Sisterhood

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday August 28, 2008

Joel Meares

On the outskirts of Sydney a small group of nuns still practices a way of life that began in the 13th century. Joel Meares reports.

It's just after 7am and the Carmelite nuns have been in their chapel for more than an hour. Wearing long brown habits, veiled heads tilted to their laps, the sisters read aloud from leather-bound books of prayers, sitting, standing then sitting again as they go. Nearly all adjust spectacles as they follow the pages and some trace the lines with a magnifying glass. There are four walking aids in the room but not one frail voice. Prayer is their job and they do it well.

"All priests and nuns pray but we specialise in it," says Sister Joan. "Our business is to pray for the church and for the world." Devotion is a full-time job. The sisters also pray for loved ones, each other and for the things they see on the ABC nightly news. They even take requests. Phone them at their convent in south-west Sydney with something you need prayed for and the Carmelite sisters will keep you in their thoughts.

As a specialty, prayer is falling by the wayside in Sydney. While the city's population grew by 2 million between 1958 and 2008, the number of Catholic nuns or "religious sisters" fell from 2699 to 1583. Most of these don't reside together in convents but live alone or in pairs in suburban apartments and houses. The day of the secluded convent could be at an end. But there are three small communities on the city's outskirts - one in Jamberoo and two near Campbelltown - keeping the faith. Recently, the(sydney)magazine spent a day with the Carmelite sisters - the Discalced Nuns of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel - to discover exactly what a day in a life of prayer involves.

The Carmelites live on a 4.5-hectare property at Varroville, just north of St Andrews, near Campbelltown. A stone's throw from the Hume Highway, the single-level brick convent is hidden down a long driveway lined with peeling gum trees. The 15 women who call it home range in age from 38 to 92, hail from as far away as Sri Lanka and as nearby as Marrickville and, despite the name ("discalced" means barefoot) are allowed to wear shoes. Three are wearing ugg boots on the morning we visit. Isolation has been important since the order's origins in the 13th century on Israel's Mount Carmel, when St Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem, created a set of rules for the Carmelites to live by. Though the Varroville sisters come from a reformed version of the order started in 16th-century Spain, and brought to Australia from France in 1885, the central tenets of the Rule of St Albert remain: poverty, strict enclosure, long periods of silence and withdrawal from unnecessary contact with the world.

The sisters have finished their individual and group prayers and Father Gerard, a priest from a nearby Carmelite monastery, has arrived to say mass. It means the sisters must wear their mantles and the extra shroud of cream-coloured fabric is welcome today - despite the best efforts of two oil heaters, it's bitterly cold. They help each other into the cloaks, which symbolise Christ's protection, before settling back into their padded chairs. There are no wooden pews for these nuns - they pray in this chapel four times a day and deserve some comfort.

The Varroville convent, which the nuns moved into in 1990 after Australia's first Carmelite convent in Dulwich Hill merged with one from Parkes, is purpose-built for prayer. Work and community rooms form one end of the building, while rows of "cells" (still the correct word for a nun's room) fill the other. The tidy rooms each have a single bed, a desk, a cupboard, a sink and a mirror. Cells aren't numbered, but each nun has something unique on her door or doorframe - a picture of a favourite saint or, in one case, a touristy thermometer magnet in the shape of a lorikeet. It reads 12 degrees as the priest says his farewells and the sisters move off to the refectory for breakfast.

What compelled these women to choose so spartan and selfless an existence? Sister Gemma, elected Prioress (or Mother Superior) by the sisters this May, says she wanted to be a nun for as long as she can remember. But it was tragedy that galvanised her calling. A sturdy woman with twinkling blue eyes that belie her 71 years, she was 14-year-old schoolgirl Margaret O'Keeffe the day her mother died in 1951. When a brother called her out of class she thought he said that her mother had passed out and was rushing home when one of the nuns ran after her. "I knew something was wrong," she recalls.

"You never saw her running and nuns weren't even allowed on the street in those days. Sister said, 'Margaret, God's asking a big sacrifice of you. Your mother's dead.' "

Later, standing in her mother's bedroom, looking over her lifeless body, Margaret noticed that one eye was still open. She ran to tell someone that a mistake had been made but felt something stop her at the doorway. She turned back to her mother. "Something said to me, 'What's life all about? You were here this morning, I could talk to you and now I can't - just in that two hours.' That really changed my life."

Gemma entered the Carmelites five years later, on July 15, 1956. She had become a surrogate mother to her younger siblings and a support to her father. As they passed through the gates at Dulwich Hill, he turned to her and said, "Margaret, this is like Mum dying all over again for me. But this time I don't mind because I'm giving you to God."

It's 11.09am, morning prayers and breakfast are over and Sister Bernadette is sitting at her computer working on a newsletter layout. While some spend the hours between breakfast and lunch at midday engaged in traditional work such as crafting sculptures, making rosary beads or simply praying privately in their cells, perennially cheerful Bernadette logs on to her PC. "I taught myself the computer when I was 18," says the tech-savvy 38-year-old as she moves a graphic of a dove across her computer screen. Indonesian-born Bernadette is making her daily contribution to the convent's business arm, Carmelprint. The registered company produces mass booklets and greeting cards and Bernadette is working on its biggest money-spinner, a weekly leaflet called peoplespeak. It features stories submitted by readers and is bought by hundreds of parishes across Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. She also designs greeting cards for the company using photographs she takes of gardens and statues around the convent.

With 11 PCs and two laptops in the convent, the Carmelites are wired to the technological age, even if 80-year-old Sister Patricia is "still convinced there's a man in the box". Sisters use video-conferencing software Skype to keep up with other Carmelite orders and this year impressed pilgrims visiting their stall at the World Youth Day Vocations Expo with a PowerPoint presentation. On the day we visit they are launching a slick new website.

For a contemplative order, the Carmelites keep busy. On top of her design work, Bernadette rings the old iron bell for prayer times today. She also cooks once a week - the sisters love her noodles - and walks around the property every day for exercise. "This week I also have another job you might notice on the whiteboard: toilet cleaning!"

She snaps her fingers enthusiastically.

Her workload is heavier than most. Bernadette is still in "Formation", meaning she is not yet a fully-fledged Carmelite sister. Every week on top of her chores, she must take three hour-long classes in prayer, Carmelite history and catechism. A woman wishing to join the Carmelites must first meet the nuns, satisfy them that she is healthy and of sound mind (references and medical certificates are required), and complete a live-in at the convent. Her first three years are spent as a novice. She is then made a professed novice, like Bernadette, before taking final vows. The decisions to invite a woman into the order and when to profess her are made by the Chapter, the group of solemnly professed nuns living at the convent. The process takes five to six years and Bernadette, who has been at Varroville for five years, should soon be swapping her white veil for the brown type worn by her elders. Not bad for a girl born into a Buddhist family.

Like many Chinese-Indonesians, Bernadette attended Catholic school even though she was Buddhist. Inspired by the Dutch priests and nuns who taught there, she wanted to be a Catholic nun from as early as she can remember and slowly took the steps to her dream behind her family's back. Baptised at 20 while studying economics and management at university in West Kalimantan, she joined the Missionary Sisters of Providence in Taiwan at 25 and worked in a hospice. "I told my Dad that I was going to study Mandarin in Taiwan and he was very happy I was going. When I got there I rang him and said, 'Dad, I'm a nun.' "

But it was a contemplative life that appealed to Bernadette and, after nine years in the hospice, she joined a Carmelite order in Taiwan. The move did not last long. She had an appendectomy in 2003 and left the convent to convalesce with her brother's family. He was living in a strange place called Maroubra in Sydney. "It was a different style of life," she says. "Television 24 hours, no time and no space for praying. I just loved peace." After two months, Bernadette felt that same calling she had felt growing up in Indonesia. She approached the Varroville nuns, visited the order for a retreat and soon joined its ranks. She found them online.

By 1.15pm, lunch is over and the recreation room is full. Joan is reading a newspaper and 90-year-old twins Francis and Madeline, both in wheelchairs, are shakily threading rosary beads. Six other sisters sit in the circle crocheting bright thick rugs for Wrap with Love, a charity that supplies rugs to "whoever needs them at the time".

The sisters spend an hour in the recreation room after lunch, called "dinner" because it is the day's main meal, and another hour here from 7pm every evening when they watch the ABC news. There is a television and DVD/VHS player in one corner of the room and an organ by the back wall. The sisters sometimes watch videos at night and on feast days. Usually, it's a documentary or concert - they love the new Andre Rieu video - but there is also a Laurel and Hardy and Abbot and Costello double feature on the shelf, next to a copy of Mel Gibson's The Passion. Sudoku fever has breached the compound too. One sister photocopies the Herald's puzzle every day for the sisters to nut out.

That nuns are totally silent is pure myth. The Carmelites don't talk over meals or between the end of evening recreation at 8pm and the start of morning prayer at 6am, but they're happy to chat in the rec room. Today it's not long before talk turns to gardening. Horticultural tomes on the bookshelf including What Shrub is That? and Think Trees Grow Trees suggest it's a popular topic. The sisters each have their own small section of garden in one of the convent's two green courtyards or around the property, and most tend them judiciously. At 90, Madeline still manages her own group of pot plants on a ledge despite her immobility. "We bring the garden up to her," says Sister Sarah.

The common green areas are taken care of on a monthly "Garden Day", when the women don work clothes to prune and weed for the day. They stick to growing flowers, as vegetables don't last. "We've got rabbits," they explain. When the sisters start debating pruning, things get slightly thorny. "She leaves the trees naked," exclaims one. "They're not naked but some people think they look naked - it comes beautiful when you give it a prune." "Put a pair of secateurs in her hand and that's it, everything goes from here down." It's the closest thing to disagreement all day, although the sisters may have been on best behaviour. As with all sisters, friction is inevitable. "Some [sisters] will irritate you on a permanent basis," says 78-year-old Joan. "Some people you get along with more easily. Just because you've given yourself to a life of prayer doesn't take away the human element. We're not born saints, we have to work at it."

Sister Elizabeth, 64, knows how she feels. "Community life has its own tensions and things need to be worked out," she says. "You can meet somebody and immediately feel you would not be a friend to that person but it's not to be run away from. Christ always said to love one another."

A tall slim woman with a kindly face, Elizabeth might work at tolerance but she's glad to escape the convent. She's one of the Carmelites' four designated drivers and loves listening to Bach on her way to do the weekly shopping at Woolworths Eaglevale. There she picks up perishables and chats to people at the checkout; milk, bread and heavy tinned groceries are delivered. Her license still says Joan Franks - "I feel like a split personality", she confesses.

"Joan Franks" also makes an appearance when Elizabeth leaves the convent during a yearly two-week holiday when sisters are permitted daytrips. "A group of us might go to Coogee and walk to Bondi," she says. "We wear anything because we just don't want to be known as nuns at all, we just want to be free." Free from what? Old people, mainly. Elizabeth's saintly demeanour disappears as she describes them talking to her like a child, asking her for prayers or asking about her life. "They can goo all over you when they know you're a nun and I can't stand it. They come up and say, 'Oh hello sister', and I think, 'Oh no!' "

With her model-like frame, it's no surprise Elizabeth relishes the chance to get out of her habit. Prior to joining the order she worked as a secretary to the chief auditor of NSW for two years and spent her days in skirts and fashionably pointy flats. "A slack suit would have been just so nice to wear to work," she enthuses, thinking about how fashions have changed since then. Still, she finds room for individual flair in her own brown outfit. "We might have different styles of collars for different people," she says, touching her own collar. "And I like a belt; some people don't."

When the oldest sister, Marguerite, 92, joined the Dulwich Hill convent in 1936, the Carmelites were a more restrictive order. There was no holiday period and silence was more strictly observed beyond the rec room. But the most difficult restriction of the era was that sisters were limited to monthly half-hour visits with their families. As with all visitors from outside the cloistered community, they were separated during these times by grilles - walls of iron bars in the parlour, chapel and visitors' rooms that divided the nuns from their guests. When Varroville was built in the 1980s, grilles were removed from the plans.

Smaller restrictions grated on the sisters too. For Sister Jennifer it was the strictly spiritual library. "I missed poetry and literature very much," says Jennifer, whose favourite poets include Eliot, Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The library's four aisles of books today are a testament to how far the Carmelites have come. The books are still mainly spiritual, but among them are works by Agatha Christie and Jeffrey Archer, and a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It's a little after 4pm, the sisters are back to individual work, and Prioress Gemma is sitting at a computer at the work-end of the convent looking over financial documents. The temperature has not improved much - the lorikeet reads 14 degrees - and Gemma is wearing a fleecy brown sweater over her habit. Squinting at the computer monitor, she admits, "The work gets done a lot more slowly these days."

March marked Gemma's Golden Jubilee of profession. She was professed on her 21st birthday in 1958 and has seen many changes. Any further changes at the autonomous convent over the next three years will come down to her.

"I'm not an easy changer," she confesses. "I think you have to be prudent." Despite her caution, Gemma sees the success of opening up whenever she sees the sisters' families. "They come in and they say, 'Now we can see you.'" Gemma's father never lived to look directly at her again after delivering her to the convent. He passed away before the grilles were removed.

For Gemma, sacrifice is important to the Carmelite way of life, and she sacrificed both the family she had and the one she might have had, to enter. Raising siblings after her mother's death, she came to love children. "I did struggle," she says.

"If you really want something, you don't mind the sacrifices you have to make. This isn't just a withdrawal to get away from the world; I don't think you could live our life if that's all you were doing; it's so very ordinary. It's the belief that there's value in that in God's eyes."

Bernadette soon tolls the bell for evening prayer. Gemma slowly gets up and starts to make her way back, again, to the chapel. For the next hour, and, indeed, for the rest of their lives, she and the other sisters of Varroville's Carmel of Mary and Joseph will quietly pray for the world just down the road. (s)+

Sydney's surviving convent communities

Discalced Carmelite Nuns

Where St Andrews Road, Varroville.

Order Carmelite.

Number of nuns 15.

Founded 1885.

Youngest nun 38.

Oldest nun 92.

Prioress Sister Gemma.

New recruits None on the horizon. The sisters had a stall at the World Youth Day Vocations Expo and an interested pilgrim said she would consider joining an American Carmelite community.

Did you know? The sisters love taking a dip in summer. They had to have a water source for bushfire safety so they chose an in-ground pool - and "it's never used for fires". www.carmelvarroville.org.au.

The Poor Clares of Bethlehem

Where Narellan Road, Campbelltown.

Order Franciscan.

Number of nuns 15.

Founded 1951.

Youngest nun 40s.

Oldest nun 87.

Mother Abbess Sister Colette.

New recruits Two women have recently approached the community interested in joining. One is in her 20s, the other in her 30s.

Did you know? The sisters love celebrating birthdays and always make their own cakes.www.poorclare.org.au.

Benedictine Contemplative Nuns

Where 695 Jamberoo Mountain Road, Jamberoo.

Order Benedictine.

Number of nuns 30.

Founded 1848.

Youngest nun 26.

Oldest nun 88.

Superior Abbess Mary Barnes.

New recruits There is a steady stream of interest, particularly from people aged 20-40. Two people have entered the community in the past year.

Did you know? The ABC filmed a series there in 2007.

www.jamberooabbey.org.au.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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