The innocent world of the cloister—celibacy, sex and art

Alécio de Andrade, The Three Graces (1970)

December 15, 2008

I met Maylie Scott at the Center for AIDS Services where she came twice a week under the guise of leading a writing group. I say guise not to ascribe any hidden motivation as if she were trying to convert the people she worked with to some Buddhist straight and narrow or any other hidden aim, but she was doing much more than teaching a creative writing course, She was a talented Zen teacher who had also been trained as a social worker. She was masterful. Our clients at the Center were drug addicts, some in recovery, some actively using; male, female and transexual sex workers; 50 or 60 gay men, pretty evenly split between middle class white men and African American ghetto smart street kids. The glue that held the community together was that everyone was dealing with a disease that in the mid-90’s was still a death sentence. They had a lot of their plates. In Maylie’s group they opened up and began to talk about themselves to a very sympathetic ear without a shred of judgment. 

Maylie was a divorced single mom with three adult kids. Her big California brown shingled house on Ashby Avenue was part of the divorce settlement with her ex-husband, a Canadian English professor at UC. After her kids moved out there were several empty rooms. Her mother had just moved from a Manhattan apartment where she’d lived since divorcing Maylie’s father. It had been many years of living alone. Mary was close to 90. She could still take care of herself and was mentally very alert, but obviously living alone in a New York apartment was no longer workable.

..

Maylie was one of Mel Weitzman’s senior students. She’s been working with Mel for more than 20 years, but, with the exception of several practice periods at Tassajara, she’d never lived in a Zen center. She was looking to form a loosely knit community not organized around a practice schedule. She asked if I would consider moving in. 

She invited me to join her and her mother for dinner so that I could meet her mother, and Mary got to give me her seal of approval. Mary was bright and curious to meet a potential new house mate. I’m sure that she wanted me to feel entirely at home as well as understanding the level of manners expected. When we sat down to dinner there was a lovely silver napkin ring at my place. It was engraved in an antique script with the initials LBC. It would be mine. In thanking her, I asked who LBC was? Oh she said someone in the family a generation back, Lawrence Baine Crandon. I said how lovely my grandfather was Lawrence and one couple among my parents' friends in Nichols where we grew up was Phil and Phyllis Crandon. Maylie was serving, but put down the spoon and looked at me with an impish grin, “We call him Uncle Phil, but he is really my mother’s first cousin. He is quite a character, don’t you think?”  I tried not to act as surprised as I was. I said that all the kids loved to go to visit Randy, their son, where we snuck down into the basement where Phil had a very elaborate and expensive HO2 model train collection with tracks that wound around almost every available space. 

Family with a Zen flavor.

This was the beginning of three very important years in my life. I finally began to allow myself to heal from the hidden personal costs of my work at Maitri Hospice, and I really began working with the koans which enriched my Zen practice. All the while Maylie with her steady practice was just there. She was lovely and so kind.

Sister Mary John Marshall and

Maylie Scott (Kushin Seisho)

I remember the day that Maylie Scott’s sister, Sister Mary John, came to visit their mother for what everyone knew would be the last time. I had been told that I would be sharing the bathroom with an Anglican nun who had rarely seen a world outside the walls of the 13th century Benedictine cloister in the south of England where she had lived for more than 35 years, but I was not fully prepared when I got up to find the damp, coarsely woven material of a medieval habit neatly stretched across the rod for the shower curtain.

Mary John was cut from different cloth than the liberated religious that I had known in the heady days after John 23 had thrown open the windows at the second Vatican Council. Sister Fayne RSCJ, for example, had gone to law school, taken the bar, and was living in a housing project in Washington D.C., advocating for the poor. A wonderful vocation but worlds apart from that of Mother Mary John. She was also worlds away from the extraordinarily beautiful pianist whom I met while visiting a university with a highly regarded graduate program in music. She belonged to a religious order with a very liberal bent, and had the heart breaking proclivity of falling in love with sensitive young Jesuits.

I wondered how I would get on with Mary John. She told me that, yes, she had met gay men before, the priest who usually celebrated Mass for the sisters was a curate in a nearby parish in Kent and indeed he was gay. He was celibate, and she just seemed curious about same sex relationships, not at all judgmental. In the same way, she also wondered how the women of her congregation were going to deal with the situation of female priests. She had just been elected abbess of her congregation, and they had just accepted as a postulant a woman from Texas who had been ordained. Would a woman priest in their own community say Mass for them? It would take some getting used to, but her sisters seemed willing to be open to any genuine movement of the Spirit.

But for the most part our conversations were very ordinary. Did I want her to do any weeding in the rose garden? Yes, she did know of the new hybrids developed by Austin. They were lovely. For those few weeks she stayed with us, I became rather used to seeing a religious habit hanging over the shower curtain rod in the bathroom.

And when she left I noticed that I had changed. Though our conversations had been rather brief for the most part, they were never guarded in some ways that I see in myself when talking with women. She seemed to be entirely relaxed with me. I did not pretend to be other than I am when I was with her, though during her stay I did not have my boyfriend spend the night as a gesture of respect for her religious vows.

I talked with Maylie after her departure and, yes, Maylie felt something too. We tried to find the right word. Perhaps it was “innocent” or “naïve,” not as describing someone who has refused to be an adult, but rather someone who has maintained a quality of openness to the world and, through their attention to their inner states, cultivates a state of mind that is simple and focused.

And that innocence is what I find so lovely in the picture at the top of my post—the three women covered in religious habits are just gazing at three naked female forms, pagan goddesses actually, and the woman on the left is holding the hand of her sister. It is not sexual in any way—they are sharing a view of a world that they have renounced. It is very innocent, perhaps naive. Perhaps even "childlike" in the best sense of the word.

I was reminded of Sister Wendy Beckett who did a wonderful series for public broadcasting about the great art displayed in the world's museums. When Wendy, standing in front of this painting by David Hockney,  'Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool', said lightly, “Oh David and his boys,” there was not a hint of judgment in her voice, and it allowed me to see the painting in an entirely different light—though not entirely asexual.