I was raised Catholic, which explains why my fascination with nuns came later in life. Along with banal cultural reference points like The Sound of Music, I was exposed to plenty of them at school and church, where they always seemed to be one of two types: young, sweet, and pretty, or old, strict, and, well, not so pretty.
We also had a nun (the second type!) in my very own family, to my Catholic grandmother’s joy. My mother’s sister Beverly had seen Mother Teresa speak at a tumultuous time in Bev’s young life. Entranced, Bev managed to speak with her afterwards, asking how she, too, might serve.
“You must renounce all earthly possessions,” the saint-to-be said, according to family lore. “Come to me with nothing, and we can begin.”
So, in 1973, Beverly became Sister Joseph, and remains in Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity to this day, having served everywhere from AIDS-crisis-era New York to Bolivia, Colombia, Ireland, and Peru. Today, she is a contemplative, living in an Italian convent where she is wholly devoted to meditation and prayer.
Mother Teresa and Sister Joseph in Guatemala City in 1980.
Sister Joe, as the family calls her, has always sent frequent missives from her stops around the globe, and when Mother Teresa was alive, she often sent along a prayer card or even a personal birthday card from the Nobel laureate herself. I always kept these things, and I made varying attempts to understand Sister’s letters, to glean any wisdom from the nearly impenetrable wall of prayer-filled cursive. Half-transcendent, half-scolding, they spoke of heeding the call to live for God, though Jesus and Mary seemed to be invoked twice as often. Never a believer myself, I tucked them away. Like my collection of rosaries, they were more aesthetic and nostalgic than imbued with insight I could use.
As I got older, the counterintuitive romance of nuns came into focus. Powell & Pressburger’s cinematic adaption of Black Narcissus became a touchstone, the sisters’ pristine white habits billowing in the Himalayan wind. I also learned that nuns, whether isolated in remote outposts or deeply embedded in their communities, did more than pray and care; they produced exquisite embroideries and intricate laces, or, like the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, they might be writers, composers, philosophers, or mystics (Hildegard was all of these and more). Many were proto-feminists, as Melissa Febos notes in her memoir The Dry Season, which traces celibacy in history.
Hearing this, I was hooked. And I couldn’t help but notice that the mystically tinged influence of nuns seemed to be ascendant, with recent pop culture appearances from HBO’s And Just Like That to TikTok-famous nun Sister Monica Clare and last year’s viral “vow of silence” summer.
The author at age 2, far right, with family and nuns in Manila.
Underpinning this cultural moment, there is the undeniable and much longer-running appeal of nuns in literature. You like horror? There’s a nun for that (everything is scarier with religious overtones, at least for the Catholics among us). Cozy mysteries? Definitely a nun for that. Nuns in space? Heavens, yes. And memoir? The sisters are doing it for themselves!
Recently, I found myself downloading Convent Wisdom by podcasters and Brown University scholars Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita. Like Melissa Febos, Garriga and Urbita looked to the past for insight into their increasingly unmanageable 21st-century lives. Surveying nuns of the 16th and 17th centuries, they found that what may appear to be dowdy, hopelessly old-fashioned women were not just radical and resourceful trailblazers, but their experiences and writings in love, spirituality, money, and art are surprisingly relatable and relevant right now.
As I savored the lessons of Convent Wisdom, I wondered what my aunt would think. Of course, it’s probably more for a lay audience than a nun with a half-century’s experience. As for me, I found it digestible, witty, and exceptionally narrated. And praise be, it’s not in cursive.
Fiction and historical fiction
Religion and spirituality
