Second language in cloister?

[KevinBanet]

Did you know that you had to learn a “second language” after joining a cloistered community?

This is the story of the Poor Clares of Rockford, IL, and something that a novice discovered after living there. OK, this is a* fictional novice* - but, hey, lighten up - it’s what every cloistered religious finds out when she begins life in such a community.

[cloisteredlife.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/poor-clare-praying-b+w.jpg](Cloistered Life - » Article Archive - » New Novice Writes Home — Silence Is the Language of God www.cloisteredlife.com The following is a letter from a fictional novice of the Poor Clare Colettine Nuns in Rockford, IL. Dear Mom, …)

Find out for yourself by reading “New Novice Writes Home.”

 

[barb_finnegan]

Speaking of ‘second language in the cloister’:

Back in the early to mid-1970s I had a friend who was going to enter the same Carmel which I was thinking of going-in fact, she found out about me from the nuns themselves.

She once told me that she had to ‘unlearn’ three words that were discouraged in the cloister:
‘Gee, golly, and gosh’. (remember, this was the 1970s! )

She entered in August 1976 (I went down with two other friends of ours to see her actually enter the cloister-her family was there too, of course, but her younger brother, usually so ‘macho’ and taciturn, ended up running out of the convent in tears because he thought she was going to enter through the parlor grille!). Sad to say, her health suffered and she had to leave at the end of September of that same year.

I ended up not entering, through the decision of the Mother Prioress and Mistress of Novices.