Still Water

I was doubtful. I couldn’t come out and say that I thought Sister Angeline was a bad spiritual director, of course. What if I was wrong? What if my mother and Sister Angeline were the ones who were right about everything? What if God really was a sadist, a monster lurking in the mud at the bottom of a still pond, and Sister Angeline was His silent prophetess?

I didn’t pray for vocations, nor did I pray against them. If it was God’s work, I thought, it would be fruitful. I didn’t admit, even to myself, that I hoped it wouldn’t be.

My mother went to visit Sister Angeline in her new home several times a year– these were called “retreats.” Every time a retreat was planned, she got more and more nasty to me building up to it; she’d find fault with me, scream, threaten to forcibly withdraw me from all my medications at once, give me the silent treatment for two days running and then go on her “retreat” to see Sister Angeline. She always handsomely forgiving when she came back.

After I ran away from home, cut ties with my family and ended up living in Steubenville, I would run into Sister Angeline every so often. She was frequently on campus with her only recruit to the order, an aggressive woman with a man’s name whom I’ll call Sister Justine. Sister Angeline would greet me and ask how I was; she’d make polite small talk, as if there was nothing awkward about the fact that I was practically living in hiding to avoid my mother’s wrath.

I wondered how she could fail to see anything wrong in my family, but it seems she didn’t, or didn’t think it her place to say anything if she did. I wondered what she really thought of my mother, and if she’d ever in all these years spoken up for me. I wondered if she was giving me this friendly treatment as a way to lure me back to her.  Or maybe she honestly didn’t see anything wrong.

After my daughter was born, when I was futilely trying to establish a healthy relationship with my parents again, my mother informed me that we were going to go together to visit Sister Angeline, and I went.

We sat in the parlor of the house that had been donated to the new religious order. I held my baby and tried to make small talk that wasn’t offensive, just as I had done when I was a little girl. My husband, who didn’t understand the House Rules under which I grew up, made his usual awkward academic conversation when anyone addressed him. My mother and Sister Justine had a long, animated talk about how these were definitely the End Times, and how the Indonesian tsunami was a punishment sent directly from God for the sin of human trafficking. God did things like that all the time. That was how we were to understand natural disasters.

Sister Angeline, the mother superior of a new religious order with the charism of spiritual direction, sat silent, placid as calm water, and listened to her single disciple agree with my mother’s hysteria. She didn’t offer a word of correction. My husband calmly stated that there were other possible interpretations available in Catholic theology. He bit his tongue about how Sister Justine was explicitly contradicting Hebrews 12.

That night, my mother informed me that my husband had offended her, and furthermore he had scandalized Sister Justine and Sister Angeline. She and my father left town in the middle of their visit. I haven’t spoken with her since.

Last year, I was shopping at the Franciscan-run thrift shop when I heard a woman talking to the sisters behind the counter.

“Did you hear about Sister Angeline?” she asked. “She had to go into a nursing home, and since they never had any vocations but one, the bishop dissolved their order. Sister Justine isn’t a nun anymore. She’s not even called Sister Justine. I don’t know what to call her.”

A weight dropped off of my soul.

I hadn’t realized I was carrying a weight, but I felt it leave me.

There was nothing at all in the still water, except the reflection of the person looking down.

God was in Heaven, and I was safe.

(image via Pixabay)