Courtney McGrailRachel Beard talks to Carmelite nuns in Delgany about living a contemplative life
Rachel Beard
“Wasting your life’, that was really the answer you got from most people,” Sr Gwen Collins says of her life as an enclosed nun. “Why are you wasting your life up there and locking yourself up there? Go off to Calcutta and work with Mother Teresa!”
To outsiders, life in a Carmelite Monastery can seem cold and even lonely, but Sr Gwen feels the enclosure aspect of her life is often greatly misunderstood.
“It’s to create an environment to help to foster prayer,” she says. “It’s not that if the door opened, we’d be gone out like a shot down to the village, never to be seen again. We’ve freely chosen to do this, so it’s more or less to keep a boundary for us and people that people can’t be all over the monastery. Keep the silence. I suppose that’s why we call it an enclosure.”
Prayer is always at the centre of a Carmelite sister’s life, “no matter what else”.
“You put supports around your life to try and make prayer the centre,” Sr Gwen says. “It’s kind of a day that’s broken up with prayer and work, recreation and study, that sort of a day. It’s a very good balance we feel in our life, and you have also a silent atmosphere. You try and keep a silent atmosphere around the monastery.”
Distractions
Sr Monica Lawless says this contemplative life is something everyone has a “hungering” for, to set aside distractions and really connect with themselves and with others.
“It is actually a discipline, isn’t it?” Sr Gwen says. “To give up and they find they don’t need the stuff. People should do courses on that. ‘How to smell a rose.’”
Today, the Carmelite Monastery in Delgany is an open welcoming space for both the sisters and their visitors, but Sr Gwen says it wasn’t always that way.
“In older times, they expressed it in a very strict, kind of harsh way,” she says. “They might have wire and curtains, and you wouldn’t see people, and it was very harsh. Even in my time, when I entered, with our families, we would have experienced this. There was wire between us and our families, grills. You couldn’t even put your hand through and shake hands with your parents.”
Sr Gwen remembers when her niece and her niece’s friend came to visit her in the monastery and the young girls were shocked by the way the Carmelite sisters were living at the time.
“The two of them were 12, and they were up in the room up there and I could see the friend whispering to my niece,” she says. “The other friend was saying to her ‘why is she in prison?’ That’s what they were saying to her.”
Sr Monica says the harsher tradition of wires and curtains started in Spain.
“It goes back to the 16th Century,” Sr Monica explains. “At that time, the role of women was different. They thought they needed to be protected, and also there’s the influence of Islam at that time and Islamic women would have been in that. So it was very much a cultural thing.”
This tradition of putting Carmelite nuns behind grills and iron bars was initially a practical way to protect the sisters, but began to be seen in a less positive light as the centuries passed.
“In our day, we see things differently, and you have to update with the culture as well,” Sr Monica says. “And if a symbol has lost its meaning then it has lost its meaning. If you have to explain a symbol, it’s lost its meaning.”
Sr Monica says that these cold reminders of enclosed life were set aside when they no longer became relevant.
“I suppose some of it was a little related to the historical situation at that time and enclosure was part of it,” she says. “But it took us a long time to realise these are not the essentials. These aren’t the essentials. We can still be this without having the separation between you.”
When the monastery in Delgany was rebuilt about 10 years ago, the sisters decided it was time to let go of these harsh symbols of enclosure.
“So we kind of had to rethink how we wanted to express enclosure, because in the old place we would have had these iron bars, curtains and all the rest,” Sr Gwen says. “So when that all was coming down, we had to sit down and say ‘well, do we want to put up more bars in the new place? what do we want to express?’ We are still enclosed. We haven’t thrown out the value. It’s still an important value. It’s still a great support for prayer. So how do we want to express that now in today’s world?”
Silence
But living in enclosure doesn’t mean that the sisters can’t be social people. “As a community, we meet together twice a day to recreate, to recreate ourselves again, to come out of silence, to share, to talk, and then we come back into the silence,” Sr Gwen says. “These are supports that help the prayer life, and we also live, we call it enclosure, we also live inside a boundary, but that’s not to keep us in.”
Sr Gwen says that the community support of her sisters is a very important part of her prayer life.
“So that’s a great balance, I find, in my life,” she says. “Because you’re not off on your own and left on your own, but you have to come back, you have to work with people, you have to share, which is difficult.”
The Carmelite Monastery is an integral part of the local parish in Delgany, providing a church for the community as well as a room for parish activities.
“We’re very much inserted into the parish here,” Sr Gwen says. “Our church is an open public church. It’s open all day. We meet there seven times a day to say the [Divine Office] so people come in, they hear us. Some people will join us and say the office with us. That keeps the rhythm going. No matter what you’re doing, once it’s time for the office, that’s dropped and you go back to prayer, and then your prayer’s finished, you’re back to work.”
Fr Joe Murphy is the chaplain at the monastery. As a retired parish priest, he lives on the monastery grounds and says Mass at their church.
“Mass is every morning,” Sr Gwen says. “We’re lucky with Fr Joe. He’s there every morning at quarter passed nine, half nine for Mass.”
Fr Joe enjoys doing light ministry for the sisters and the surrounding community and has found it to be quite successful.
“There’s usually about 40 or 50 neighbours who come in [to weekday Masses],” he says. “You might get 100 on a Sunday, and so I have a short two to three minute homily usually on the Gospel or on the Scriptures.”
The sisters pray in the church frequently, and Sr Gwen thinks that’s why so many people attend Mass at the church.
“People pick up on the sense that this church is a prayed in church,” she says. “And some people say they can feel that sort of sense. Because the sisters are in and out all the day, praying at different times, and we just like to come and be in that presence. They might not believe in anything, but they get a peace or they get a consolation or they get a strength especially if there’s a bereavement or something in their family. They come, and they sit in the quiet in the church.”
Sr Monica also believes that the church provides a quiet, contemplative place for everyone in the surrounding community.
“There was a man for years. He was a very strict Orthodox Jew,” she says. “He used to sit at the back of the church and be there. I remember he came once and he said he didn’t actually know why he was attracted to coming. And another guy, he used to do his meditation. He was into Buddhism and all that. So it’s just an interesting thing that there’s an attraction to a place like that.”
The reception room in the monastery building is also used by the local parish as a sort of parish centre.
“We have a lot of people who come here in,” Fr Joe says. “They use this room for various parish events, preparing for First Holy Communion, preparing for kids’ confirmation, the parish council meets here, other groups meet here, catechists and stuff like that, and I have a Bible study here every Friday morning. Not with the sisters, though I have given a series of talks on the Scriptures to the sisters.”
Outside of the local community, the Carmelite Monastery is also an important resource for travellers who frequently visit the sisters.
“They come up to the door, like there was a couple there having a row,” Sr Gwen says. “They weren’t getting on, and they just come in and they share everything with you. You tell it through this sister, and you tell it through that sister, and they have a pray. They would want to pray.”
Sr Gwen says travellers come in to the monastery “all day” to talk to the sisters.
“They bring their children and they want them blessed and if they’re sick especially,” she says. “They’d be very distraught if the children were sick or in hospital. They’d be down. They have tremendous faith, very strong faith. They call a lot.”
The sisters provide a great deal of support to all of their visitors, and Sr Monica says that “they just want you to listen to them”.
“It’s our job to be a praying community, a praying presence in misery,” Sr Gwen says. “That’s why we’re here. But at the end of the day, everybody all wants to hear the same: ‘we will pray’.”
When the Carmelite sisters first came to Delgany in 1844, they set aside their traditional life devoted to prayer to set up a school for the Catholics in the area.
“The Church and the diocese at the time, the archbishop asked the contemplative nuns to teach school,” Sr Monica says. “Soon after that they set up the school which went on for 50 years and the nuns taught at the school. They did bring in some other people later who taught, but they still maintained contemplative life.”
Sr Gwen says this adaptability is part of the reason that the local community is so supportive of the Carmelite sisters.
“That’s one reason why the Carmelite charism has survived,” she says. “We’re very flexible in situations like that. We’re 800 years now.”
Sr Gwen hopes the monastery will continue to be as flexible in the future.
“Just to be able to maintain the monastery, to keep it going in the area as a Carmelite monastery that would certainly be one of our aims,” she says. “We see the value of it, especially in today’s world, for people who just need a bit of time and a space to be able to see that it’s about being more than just doing or going and achieving. That’s really where the contentment in life comes, I think.”
For Sr Monica, sharing the joy of their contemplative lifestyle is another important aim for the future. “I think that there are a lot of contemplatives out there who don’t even know they’re contemplatives,” she says. “You see it every day in our church. People are deeply prayerful.”
Although choosing to live as an enclosed nun may seem like a drastic choice, Sr Monica feels that we can all be contemplative in our day-to-day lives even if we don’t feel compelled to join a Carmelite Monastery.
“I think it’s very natural,” she says. “For us, this is a particular way of life that we are called to, but everybody is called in a different way to be what we are as well. The contemplative is really important. I suppose if God wants us to be still here, if maybe your mission is finished, that’s another matter, too.”