Review: "Cloistered" by Catherine Coldstream

Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream
Published March 2024 via St. Martin's Press
★★★★

On my second afternoon, writes Coldstream of a visit to the priory where she would later take vows, there was a thunderstorm, and the women I saw from my window, flitting across courtyards in their long brown robes, were like ghosts. They barely spoke and their pale faces were as inscrutable as distant moons. I saw them as brave, extraordinary, martyr figures. They belonged to the same forgotten world as the moss growing out of the ancient enclosure wall, and as the ferns that grew, unchecked, at its base, and the dandelions and smaller flowers peeping from its crevices. They belonged to the fields and forests. Above all, they belonged to the silence, and to God. I opened the window. The smell of damp earth rose, reeking of something half forgotten, mixed with spring. (loc. 885*)

Coldstream was perhaps an unusual choice to be a nun: raised in an artistic and academic, non-Catholic household, she took to Catholicism only after her father died and her world upended itself. But when she went in, it was all or nothing: not just Catholicism but a nun, not just a nun but one in a cloistered, largely silent community. And she loved it—loved the silence, loved the isolation, loved the intense focus on religion, loved the honeymoon phase and weathered the loss of that same phase.

Time passes in the monastery like ghosts that move through walls; it seeps through cell doors and stony archways, through bone and marrow, imprinting patience and endurance at every touch. With the shifting of the seasons, and by our second dusky-coloured autumn, we'd turned from eager novices, excited by the novelty of monasticism, to heavy labourers, hands chapped from toil, lips cracked with cold, and faces raw. (loc. 1298)

But nuns, too, are only human, and eventually those cracks spread outward, and outward still, and gradually things changed.

Coldstream is at her best when writing about those early years, and the beauty she found in the bareness and silence of the monastery. She mentions few of the early red flags that many ex-nuns who lived in particularly restrictive (or just pre–Vatican II) describe, and a sense of longing and what if remains: what if this had happened within the community, or that, or if this sister had been given more leeway or that sister less, or if she had begun her journey in a different convent or chosen a less closed order to begin with—would she still be there? Without going into too much detail, I think it's fair to say that it was the bare humanity of isolated religious life that made questions start to grow, and then to proliferate.

Coldstream took a series of vows en route to becoming a fully professed nun, and it left me thinking about the strange way that the Catholic church (or at least some streams of it) makes convent life into a marriage, with each nun in her marital cell and Jesus as the ultimate bigamist...Coldstream didn't go down the aisle in a white gown, as used to be more common, but even if she had that would not have been anywhere near the most final of her vows—which is not the way the church treats a more conventional marriage, leaving me puzzled about why they would put the marriage-to-Jesus bit relatively early in the process. Not for the first time, I find myself thinking that the Catholic church might do better to encourage temporary vows (much the way there are so many short-term Buddhist monks) rather than, as Coldstream describes, making the process a long one but one that nearly always has a goal of permanence. Because—how might Coldstream's journey, or those of any of the women she lived in community with, have been different with the doors still open?

Not always a happy story, but a beautifully written one.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.