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katdog, I remember you! I'm glad you re-introduced and started posting some more. I'm fascinated by your way of life and I appreciate your candor and willingness to share.
I've been a Mormon missionary and our experiences are definitely different. It's really neat to hear about yours.
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quote:When I saw your name and the thread title, I thought, "Wow, we finally have a pet who is posting." We have had babies post before and I am thinking it is a matter of time before we get an animal.
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lem, I may have been around longer, but I certainly haven't been a consistent user and until recent days, I'd say that no one on this board ever paid attention to me at all.
As for my user name, I've been using that since I was in middle school... even before the show "Catdog" came on the air! My friends always called me Kat but that name was already taken in several places so one friend suggested the additional "pet" name to make it slightly more unique. I'm sure many of you here understand the 42 reference.
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Narnia, have you ever posted about your experiences as a missionary? I'd love to read them if you have. I'm fascinated by all forms of people who give their lives for God's service!
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I really haven't posted. I've been promising to in a landmark. (I promised way back that my 2K landmark would be about my mission. As you can see, I didn't deliver.) Your encouragement is making me think I should do it. Stay tuned.
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katdog, it's great to have you here! You seem so friendly and nice. I went to parochial school taught by Benedictine nuns a long time ago, and they were all quite scary and mean. You don't seem scary and mean at all.
I have to mention my favorite nun book, called "Lying Awake" by Mark Salzman. It's about a Carmelite nun who begins having powerful religious experiences such as visions, and then is diagnosed with a temporal lobe brain tumor. She has to figure out what it means and what to do about it. It's a great book, I think, about faith.
Mark Salzman doesn't seem to be a religious person, yet he came to understand faith very well, it seems to me, in the course of writing that book. I've heard him discussing how difficult that book was for him until he had a sort of breakthrough at one point. It sounds to me as though he realized that something he already had was actually the same thing as faith all along. I'm not describing it well but it's a really cool book, my favorite nun book.
His latest work that you also may enjoy, is a memoir, but also features a nun. He teaches writing to these violent offender kids who have been thrown away into our criminal justice system. T'was a nun (something like Bean's Sister Carlotta (is that her name?)) who sort of made it really hard for him to say no to this work, and he has come to enjoy it very much. The book made me laugh and cry in every chapter. It's hilarious and it's very sad but ultimately quite affirming. It's totally real, too. Somehow he can write memoirs that are so much like novels, yet they are simple and true, they are history. He's a fantastic writer, I think. He's my favorite living writer, just edging out Uncle Orson.
Anyway, I'm glad you're here, and I'm sorry if my anti-nun prejudice has caused me to say rude or untrue things about nuns in general. Living for God sounds like a very blessed life, and you seem like a blessed person.
I hope to serve a mission someday for my church. I want to do a humanitarian mission working on my church's clean water initiative. I promise I will tell about it on hatrack when the time comes.
Narnia, I would love to hear about your mission too! Go ahead and write it for us! Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Wow, more nun books! Those both sound like excellent stories, especially the first one. Fascinating! If we don't have them in our library, several of our sisters live in Louisville Kentucky and they often check books out for me from the large library system there.
As for anti-nun prejudice, unfortunately a lot of the stereotypes and prejudice have a basis in fact. At times, some of the people who joined convents and monasteries were not the kind of caring people that I have experienced today. It's pretty sad when you hear stories about kids getting slapped with rulers and stuff. Fortunately, nuns are beginning to dispel those images, though, and become known for what we are really about... serving God.
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Now I feel the urge to rent "The Trouble With Angels," starring Haley Mills in a Catholic boarding school. I watched parts of it while studying late one night. Even though it looks pretty silly.
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A monk once lent me Good Omens. Not sure if that counts, though.
katdog, reading about your experiences in your monastery gives me the warm fuzzies as it makes me recall my time in college interacting with the Benedictine monks there.
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Wow, a lot of people on this board have had personal experiences with Benedictines. That makes me feel kind of good.
"The Trouble with Angels" is silly, but cute in its own way.
I guess I should throw in my own favorite monastic book here. I really like "The Hawk and the Dove". It's all about life in a Benedictine Abbey.
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I'm not a nun, but I played one when my high school put on a production of "The Sound of Music". After one of the shows, the zipper on my costume stuck and I couldn't get out of the habit. After lots of tugging, the zipper broke, which spawned too many "break the habit" jokes.
But I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don't have zip-up habits hanging around the monastery.
How do you solve a problem like Maria?Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Fortunately, we don't have any habits hanging around this monastery. Our community has chosen not to wear them anymore!
As to your other question, your pray. Really hard. (or that's what they say when they're talking about solving a problem like me!)
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katdog, I wondered about the habits. The monks at my college still wear them and I wondered if you guys did (and it turns out you don't). When was that decision made? What made you guys decide to hang 'em up?
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A Brief History of Monastic Clothing by Sr. katdog
At the time of St. Benedict, everyone wore cowls and tunics. It was the thing to do. Hence, monks wore them as well. The Rule of Benedict, on the topic of clothing, states that clothing should be simple, inexpensive, modest and locally available. At his time, that meant tunics.
Over the centuries, fashion changed... monk's clothing did not. In the 1960's and 70's, Vatican II (a meeting of all the leaders in the CAtholic church) released a bunch of documents telling us about our faith. One of the things they said was that religious communities, which had become quite uniform in many respects, should return to the spirit of their founders. As such, many Benedictine communities (and some men's) re-read the rule of Benedict and realized that wearing habits has nothing to do with being Benedictine.
Many communities began to follow the idea of "simple, modest, inexpensive and locally available" clothing and got rid of the need for things like habits and veils (though some of the sisters in our community still wear them).
I wear simple skirts, dresses and jumpers with plain blouses (sometimes with flowers or stripes). I am also allowed to wear slacks (but not blue jeans) to meals and prayer as I do a lot of manual labor that requires this kind of clothing. During recreation time, I can wear whatever I want as long as it's basically modest (I can't wear tank tops, but shorts are okay in the summer). Basically, when I dress, especially for prayer and meals, I try to dress nicely but very simply. I don't wear jewelry or make-up and I wear my (long) hair pulled back in a bun or a barette or a head band most of the time.
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Yes, in fact I can let parts of my arms and legs show. In church we can't let our knees show, but during the summer we can wear shorts (though definitely much longer than what you would find most people my age wearing) and, when appropriate, even bathing suits.
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In Kathleen Norris's book The Cloister Walk she has a chapter on the habit and some of the conflicts that various Benedictine women's communities went through over them when the options opened up after Vatican II.
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See, if I were a religious, I figure I'd rather a habit so I don't have to think about what to wear. Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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"The Cloister Walk" is an excellent book for anyone wondering more about Benedictine life.
'Tis true. Recently there has been a rash of young people wanting to wear habits again. I think that people of my generation want some physical sign to hold onto. My problem is the years of oppression that are tied to that physical sign and that's why I don't want to wear it.
I hate having to think about what I'm going to wear, too. Although I don't want the uniformity of habits or similar dress, I don't like the pressure of trying to dress appropriately. Fortunately, I already dressed very simply before entering, so that wasn't a problem. I just have to ensure that I don't dress too casually. Fortunately, as a nun, we are not too concerned about outward appearance as long as we look decent and are sufficiently covered.
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Hey, just a note, 'cause I feel like I have to tell somebody and my family's not home tonight.
The official announcement came out today! I have been excepted to the second year of novitiate! Not that I was concerned that they would ask me to leave, but the evaluation period can be a bit unnerving so I am quite relieved to have over for another year!
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Hey, I was just reading OSV and there was this question about nuns and sisters. The answer given was basically that nuns are women in religious life who are cloistered. Women who aren't cloistered but have the same vows who have jobs like social workers and nurses and so on, they are properly addressed as sisters. Nuns are sisters, but sisters aren't always nuns.
Is that right? That just doesn't seem right at all.
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Theaca, technically, yes, that is correct. Nuns are strictly cloistered and the rest of us are merely sisters. This came (at least in my understanding) at a time when noncloistered nuns were look down upon and the Church wanted to make a distinction between the good nuns and the slightly lesser sisters. Today, we basically use the terms interchangeably, mostly because, as Tante pointed out, if I could on and said that I was a sister, most people would congratulate me on having siblings.
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