Catherine Coldstream

Maybe more like a 3.5: both fascinating and flawed. Unmoored in the wake of her father's death, Catherine Coldstream converts to Catholicism, and decides to become a nun. She chooses one of the coldest, strictest orders she can find, and she is decidedly "all in." She arrives, having already immersed herself in the words and histories of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross, eager to plunge herself entirely into "the Life" and her new "spouse" (Jesus). She cannot wait to take her vows. She loves the priory, the silence, the cold, the work, the singing, the prayers; she wants to love her sisters. Ah, but... When Alec Guinness converted to Catholicism, a monk asked him "What do you think is the greatest difficulty in the life of a monk?" Alec promptly replied: "Other monks." And the monk confirmed he was absolutely correct.

Alas, poor Catherine. She discovers that in this house, the prioress is not interested in anyone's spiritual investigations, emotional struggles, or thirst to learn and explore theology or ideas. You shut up, keep your eyes lowered, do the tasks set you, attend services, and above all: obey. Period. You are not to have friends - in fact, the prioress has imposed a "rule of three": no private conversations between individual sisters unless a third is present, and familiar relationships are not allowed. Of course, you're only allowed to speak at certain hours of the day and for specific reasons anyway. And yet, the prioress plays favorites: one seriously troubled young novice, who entered the order the same time as Catherine, is accorded all kinds of special privileges and exemptions no others get. But the prioress has been in charge for decades, and, well, "we've always done it this way," "this is how we do things here." Her autocracy runs to not bothering to inform Catherine that her long-yearned-for vows have been put off for a year because she is deemed "not ready." It runs to having successfully evaded having any regular visits from their presiding bishop for years. It runs to her having consolidated all positions of authority and responsibility to herself, in violation of conventions of the order. Some sisters leave in disgrace, to find fulfillment in a more liberally run house. Then another house closes, and its remaining sisters are sent in. The balance of power is disturbed. The bishops start to stop by now and then, and even dare to have private conversations with Catherine and others. The bishop casually mentions to the group a recent papal encyclical which he hopes they have all had time to study and discuss, outlining steps to be taken by monastic houses to move forward in the modern world - to the befuddlement of the sisters, as the prioress has made sure they never knew of its existence. Factions split off. Sisters are forced into humiliating prostrations of apology in regular gatherings; a new prioress is elected, ultimately to be wrecked by the ousted one, and who erupts into physical violence. Catherine flees in a dramatic middle-of-the-night flit.

And yet she goes back before giving up and leaving. Twelve years she puts in. It is excruciating, partly because she is so in love with the Life, and because she sometimes simply doesn't understand what is going on. She blames her own weakness. She is an educated, artistic, emotional personality seduced, abused, and abandoned by the love of her life. It's fascinating, bizarre, sad, and pitiable.

Catherine is painfully earnest. She shares her joys, her aspirations, her loves, her suffering. But she does not share things that perhaps she either didn't really see or recognize. She repeatedly talks about how devastated she was by her father's death, and yet we see virtually nothing of him as a person or a father or what her relationship to him was actually like. (I lost my own father days before I started reading this book by sheer chance, so this mystified me.) With the exception of the two prioresses, the characters of the other sisters (as well as her siblings) are barely in evidence - though perhaps the emphatic prohibition on personal relationships made that impossible for her to explore or describe. There's probably too much "nature writing," and the focus on her woes can become repetitive and a bit wearisome. Presumably she made some choices of what not to include for reasons of privacy or charity, but that leaves blanks that make some of her emotional responses feel excessive.

I ended up curious about how she could possibly go back after her flight, and what changes occurred after that. Curious about how she readjusted to the secular world - to marriage, to an academic life, to re-assimilation into her family. Maybe a restructuring would have tightened the book, shining more light into some murky places, while reducing the glare into others. Still, an affecting and engaging examination of one young woman's experience in a mysterious and powerful place.… (más)

Author Catherine Coldstream converted to Catholicism in a fit of religious zeal mixed with grief after her beloved father's death. She thought that sisterhood in the austere Carmelite order would fulfill her spiritual and intellectual needs. She couldn't have been more wrong. The traditional community valued manual labor over theological study and mindless obedience over spiritual growth. The powerful prioress Mother Elizabeth and her favorites, known as "the gang," made up their own rules and delighted in gaslighting their rivals.

You don't have to be Roman Catholic or know anything in particular about the Carmelite tradition to appreciate this compelling psychological study of an isolated, dysfunctional community. Many of Coldstream's observations would apply to corporations, clubs, and any other organizations where there are strong pulls towards authoritarian leadership and stagnation in the name of "that's the way we've always done it."

This insightful book is the best one I've read in a long time. Highly recommended.

I received an electronic copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way.… (más)