Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed

I am neither Catholic nor interested in taking on a monastic vocation, but I have long been a student of the ideas and practices of the religious (monastic) life. Monasticism is attractive to me because it is so singular and focused on the spiritual connection to Christ. When Paul the Apostle spoke of the single vs. married life, he pointed out that while both are good, the vocation of marriage does distract from the spiritual life because one cannot be both married and only care about God. Of course I know people who are single that are also distracted from God, but that is because they have no calling to be single. They are just in an interim or pre-marriage state. In this book, Cheryl Reed, who is a journalist, puts together a lively narrative about her experiences as she traveled to different parts of America to meet different orders of nuns over a period of several years. She was curious about how they lived, what got them started on this vocation, what keeps them going, and is this still a living institution of the Christian faith or is it something that is dying out in our modern and increasingly secular society. Aside from some incredibly interesting characters she met along the way, what is unveiled in the book are some pretty interesting paradoxes within this institution. For instance many of the older nuns tended to have less loyalty towards the Catholic Church while younger ones tended to be more loyal. Another paradox was that orders that had given up the religious dress and sought to be more engaged in serving society tended to be smaller and shrinking, where orders that wore the habit (the religious clothing of the nun) and were cloistered (isolated from society to fully devote themselves to prayer) tended to be younger and experiencing the most growth. In my mind, this challenges the notion that younger generations are not up for rigorous discipline and challenges. Perhaps we have not because we expect not as a society in general. While the pressures of marriage and family are not present in the monastic vocation the challenge of living communally with other members of your order provided sometimes even more challenges to love unselfishly and unconditionally. What Reed found all around were women who were very devoted to their vocation and quite selfless in their service and while their numbers have certainly diminished in the USA since the high-tide of the 1950’s, Catholic nuns are a far cry from extinction.