Martin O'Brien
Martin O’Brien meets onetime BBC political correspondent Martina Purdy, now Belfast’s Sr Martina of the Blessed Sacrament
“It started as a fleeting thought, easily dismissed. Give your life to God. Then it became stronger…and then it became a burning desire.”
In the end Sister Martina of the Blessed Sacrament, now beginning her second year as a novice with the Sisters of Adoration and Reparation on the Falls Road near Clonard monastery in west Belfast just couldn’t resist that burning desire any longer.
“The call” had by then been persisting in her head and probably more importantly in her heart for more than one fifth of her life, for around 10 years, from about the time she wrote the highly regarded Room 21: Stormont Behind Closed Doors (The Brehon Press 2005), arguably the best book about the fevered political scene in Northern Ireland in the years immediately after the Good Friday Agreement.
And so at 3 o’clock on Friday, October 10, 2014 Martina Purdy, the multi-award-winning journalist and BBC Northern Ireland political correspondent known for her terrier-like qualities in getting to the heart of a story, made national news herself – when she (in the form of a tweet to her 11,000 Twitter followers) and her employer, in bulletins and articles on all its news platforms, announced that she was ending a career of nearly a quarter of a century in journalism to become a nun.
Habit
Within three weeks of leaving the BBC and “a job I loved very much” she was a postulant wearing the brown garb of her congregation – a dramatic experience for such a fashion-conscious person.
She donned the habit and white veil on becoming a novice one year ago.
Any regrets, I want to know. “No, not one” is the emphatic reply. “It is so freeing! I am living the dream of joy and peace. This is not a boring merry-go-round but a roller-coaster which the Lord likes to drive fast.”
But there are privations.
“The food is not always my choice. I still feel like a pizza and a glass of wine on a Friday night. Housework, vacuuming [which she has to do her share of] was never my favourite thing”.
“And I have had to learn to cook a chicken casserole from scratch. No more M&S and the microwave!”
But she is very happy.
“I’ve had a very privileged life reporting from [such places as] the White House and Windsor Castle and 10 Downing Street and I’ve met presidents and royalty, but the greatest privilege of my life is sitting at the feet of Jesus everyday adoring Him in the Blessed Sacrament.”
Today, instead of tweeting the latest political gossip she uses the Adoration Sisters account @adorationsister to tweet daily quotations from the Bible and from the writings of Mother Marie-Thérèse who founded the Congregation, a contemplative yet unenclosed community of nuns, in Paris in 1848.
It is believed that Jesus appeared to Mother Marie-Thérèse when she was praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament and told her that he “wanted souls before Him always to receive his life and communicate that life to others” and that is, stresses Sr Martina, the mission of the Congregation.
Sr Martina may have been a well-known name in the North as a leading TV journalist but she is just one of four new recruits to the Congregation in Belfast in two and a half years, the latest being Sr Anne of the Divine Mercy (Cahalan) who became a novice in May.
This has in such a short time amazingly, many would say miraculously, doubled the Belfast community in size and brought untold joy to her novice director there, Sr Kathleen Healy from Cork and to Mother Mary Josephine Caldwell from Belfast, who not only heads the convent on the Falls Road but is Superior General of the small Congregation of around 25 members that has its mother house in Paris.
She describes the Adoration Convent which opened in 1981 following the arrival of the congregation from France as “a powerhouse of prayer” and has no doubt that the prayers here along with prayers in Clonard, on the Shankill Road and elsewhere, including all the years of prayer organised by Br David Jardine, contributed to the Good Friday peace settlement on which she reported so fully.
Before her departure from the BBC Martina had informed some close friends and colleagues and phoned Northern Ireland’s top politicians including then First Minster Peter Robinson (with whom she once had a televised confrontation that can still be viewed on the BBC website alongside her grilling of Sinn Féin’s Gerry Kelly) and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.
“People were very surprised and happy for me.”
She continues: “I had told the BBC the previous Monday that I was quitting and they needed some time to make the necessary arrangements and they came back to me to say they’d make the announcement at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. I said, are you serious? That is the time that Jesus died. That is the hour of mercy, that is [the moment] when I am dying to new life.”
Sr Martina says she still misses the friendship of her colleagues in the political unit in the BBC and remains grateful for the way BBC management, including her former boss, Kathleen Carragher, head of news, managed her departure.
“All in the BBC couldn’t have been nicer. It was an unprecedented departure and they were very understanding and made it very easy for me.”
Engaging
I spoke to Sr Martina, my former BBC NI colleague, for a total of three hours in the reception room of the Adoration Sisters Convent in Belfast.
It was an engaging and joyous experience sprinkled with laughter and a good injection of ready quotes from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Mick Jagger, Woody Allen and the poet Lord Tennyson, revealing some of Sr Martina’s musical tastes and her rich cultural and literary hinterland.
And as you would expect, much from the Bible and Pope Francis.
It was her most extensive and wide-ranging interview since she left the BBC approaching two years ago and I was sorry when it was time to go.
Sr Martina was unaccompanied and – as you would expect from a former accomplished broadcaster and correspondent – she spoke confidently throughout and without notes.
Even without TV makeup she looks younger than her 50 years.
“I do not watch the television news any more but I do read The Irish Catholic every week,” she said.
There are several striking things about Sr Martina. She radiates a serenity and a joy that can only be a reflection of the peace and joy of Christ that she experiences through hours of Eucharistic adoration and reading Scripture.
She talks a lot about Jesus and God in a natural and unforced way, in such a way that you know that she is deeply in love with him and that he is not just her constant companion but that He dwells within her.
The room is just a few metres away from the Chapel of Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration where Sr Elaine of the Heart of Jesus (Kelly), then a successful barrister and Martina’s friend and confrere who (in Sr Elaine’s own words to me in a previous interview) “experienced that touch of Christ on my heart” shortly after 9 pm on March 9, the first Sunday of Lent 2014. (See online my article ‘Doing Joy Well’ in The Irish Catholic, October 23, 2014).
Sr Martina says: “Elaine had a boom moment and she says it is like falling in love with God but for me it was more of a slow burn.”
She says that she and Elaine are known as ‘The Twins’ in the convent and that their respective callings have “just amazed” people in the local community.
“And I am just amazed that he called a BBC journalist and a barrister, a woman of reason, to communicate his life. It’s quite comical [laughs]. He is a lot of fun with a great sense of humour” [laughs].
And in case I forget she exhorts me to write that down.
Volunteer
Martina was born in Belfast and lived with her parents, the late Albert (Al) Purdy and her mother, Margaret (nee Logan) in Andersonstown in the west of the city until the family emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in 1971, when she was just five, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles.
She has three brothers who still live in Canada and her mother lives in Belfast. Her mother, a Falls Road woman, has always been a devout Catholic and Martina drove her to the Adoration Chapel for years and she remains a volunteer there.
Martina’s father was from Nottingham, and a former British soldier who completed his national service in N. Ireland before conscription ended in 1963. He met his future wife here and was “a lukewarm Protestant” before he converted to Catholicism ahead of his marriage.
Having taken instruction in Clonard he went on to become “a man of great faith with a wonderful devotion to the Blessed Sacrament”.
Her family story made me wonder would she have liked to have become a wife and mother herself.
“I always thought I would get married and I always wanted to have children. I absolutely adore children.”
Had she any serious relationships, I inquired.
“Yes, I did have serious relationships, but God did not want that for me. He was saving me for himself. And thank God…you know the Garth Brooks song ‘Thank God for Unanswered Prayers’?
“Marriage is a beautiful vocation but it is not an easy life and if it is not the right person it is not going to work.”
The family moved to Canada because her father “feared a blood bath” and anyway Belfast would not then have been considered the safest of places for a former soldier, albeit a conscript.
Martina attended high school in Canada and attained a degree in international relations from the University of Toronto in 1987 but always had a wish to return to the place of her birth having enjoyed several visits back with her mother to see relatives notwithstanding the Troubles.
She recalls “a soldier pointing a gun at me and my brother who was only two, he didn’t mean anything but it was quite frightening”.
At least from the time of her university days she wanted to pursue a career in journalism.
This arose from her love for literature and writing and a desire to “travel and see the world.”
And what better place to start than Northern Ireland which by that time was one of the longest-running stories in the world.
Straight out of university in 1987 and bursting with ambition and pushiness she returned to Belfast for 18 months thinking she could pick up a reporter’s job on a daily newspaper.
The closest she got to the action was a telesales job in the Irish News and she remembers vividly the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen.
She returned to Toronto to secure a place at the prestigious Ryerson School of Journalism who were impressed by her spell in Belfast, then a world trouble spot.
When she returned to Belfast in 1991 the Irish News appointed her their business correspondent and two years later she was poached by the Belfast Telegraph to head up their business desk where she was a great success.
But she wasn’t satisfied because all along she really wanted to be a political correspondent reporting one of the most intriguing stories in the world, the transition from war to peace in Northern Ireland.
Awards
Martina got her way eventually through the tenacity and skill that had secured several awards for her business reporting and was appointed a Belfast Telegraph political correspondent in 1996 not long after the breakdown of the IRA ceasefire.
She was excellently poised to cover the rocky road to the miraculous Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the unspeakable Omagh bombing which she also covered as a stringer for the Los Angeles Times.
Among her most colourful memories are of her dealings with the Rev Ian Paisley who warmly welcomed her with a cup of tea when she turned up for the first time as a rookie political correspondent on the Telegraph.
“He was very gracious to me and we had a very pleasant relationship for 18 months [laughs]. I was trying to build up a relationship of trust.”
She recalls: “One day I was pushed out of the [media] scrum by a big foreign [TV] crew and he stopped the press conference and said, ‘let the little girl in from the Belfast Telegraph’ and they parted like the Red Sea.”
However, things turned sour later when she challenged Dr Paisley for a clear answer on whether he was in favour of power-sharing or not as it appeared “he was neither in nor out”.
Sr Martina: “I said to him, ‘Dr Paisley, you cannot be slightly pregnant’ and after that he used to refer to me as a foreigner. His press officer apologised but I thought it was part of the cut and thrust and I found it entertaining.”
Martina’s reputation grew in the Telegraph and the BBC snapped her up as one of their political correspondents in 1999.
Although the road to the brown garb of the convent was a slow burn Martina’s story appears to contain several key experiences and choices, perhaps Kairos moments that, looking back, changed her life.
It is hard not to see the hand of Providence in this.
Sr Martina would need to write a book to tell her remarkable story properly because it is hard to do it justice here.
Being brought up in a traditional Catholic family she “always believed in God but I did begin to question different aspects of my faith, which is normal, as I grew older and I came to be seen [within her family] as the à la carte Catholic.”
“I didn’t like Confession and I didn’t see the point of having to go to a priest and took the approach God knows my sins and I’ll go direct to the Lord”.
“Pride got in my way and I saw Confession as a torture chamber.”
Her attitude to Confession would later change dramatically and now “it has transformed my experience of Holy Communion; it gives a tsunami of grace.”
Poverty
Martina (like me) is named after St Martin de Porres who was born in Lima and is noted for his work for the poor.
Perhaps the first Kairos moment happened on holiday in Peru “about 10 years ago” when she realised an ambition to visit St Martin’s Church and amidst the high life of good food and shopping that she relished she “was taken aback by the poverty.”
“I had this sense there was something not quite right about this.”
“I felt bad about it and I remember praying that I wanted my life to change… but not yet Lord! If you know what I mean.”
After that “I began to pray more and that gave me a lot of joy and sensed the Lord was calling me to work with the poor.”
She thus began to do some fund-raising for Trócaire which brought her to the Monday evening Mass in St Michael the Archangel Church in Finaghy where there was also Eucharistic Adoration and she recalls one Mass when “the spirt of God was flowing.”
She had attended Eucharistic Adoration as a teenager and had liked it but now she became “just smitten” and over several years became very disappointed if she ever missed those Monday evenings owing to her work commitments.
Over a period of time “the passion for the journalism started to diminish, it wasn’t satisfying anymore.”
She came to realise that regardless of the state of one’s soul “there are no barriers to the spiritual graces that are flowing from Eucharistic adoration and at one stage someone said to her “The Lord is touching your heart.”
Her parish in Belfast was not St Michael’s but Holy Rosary in the south of the city and she found herself “roped onto the parish pastoral council”.
Weighed down with the Trócaire work, the BBC and holiday plans in Rome she first “kept my head down” when tickets were being offered for the Living Church Congress in the Waterfront Hall in September 2013 but “out of Catholic guilt” later told her priest, Fr Patrick McKenna, that she would go after all and ended up actually compering the event.
Fr Peter McVerry’s workshop on poverty “touched me but I dismissed it”.
Then “the most beautiful hymn and music and the Spirt of God at the end of the Congress just touched me and I felt this pull towards working for the Church and working for God”.
You couldn’t make this up.
She went on holiday in Rome the next day with friends, staying in a different hotel than the one originally booked because a friend had got a great last minute deal.
That hotel turned out to be Hotel Donna Camilla Savelli in Trastevere, a former convent where there are still a few old nuns, and a chapel with early morning Mass which she attended.
“I had this strong call there, such joy, such a desire to serve God but I didn’t really have a clue [how].”
She returned home “feeling just weighed down by my possessions. I felt they were choking me.”
After seeking the advice of a priest she was booked on a retreat for those interested in vocations at Drumalis in Larne at the end of March 2014 just after she returned from covering President Obama’s St Patrick’s Day bash at the White House.
“I knew it would be my last trip as a BBC correspondent to Washington DC”.
She went to the retreat and observing a tree that had still to bear fruit “I realised what I was being offered was transformation. I heard the words ‘I am the vine; you are the branches’ (John 15.5) I knew I was being offered a choice, I could go back to the BBC or I could give my life to Him. I said ‘Yes, Lord, I want to be transformed’. That was such an amazing moment, so full of joy. ”
Returning inside to the retreat centre “there was Sister Eileen [McKillen] of the Adoration Sisters wearing her brown. And somebody said, would you not think of joining the Adoration Sisters? And I said no thanks, I’m looking for powder blue, I was very into clothes and brown was the last colour I would wear.”
Her comment about the dreaded brown did not at all amount to a rejection of the Adoration Sisters.
In fact, she told a relative that she was interested in the Sisters and was told that she must be drunk.
Within weeks of the Retreat Martina did begin to visit the Adoration Chapel and one of the sisters told her that she thought she had a vocation.
Instead of taking part with her BBC colleagues in a party after the European elections of May 2014 Martina spent a brief live-in in the convent and loved everything about it.
She was now focussed on existing plans to travel to Zambia as an aid worker for six weeks in August/ September 2014, a commitment she honoured.
She knew that her days were numbered at the BBC when she returned from Zambia at the end of September 2014.
Sr Martina understands why many people have difficulty in getting their heads round “her radical choice” including two media colleagues who were concerned for her well-being and wanted to satisfy themselves that she was okay. They left assured.
“There are only two possibilities here: I have either had a supernatural encounter with the living God who made the universe or I have flipped.”
She entirely understands why people who haven’t that encounter, or whose faith is hanging by a thread believe she has flipped “because maybe the alternative is a bit frightening.”
An important “very prayerful” part of Sr Martina’s day is spent cutting or sorting the altar bread in St Joseph’s House of Bread, the sisters’ altar bread business run by themselves and an indispensable team of volunteers.
It provides the altar bread for the parishes of Down and Connor and some other outlets and the necessary funds to maintain the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration and promote their sacred mission. Prospective new customers are welcome to get in touch.
“I’m also in charge of our new range of religious items such as rosaries and prayer cards, so all my years shopping has not gone to waste!”
A conversation with Sr Martina leaves one in no doubt about the strength and inspiration she has drawn from Pope Francis since his election at a time when she trying to figure out her way forward.
“I love Pope Francis because he’s been able to communicate so powerfully that the name of our God is mercy, is compassion, is love, pure love. But that doesn’t mean that God is a pushover and doesn’t say do what you want”.
“Pope Francis has told us [religious sisters] to ‘wake up the world’ and in the past I was probably too private about my Catholic faith.”
As an adoration sister she was thrilled earlier this month when Francis encouraged Catholics to visit the Blessed Sacrament every day ahead of September’s Eucharistic Congress in Genoa.
Visitors to the Chapel of Adoration are therefore particularly welcome just now.
Besotted
Several times she declaimed: “Jesus is alive and well and living at No.63 Falls Road”.
“He is absolutely besotted with us and wants us to lay any troubles we have at his feet. God is absolutely boundless and we are finite little things and so I only know him a little.”
Now her life’s mission is to get to know him more and more and to keep communicating his love.
She did not expect and did not want any further public profile when she gave up her career in the BBC for this.
“Communicating his life to radio, TV, etc. where appropriate is part of my call and is a very broad mission. The congregation doesn’t say yes to everything we are asked to do, in fact we turn quite a bit down and through prayer we discern when I should talk.”
Sr Martina’s favourite message from the Bible is “Do not be afraid” which she repeats often and one of her favourite passages is Isaiah 43:1-5 which includes the words “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are mine…”
It’s a passage that underlines the uniqueness of every human whatever their particular calling.
Asked what she’d say to those considering a vocation and why they might like to take a look at the Adoration Sisters Sr Martina has her pitch ready.
Marriage
“I tell young people God has a plan for your life. It could be marriage, the single life, or the religious life. What I say is stay open to all three paths because you have a choice in life. But if you do the part that God wants that is the one that will lead to the most joy and peace in this earth.”
Reflecting on her remarkable calling she says: “I was spiritually blind. I didn’t know God. We only know Him through prayer and through the Scriptures and the doors of prayer opened, and the doors of the sacraments opened, the door of adoration opened, and the door to the Scriptures, and my God!”
Her light blue eyes open wide.
Last week-end, on Saturday, August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, Sr Martina and her fellow Adoration Sisters celebrated the first profession of their confrere Sr Máire of St. Joseph (McAteer) from Castlederg, Co. Tyrone, who exchanged her white veil for a brown one and received a brown scapular and the ring of the Congregation signifying her marriage to Christ.
It was an occasion of unbridled joy in 63 Falls Road and Sr Martina knows there is just nowhere else in the world she wishes to be as she prayerfully looks forward to taking the next steps in her own vocation journey including, she hopes, making her own first profession and taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in one year’s time.
Sr Martina of the Blessed Sacrament has no doubt that, to paraphrase Psalm 119:105, Jesus will be a lamp to her feet and a light to her path, every step of the way.