Review: "The Nun Diaries" by Annie Kontor

The Nun Diaries by Annie Kontor
Published May 2015 via Indigo Prairie Press
★★★

In her mid-twenties, after college and graduate school and time spent abroad and in the workforce, Kontor took a leap she'd been thinking about for more than half her life: she joined a convent, expecting to remain a part of it for the rest of her life. And a little less than a year later, she left the convent for good.

Now, I've read my fair share of nun and (especially) ex-nun memoirs. I am not Catholic and there was never any fear that I would become a nun (or, you know, become Catholic), but I'm perennially interested in memoirs about the experience. It's so removed from my own life, sometimes literally, and it's also an experience that has obviously called to so many over centuries—and also that so many have left. Kontor was clear, when she looked into the religious life, on what she wanted: a liberal, community-focused order; plenty of social justice; street clothing, not habits; other nuns in her general age range; definitely no cloistered life.

She found that and more (think: visiting a house full of nuns who had bought a house in all its 70s swinger glory and left the décor intact because they found it funny), and yet. Communal life rankled. Even with the freedoms of a liberal order (everyone was expected to work outside the convent—choosing their own jobs—could spend their free time as they pleased, including out dancing with non-religious friends, and chose a church to pray at as they pleased), Kontor notes that since I had never dated any one person for more than three months, I had no clue how the give-and-take in relationships worked (29). She was also struggling with depression and the effects of childhood trauma, and the resources the church could and would provide were not enough to make a difference.

Sister Janice had once said if the community brought out our best self, it was a good sign we were in the right vocation. But if it zapped strength we didn't have, it may not be worth it. (43)

Every time I read an ex-nun memoir, but especially ones where someone went in with a long-standing dream but ultimately realized that it was not what they had imagined, I think that the church is doing it wrong by having postulants go in with a permanent commitment. I mean, I get it: a nun is supposed to be marrying Jesus, and even though it's a bigamous relationship a marriage is (in the eyes of the Catholic church) a permanent/forever/un-undoable thing. But I think about the way that in some religions it's much more normalized to step into the religious life for a while, and then step back out as planned (e.g., see A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants), and I have to wonder whether the church would do better to present that as an option to young women—spend a predetermined amount of time in some form of monastic life, have a chance to see whether it's something they feel called for for the longer term. Note that there are emergency exits for would-be nuns—it varies by order and probably location and so on and so forth, but would-be nuns spend a while as postulants, and then as novices, before taking temporary and then permanent vows. So there is a discernment period (Kontor didn't get far enough into it to take permanent vows), but it's one where the goal is always to take those permanent vows rather than one that is more flexible or open-ended; I'm not sure I've ever read a memoir by a former nun in which she didn't feel, on some level, as though she'd failed.

So The Nun Diaries is fascinating for its look at a liberal order and a more contemporary time frame—I'm not sure of the exact years, but Kontor mentions that she was not allowed to have a cell phone as a nun, so relatively recent. The only other memoir I've read by someone in a more liberal order is The Wheel of Rocks, and that's by someone who is happy in her vocation. It did feel in places as though Kontor was still bitter about her experience, and while that's perfectly valid, I wished she'd interrogated that bitterness a bit more. She talks quite a lot about things that annoyed her about communal living but struggles, in the writing, to step back and ask what might have underpinned the annoyance and what she might have done differently, given hindsight. (This is not to suggest blame, just that I think there's a lot left unexplored.)

I'm now curious to read memoirs by nuns in other settings—not the US or UK—to see how that compares, and perhaps an ex-monk memoir or two, if I can find those. One thing Kontor talks about (which she didn't expect going in) is just how often other nuns in the community passed away, simply because it was an ageing community; I'm guessing the experience is rather different in places (southern Africa, Latin America) with younger religious populations.