Human beings are being at their best when they give and receive love and friendship
What I think I like most about Mary Johnson's memoir AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST: FOLLOWING MOTHER TERESA IN SEARCH OF LOVE, SERVICE, AND AN AUTHENTIC LIFE is that it satisfies curiosity. It answers questions that I've nursed a very long time. I went to Catholic school as a youngster in Washington, D.C. Catholic schools were a good, educational alternative to the District's school system in the sixties. My father was raised as a Catholic though my mother was not. My sisters and I were baptized, confirmed, attended the schools, prayed in the parish church and had rosary beads.
A former nun’s memoir? Wow! AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST satisfies curiosity about vocations, the day to day schedule in the convent and and the personalities of nuns. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I thought nuns were truly fascinating. I felt a bit of that admiration and understanding return with the reading.
Of course it is the sex that fascinates. How could they swear to go without? This is bull session fodder for Catholic school girls everywhere I suspect. It's what my suite-mate and I discussed in our college freshman year at a formerly Catholic girls' school that went secular. We had our "firsts" that first year and we shook our heads and asked how the nuns could have given up a thing like that without knowing about it -- without experiencing it. How much we pitied the poor girls that had.We figured the girls who'd gone to the convents had really been duped -- giving up the wonderful world of sex.
I've had that stuff in a drawer for a long time. I've had two marriages, a child that came and went and other exchanges since I've thought much about the Catholic Church. AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST has made me think back about a few things.
But that wasn't all of it. Maggie and I both knew that sex wasn't the all of it about nuns. These weird women and girls had made a bold choice. We had a lot more honor and understanding of it -- the nun's vocation -- than either of us would have admitted in the late nineteen sixties. We knew nuns were supporters of the status quo. We knew them as individuals, too. We admired some of them. Paradoxically, some of them pointed us away from the provincial world of Washington, D.C. toward a wider world.
And I was moved to tears while reading AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST. It made me long to be a naive believer again. I continue to be too cowardly to admit publicly that I am an atheist. I prefer to say that I am agnostic. I can then be polite about how I feel. It is sometimes very difficult to assert yourself as a decent and moral individual who questions religious organizations. And it is tempting to deny being influenced by the tenets of the religious organization you were raised with. I attended Catholic elementary and high school. It was a very good education then -- and affordable. So my thoughts about my life with the church are mostly about academic rigor. I was a successful student -- encouraged as being smart -- you know: a smart Black girl. But the summer that I worked on The Poor Peoples' Campaign in Washington, D.C. and the nuns who taught at my high school refused to allow desperate people to shelter in our buildings I knew finally that they suffered from the same shortcomings as everybody else. Though they were pledged to charity they weren't much better at applying it to day to day living than anybody else.
The strength of AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST is that its exploration of the nun’s vocation validates those vocations as a life choice not an ignorant, unexamined, desperate act. Unfortunately, many still hold to the idea that nuns are rejected, undesirable women whom only God would want. It’s a frequent point of humor. That we don’t know much about the day to day life of nuns is probably because to expose the private side of the vocation as Mary Johnson has so bravely done, is to open a sack whose contents can’t be controlled. I hadn’t realized how imperiled the individual personality was in the traditional religious order. Mary Johnson gives us a unique and unsparing glimpse at the destruction to individuality while honoring the grand design of it. The cult of selflessness itself is what destroys the nun’s utopia. Human beings are being at their best when they give and receive love and friendship. So that the extreme celibacy of religious orders would seem to work against a social human's true vocation: to love one's neighbor AND one's self. For the truly troubling thing that AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST elucidates is that it is not only sexual intercourse, genital to genital contact and sexual foreplay that are prohibited, but everyday, ordinary touches and friendships -- interactions that make a woman or man socially adjusted.
Then there is Mother Teresa herself. AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST: FOLLOWING MOTHER TERESA IN SEARCH OF LOVE, SERVICE, AND AN AUTHENTIC LIFE is a book that reads like less about Mother than her work and the organization of her sisters. This is perhaps the thing about which she would be the most pleased.
Mother Teresa emerges from AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST as a broad-shouldered charismatic -- a John the Baptist kind of person, a Joan of Arc - type -- filled with God's fervor and acting on direct instructions from God. We are well able, through Mary Johnson's soulful testimony, to see her magnetism. We can feel her bursting through the doors of other peoples’ limitations and getting it done for the desperately poor of the world. One is not left wondering why any woman would join with Mother, but why there could not have been an easier way to do so.
Like the vocation of Mother Teresa the language of this memoir is simple -- not elemental, simplistic, naive or raw - but un-embroidered and clear. Mary Johnson has managed to be gentle in her treatment of the subject -- loving without being namby-pamby and unquestioning. I was so surprised to be tearful -- to be moved when Sister Donata left the order. It broke my heart some that she couldn't make it work. How else would I have met Mary Johnson though? How else could she have written this fascinating and affecting memoir?
FIND links to more of Mary's thoughts and to her memoir at: http://marycjohnson.squarespace.com/book-an-unquenchable-thirst/
An interesting connection also is the remarkable story of the founding of A ROOM OF HER OWN FOUNDATION based on the surprising coincidence and commitment that brought Mary Johnson and Darlene Chandler Bassett together. Check out the organization’s story at:
http://www.aroomofherown.org/home.php
