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-90s, 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 housemate. 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 Maylie Scott’s sister, Sister Mary John, came to visit their mother, knowing it 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 heartbreaking 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.

Sister Jacinta, the Reality of Women Priests

We’ve all known women priests. I am not talking about priests who attend to mysterious rites, holdovers from the ancient Roman cults that Christians adopted as they went mainstream, tripping over the anachronistic relics of a medieval culture of monarchy, lapdog aristocrats, retainers and hangers-on, making decisions from a privileged position. I am thinking more of women who’ve always done the holy work of following Jesus, holding congregations together, and performing the simple ceremonies that remind all of us about the obligations of faith. 

When Sister Jacinta got off the bus, we knew the day’s difficult work had begun. She was always prompt. I think it was the 55 that dropped her a half a block from “The Center,” formerly “The Center for Spiritual Services.” It had been founded by two of the first Brothers of Charity in the US, a congregation for men founded by Mother Theresa of Calcutta. One of the founders was a gay man who decided to leave religious life as he got more in touch with his sexuality, and with that, the Mother cut her ties with the project.

But in the mid-90s, HIV disease had started to wreak destruction in the minority communities, especially African American sex workers and injection drug users in Oakland. The group of religious and lay volunteers who’d been inspired by the original vision decided to try to keep it open. Our congregation was as large as most urban parishes, 200-300 people. Our work included providing professional support for drug and alcohol treatment, a daycare for the infants and young children of mothers with HIV, some also infected with the disease, transportation to and from doctors appointments, a hearty lunch every day so that clients had at least one good nutritious meal a day, and perhaps the most important part of the work was simply trying to take care of one another, creating the sense of community and friendship that helped people live as they were dealing with was what still at this point in the epidemic most probably an early death.

Jacinta lived in a very modest apartment with three other religious women in the Fruitvale neighborhood. They were members of a small congregation called the Sisters of the Holy Family that had been founded in San Francisco after the Gold Rush. Her habit was a plain dress that she bought off the rack in her neighborhood K-Mart with a simple cross around her neck. She wore a modest religious veil when she traveled, I think as a kind of protection. The bus ran through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Oakland. I don’t know for certain, but this was one time that she allowed the outward signs of her religious life to be a protection. 

Sister Alice would already be at the front desk with her cheery “Good Morning, and God bless you." Alice was the oldest of the nuns, probably in her late 70s, a member of the Dominican priory, probably 20 blocks away in an upscale part of town. She always wore her full habit. She didn’t do much else but welcome everyone. Unassuming and sincere, she definitely set the tone for our work.

Another nun, a large, jovial, no-nonsense woman, ran the day care with an African American grandmother who’d lost two of her children to the disease and was taking care of their children. I don’t remember if Sister Pat wore any identifying garments. I think that she preferred loose sweatpants as she spent most of her day chasing babies with HIV and their slightly older siblings while their mothers did what they could to prolong their lives. 

It didn’t take me long to recognize that Jacinta was the glue that held the place together. There were other people doing great work. There were two drug counselors, one of whom, an African-American woman, was truly masterful. She’d been there and done the hard work of recovery. There was the driver who was as calm as God created a sunset. He was a big African American man with a powerful voice and a ready smile. He was also Catholic. If Jacinta was in the van, he began the trip by asking her, “Would you please offer a prayer for us, Sister?”  

By the time Jacinta got into her office and closed the blinds over the window opening onto the large communal area, there were already 3 to 5 women and occasionally one of the men sitting in chairs waiting to talk, like confession. Their situation was dire. This is how she spent every morning. She visited every client who was hospitalized, which occupied most of her afternoons. At least once or twice a week, she called us into the quiet meditative room and said the simple prayers of a memorial service. She was our priest. 

My friend Jon Logan sat on the Center’s Board. He told me to never forget to mention that it was founded by Mother Theresa when I wrote any appeal for money. I followed his lead. Even if that was a stretch, it was true and helped. But it didn’t match the spiritual leadership of Sister Jacinta. 

Sister M. Jacinta Fiebig, SHF November 15, 1928 – March 24, 2016