"The Nun's Story" isn't meant to be an exposition of theology. It is about a very strong-willed, intelligent woman who wanted, above all, to do nursing in a time and place where it was almost the exclusive province of women in religious life, and who underestimated her ability to conform to the discipline of religious life. In a way, neither Sr. Luke nor her order were at fault. They were simply very badly matched. In Belgium of the time, there was very little lay nursing, and certainly not in the Congo. In point of fact, Sr. Luke, although devout, did not have a vocation to the religious life, she had a vocation to nursing. Today that wouldn't be a problem; then [and there], it was.

'Nuff said; don't want to hijack the thread any more...

[marigold]

It's interesting, Antigonos, that you wrote "Sr. Luke, although devout, did not have a vocation to the religious life, she had a vocation to nursing", because my impression was always that while she was big on nursing (it was definitely her charism - though the film does angle it somewhat to seem like she just entered in order to nurse) she did in fact have a vocation too. That it was the inhumane expectations of the time - like those awful notebooks of faults! - which equated keeping of rules with spiritual advancement, plus the stressful circumstances of the war, which broke her. It's silly, but sometimes when I think about that story I wish Sr. Luke had been in an Orthodox nursing convent (e.g. [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfo-Mariinsky_Convent"]Sts. Martha and Mary[/url]) where she would have been allowed to blossom. Or perhaps even a contemporary RC one!

As to AnneLine's earlier comment about my community being more agrarian - well yes, it is a farm! I enjoyed the 2 series for the history just like you did, and yes, once or twice it did cross my mind that there were aspects that were similar to life in a monastery. Case in point: this morning I woke up to an email from Mother telling me that they were taking turns sleeping in the barn with the mama goats that are getting ready to give birth! The life ebbs and flows around the seasons, as it would have done in the time periods depicted, even more so the further back you go - so maybe that's what we're picking up on.

[mantellata]

It makes a lot more sense to understand that these were active Sisters attempting to remain Cistercian. I know that the Dominicans in the United States had similar difficulties when they were founded. The difference was of course that they petitioned the Master General for dispensation (and yes - I do have to remember that dispensations began with the Dominicans so that also likely makes a difference)

Originally the Dominicans founded at Mary of the Springs had to follow the 2nd order rule in order to wear the habit (the local bishop actually tried to force them to wear black) and there were not as of yet, third order religious as we know of them today. They were living a pioneer lifestyle and getting up in the middle of the night and living on a vegetarian diet - while also farming all their own resources AND teaching AND nursing.

It's interesting to note that exemption of the midnight office and eating meat were the first dispensations that they received.

Also --- apparently (though I'm working from memory at present so if someone wants to correct me with sources otherwise please chime in) third order religious as we know them today actually began as an American "invention". In Teresa of Avila's time, all religious women were required to become cloistered. (Which really bothered St. Catharine de Ricci -- who until the last bull from the Pope was writing him telling him that they were not 2nd order Sisters -- the people of her town actually walled the Sisters in overnight)

I agree with AnneLine that it is unfortunate that the baby was thrown out with the proverbial bath water when changes happened.

As to the books with the faults -- I think this actually begins with Jesuit spirituality.... the idea that if you log your faults you can actually begin to chart the problems or come up with your predominant fault in order to better understand your own weaknesses. Might work better for men's psychology I don't know. I'm not opposed to the idea as long as it doesn't over focus you on your own actions and is used as it is meant to be used.

As far as my [b]Jansenist -- [/b]comment is concerned - I don't believe it is accurate to say that it is the Catholic version of Calvanism - particularly regards to predestination. I'm referring to how Jansenism in practice tends to 1: over focus on sin 2: over focus on personal effort rather than grace (pelagianism.... always a temptation for the monastic) 3: apply a moral attribute or character deficiency to the poor soul who can't seem to "get it together" and perform the "heroic feats" of the others.

Jansenism... or perhaps better said Pelagianism (since Jansenism has more to do with the confessional and not being able to be forgiven unless one produced a [u]perfect[/u] act of contrition) still infects good Catholics today - since after all we are human. I also believe it is a real temptation for anyone who is (as was previously mentioned) sincerely trying to become holy -- priests and religious.


Hmm.. yes,... I suppose this is a hijack of the thread.... except that we are still discussing movies here.

[SoonerCatholic]

I don't think this Carmelite video has been posted yet. Incidentally, they are having a vocation retreat weekend this August, I've been and it's quite nice. More info on their website at heartsawake.org (click for the flash content, and go to monastery and click on "what is new?")

http://youtu.be/NM8-2PZt2lk

[miles Christi]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEjwtEnGTI0&feature=player_embedded

[Mary's Margaret]

MC, thank-you for posting that beautiful video.

[organwerke]

[quote name='marigold' timestamp='1322011265' post='2339617']

That is lovely. It looks sooo much like my monastery <3




[/quote]

Who are they?

[miles Christi]

[quote name='organwerke' timestamp='1336763720' post='2429856']
Who are they?
[/quote]

Fraternité de Tibériade if I'm not mistaken

[Pax_et bonum]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zPwviwMNR4

[emmaberry]

Thank you for the video! I had read her write up on her investiture day, and thought, "oh, razzle dazzle." The video spoke so much more to me and really highlighted the beauty of it all.