The Children in the Cloister

They came in during the Liturgy of the Word.

I was in my hiding place, in the room across from the cry room. It doesn’t seem to have a purpose of its own; it’s just a room where they sometimes hang coats and vestments, and where they keep the defibrillator and the first aid kit. People line up there to get to the bathroom. I call it my cloister.

I still can’t stand to sit in the congregation, and I don’t know if I ever will be able to stand it. I still can’t imagine actually signing up to join the parish, or coming to any parish activities, or trying to join the choir, though I’d like to. I still can’t stand to talk to the pastor more than mouthing “hello!” if I see him when I come in. I want to tell him that I like his homilies and the way he’s trying to make the parish friendly and inviting, as well as making the liturgies more beautiful-looking. I’d like to roll my eyes and joke that most churches think you have to choose one or the other, friendly or beautiful, but he’s managed to do both. But I can’t speak.

I spend Sunday Mass in my cloister, pacing around or sitting in a folding chair. During the homily, if it’s the pastor I like, I sometimes stay and listen. If it’s the deacon or a visiting priest, I’m afraid he’ll say something thoughtless and trigger a panic attack, so I walk out to pace around the church porch until it’s over. I pretend it’s my cloister garden. I pretend I have a place to belong in this Church, that I’m not traumatized. That Steubenville, Franciscan University, the Charismatic Renewal, and the broken and dangerous Church I’ve come to know about don’t really exist. I am a nun in my cloister, and this is a perfect church where nothing goes wrong.

On this particular Sunday, I was sitting in a metal folding chair, gazing out the window. That window is a patchwork of blue and yellow stained glass. I like to see how it colors the world outside my cloister, making the sidewalk look blue and yellow. The cantor was intoning the Responsorial Psalm: If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts! If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts!

I was trying not to panic ahead of time, at all the terrible things God would say to me, trying to keep my heart nice and soft so I could listen.

That was when the family came in.

It’s my favorite kind of family, the kind where the children don’t hold still long enough to be counted. All the girls had their good Sunday dresses on. The boy and the baby had button-down shirts. There was a father and a mother, also dressed up, trying their best to be quiet as they clanged folding chairs. They must have gone to the cry room first, and then found it was full, and come here. The children were all given chairs to sit in so they could fidget and whisper without disturbing the congregation, but of course they didn’t sit. They milled around. The baby was especially mischievous.

I was going to have a great big chaotic family like that. I was going to be that mother, with that long hair and in that modest dress, her eyes exasperated but her voice patient. That was my vocation. That was all I wanted in the world.

They whispered and fidgeted through the tangle of gibberish that the Pauline epistles always sound like to me. Paul must have been insufferable. And then we stood for the Gospel, which was about the man who built a storehouse the day before he died. The children were crowded around me in a gaggle, not paying attention. The mother was gently shushing them.

I realized that I was trapped. If I walked out of my cloister during the homily, it would look as if I was walking out in exasperation because the children had been noisy. I remembered how terrible it felt when a woman out of the Portiuncula chapel on campus, rolling her eyes in frustration, because Adrienne was being a noisy toddler and I couldn’t make her pipe down fast enough. Her well-dressed husband leaned over to hiss at me, “This is a place of quiet and reflection! Do you see how all the people walked out of here? I hope you’ll think of that before you come back again.” and I was so mortified, I stopped taking Adrienne to pray in Adoration chapels. I didn’t ever want to make another mother feel that way, under any circumstances. If the Church was as it ought to be, mothers and children would always be welcome. So I stayed.

I stared at the yellow and blue world outside the cloister, trying to dissociate so I wouldn’t have a panic attack.

I’m sure the homily was a good one, but I didn’t listen. I was repeating “If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts! If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts!” over and over again to myself, to stay calm.

I did have to run out for just a minute when they played “Be Thou My Vision” at the collection, because that song was at my wedding in the big ridiculous Baroque church downtown with the rapist priest preaching the homily, when I was still a Charismatic and I didn’t know how dangerous the Church was, and I can’t stand to hear it. But I came right back to the cloister after it was over. I deliberately smiled at the children and went back to staring out the window.

If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts!

What He said to me was, Peace be with you! 

He said it through one of the children. I’d been trying so hard to dissociate from my anxiety that I had hardly noticed the Eucharistic prayer. I’d lost track of where we were in the liturgy. But when the priest said “Let us offer each other the Sign of Peace,” the mother and father and the children embraced each other and said “Peace be with you!” So one of the little girls came over to the strange woman staring out the window, and said “Peace be with you” to me.

I smiled and said it back to her.

I wasn’t afraid for the rest of the liturgy.

I was happy all the way home.