PRUNE SOUP OF POOR CLARE COLETTINE, ROSWELL, N.M.

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There is, for instance, a peculiar Poor Clare entree called "prune soup."  And it is called prune soup because this is exactly what it is:  buttermilk prune soup.  After a certain period of time, depending on one's personal power of adjustment, one gets first accustomed to, and then quietly devoted to, this strange concoction, which we are assured, and which we believe in all good faith, is very nourishing.  Whether it has been handed down directly from the holy founders or is an interpolation by one of their more imaginative spiritual descendants can no longer be determined from the mass of truth and apocrypha about the Order.  But it does appear to be a brew reserved to the Poor Clares without challenge.

Once a Sister from Canada was visiting our extern Sisters for several weeks.  She lived in the extern part of the monastery and shared with them the cloister fare which is given out on the days the Sisters do not prepare their dinner separately.  The day arrived for the prune soup.  Sister Monique, who had come from a section of Canada which was strictly French-speaking and whose English was a little uncertain, smiled with amused tolerance on beholding and stirring the soup, and alerted our extern Sisters:  "Someone has drop ze prune in ze soup."

When this was relayed to us at recreation, Sister Margaret remarked:  "Well, it was a very charitable way to look to look at it.  She didn't want to think anybody had put prunes in the soup on purpose."  And she added meditatively:  "After all, what would you have thought at home if you had found a banana in the consomme?"  

But we know the prunes are meant to be there, and accept rather than explain them.  In fact, I have known a novice who were such thorough-going realist that they suspected the validity of any departure from these refectory-realities.

On prune soup days, Mother Abbess announces from the head table, and not, I fancied when I was postulant, without a touch of grimness:  Dear Sisters , there are three prunes for each Sister."  One day she did not make any customary announcement, for we had no prunes.  The soup was a start affair: prune soup without prunes.  It was my week to serve in the refectory, and I shall never forget one determined novice plunging the soup ladle down into the deep tureen again and again in a quite literally fruitless effort to bring it up laden in prunes.  Each time, she would stare incredulously at the pruneless ladle.  Finally, mercy compelled me to lean over and whisper:  "There are no prunes in the prune soup today."  Nor shall I ever forget her expression on hearing this.  Shock.  Unbelief.  Alarm.  For this realist knew that life is meant to be beset with trials and that heaven comes only afterward.  She was leaning in the novitiate that the cloistered life and hard faith cannot be lived sentimentally, romantically, or euphemistically.  Where there is prune soup, one should face the prunes.

 

from the book "Strange Gods Before Me, by Mother Mary Francis"