Nun the Wiser

When my life went to hell in a hand-basket, part of me wanted to throw myself into my work. They only issue was that I didn’t really like my primary work and my second job – covering high school sports for a local newspaper, which I did very much like – I had to quit so that I could be a half-of-the-time single father.

Not having the standing writing gig left me with a void any time that Martin and Casey weren’t around. For most of a year, I just filled that emptiness by feeling sorry for myself. It’s amazing how much self-loathing you can squeeze into a couple of days by yourself.

Eventually – thankfully – I got tired of wallowing in my own pity. I explored the option of getting a part-time job again, but it turns out that most employers have trouble working around an amoeba-like child custody agreement. The one offer that I got was willing to work around my time with the boys…if I committed pretty much every free minute that I had to them.

I was so tired of being in my house by myself that I actually considered that…right up until I started to remember the physical and mental toll that working 80-90 hours a week used to take on me.

Still, I really was sick of sitting around during the times that my sons weren’t around, so I started casting about for another idea. It took a while, but the thought of volunteering occurred to me.

Now, my initial thought was, “Heck, there’s gotta be a ton of places that could use a volunteer like me.” Well, that might be true for some people but it wasn’t for me. It didn’t dawn on me at first, but the same issues that I had with a part-time job – the fact that I have a rotating schedule of single fatherhood – was a hindrance for most organizations as well.

I was on a website looking at volunteer opportunities when I stumbled upon one for a convent…as in a place where nuns live. I was raised Catholic. I went to parochial school until junior high. Nuns are all right, I thought. So, I sent an e-mail asking for more information.

Within an hour, the volunteer coordinator was calling me to find out my availability. It didn’t take long after that for me to agree to become a part of their volunteer group that helps out with activities for elderly Sisters.

My initial gig there was to run a weekly trivia hour for whichever Sisters wanted to join in. The crowds were small, but it was fun to try to find trivia questions that are appropriate for nuns. (There’s a whole lot that aren’t.)

Part of the reason that I was asked to do that is because I actually do have a wealth of useless information in my head. Unfortunately, an awful lot of it revolves around pop culture…entertainment, sports, that kind of thing. As it happens, nuns that have devoted their lives to making the world a better place don’t really care which TV actor wasn’t allowed out of his contract to take the role of Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Even if you just tell them the answer, they don’t really know nor care who Tom Selleck is…not even when you explain what an awesome mustache he has.

Instead, I would go to subjects like geography or who is the patron saint of what or history. The questions were rarely too hard, but when you’re in your 70’s and 80’s facts that you might have learned when you were in school years ago don’t come to you quite as quickly as they once did.

My absolute favorite point in doing the trivia was when a question would spur a brief discussion of a topic. For example, one of the questions that I asked touched upon the Second Vatican Council from the early 1960’s, which led to things like Catholic services being done in languages besides Latin and advocated allowing nuns and lay people be more involved in services. I hadn’t picked the question – I honestly don’t even remember what it was – for any other reason than I thought they would know the answer to it.

What I ended up with was a 20 minute discussion and lesson from a group of women who had already taken their vows by the time of Council and the subsequent changes. The struggle to figure out who the first American president was that was born a U.S. citizen was replaced by passionate discourse and insight from people that didn’t just watch it from the outside, but saw the history up close and personal. I’m not even particularly interested in the Vatican II reforms, but it was fascinating to watch.

Late in the summer, a construction project at the convent interrupted the ability to do the trivia hour, so the volunteer coordinator asked if I would be interested in teaching a creative writing workshop. It felt kind of odd to offer writing tips to nuns that could very easily have been friends with the ones that taught me to read and write, but I agreed.

The Sisters at this convent have done things like provided humanitarian aid all over the world and helped build schools and medical centers in Third World countries (and some Second and First World ones as well). For most of their time on earth, their real lives have been plenty interesting enough without having to use creative techniques to jazz up the telling.

Still, I was given a group of six very willing Sisters as my class. They came in, sat down and stood at the ready to take notes. It was like the kind of weird dream that second grade me might have had.

Over the course of the six weeks, I asked them to do various writing exercise and one overarching assignment of creating a short fictional story based on an event from their real lives. It was fascinating to watch these women whose entire lives have been grounded in working in very real service capacities try to take the ropes off of their imaginations.

It was awesome when one of them would just completely go away from their training and come up with something that was a complete flight of fancy. It was just as satisfying to see them stretch and add some flair to events that had happened in their lives. Most of them were so used at looking at those events in black and white that it was fascinating to watch as they added color.

And, I can honestly say that I never would’ve thought that I’d be using the parables of Christ as a way to get into a discussion about using creative imagery to make a larger point, but that’s exactly what I found myself doing.

The biggest thing that the entire experience has done, however, is to keep me from feeling sorry for myself. No matter how bad my day might have been – no matter how challenging recent events might be in my life – it’s hard to sit across from women that sacrificed themselves for a cause. You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate the fact that these women have spent a lifetime trying to make things better…oftentimes for the least amongst us. Maybe some people can face that and still complain, but I can’t.

It ended up being just what I needed. I’m not sure that you can ever actually plan to get more out of something than what you put into it, but it sure is a happy occurrence when that’s what you get.

Maybe I’ve even bargained down some time future Purgatory time for the rotten way I behaved as a child in Catholic school.

(And, just in case anyone is actually wondering about the presidential trivia question referred to somewhere in the post…technically, it’s John Tyler because he was the first president born after the Constitution was ratified. Martin Van Buren was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence, so he’s the first that wouldn’t have just been considered a British citizen at birth but really he was kind of born without a country. The rest of the first group of presidents would’ve started out as subjects of the crown.)