Did I tell you about the time I was a nun? Oh. I probably did. According to my girlfriend, I still say the Hail Mary in my sleep.
(Pssst, if you really don't want to hear nun stuff, I wrote something else for you to read today)
You know I was bad at it. I spilled a lot of soup. I never wanted to talk about the lives of the saints at the dinner table. I swore too much.
Apparently, even a little swearing is not nun-appropriate. Dammit.
And I had insufficient docility. And too much self-esteem. I got held back for a year and a half in pre-aspirancy, a period in nun-dom that's supposed to be just a month.
This is like flunking preschool 18 times.
So. You might be wondering why I stayed. Well. I thought it was God's will. But even amid all those moments of self-flagellation (and not the fun kind), there were moments of joy.
For example, the day after Easter, all the Missionaries of Charity (the kind of nun I was) in the New York area got together for a picnic. We headed out to some retreat center, all the nuns from all five boroughs. One of my group sisters, Sister Carmel, found a basketball and walked around to different clusters of nuns, recruiting them for a pick-up game.
When let loose on the basketball court, the nuns transformed into women who run with wolves. Sister Beth, the first American sister to join the MCs, wore thick glasses and usually moved with slow, heavy steps. When I put up my hands the first time to block her jump shot, she feigned fright. "Please, Sister Mercy, you're scaring me."
I attempted to shoot from near the free-throw line five minutes later. She sailed through the air and slapped the shot right back in my face. Her fingernails grazed the inside of my hand. "Ooooh, sister Mercy," she giggled, taking my hand in hers, "are you okay?" And then, "Oh my goodness," looking more closely at my bleeding palm, "you have the stigmata!"
Sister Maria Juanita, a very young, petite sister from Columbia, claimed she had never played basketball before, but she shrugged and said, "It's beautiful to try, no?"
When Sister Carmel attempted to pass the ball to another sister on her team, Sister Juanita appeared out of nowhere, slapped the ball loose, dribbled once behind her back, and gave the ball to her team's point guard. Sister Carmel stood with her hands on her hips. "I thought you said you never played basketball before!" she yelled down the court.
"Oh, maybe a little," Sister Juanita said, eyes sparkling, "maybe defense."
At the time, Sister Manno was the oldest living MC outside of India, and she had survived three open-heart surgeries. She ripped the ball out of the hands of a much younger sister and proceeded to run up the court. When another sister accidentally stepped on the end of her habit, Sister Manno continued to run for the lay-up. She was wearing only her long skirt-like undergarment when she turned around triumphantly, having scored two points for her team. Our collective cry went up, "Sister!" She smiled and began to re-dress. "I made the basket, didn't I?"
In my letter home the next week, I wrote three pages about the game and concluded, "I guess the sisters play basketball the way they do everything else. With their whole hearts."