Fresh Air - A Former Nun On Why She 'Cloistered' And Later Ran Away

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Catherine Coldstream spoke with Terry Gross about her years as nun in a Carmelite monastery. She talks about what drew her to the vocation, what it was like to live a silent and obedient life, and why she ran away. Her memoir is called Cloistered.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life my guest Catherine Coldstream had lived before that. She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris where she studied composition, worked in experimental music, and performed on viola. At the age of 24, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God. Entering the monastery meant starting a new life cut off from the outside world. Monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work,

and obedience. This new life seemed transcendent, but eventually she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism, and her questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality, were rejected. She ran away, returned, and two years later went through official channels and left for good. After leaving the monastery, she studied theology at Oxford University. She's written a new memoir called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun. Catherine Coldstream, welcome to Fresh Air. Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken words for 10 years. I know you had a half hour each day where you're allowed to speak,

but what was it like for you to not speak? Well, it's a really strange thing because we, when I say we, the Carmelite order is often described as a silent order. And of course, there's a huge amount of silence in the daily life. But if you look at it another way, words are absolutely woven through the texture of your life because you are either chanting or reading or meditating on the Psalms, for example, for hours every day, and other sort of theological books. So there are a lot of words that go through your head. And in fact, you know, a lot of prayer bounces off words or has resource or recourse to words. So although we were outwardly physically silent for a great deal of our lives, there was an awful lot going on inside.

And it often was referred back to or inspired by the liturgy or the reading we were doing. So yes, we were very silent. But in another way, internally, words were very important. But it's like a dialogue with God and a dialogue within yourself. It's not direct interaction with people. Why is talking considered taboo except for small amounts during the day? Oh, gosh, that's a very good question. It wasn't speech itself that was taboo. I think I mentioned that certain subjects were taboo when we did talk, say in community meetings or recreations. So speech itself wasn't taboo, but there were loads of things that you weren't supposed to talk about.

But there was a very strong culture of silence, which could feel like it was sort of anti-speech because the Carmelite order originated in the hermit ideal. So this goes right back to St. Anthony of Egypt. And in the Alexandrian desert, people went out and lived in caves. And then a few centuries later, you find people living in caves on Mount Carmel. And these were people who wanted to dedicate themselves to seeking God in solitude. It's called the desert monasticism or desert spirituality, which is like a sort of a subgroup within Catholic spirituality that's very much dedicated to seeking God through silence. What drew you to that? I mean, just to fill in your background, you're from an artist background. Your father was a painter, an art professor.

Your mother, an actor, an opera singer who was often on the road. And there was a 28-year difference between them. Your father was considerably older. It was a second marriage. You've called it a midlife crisis when you got married. The marriage didn't work out well. But you grew up in the arts. And you're a viola player.

You were then. You are now. You've done it professionally as well as just for, you know, for the pleasure of it. So why did you feel called to live this life of isolation and silence? Wow, that's the million dollar question. I mean, I did grow up in what, you know, we call it a sort of arty household. It's quite bohemian. And yeah, there was a big age gap between my parents. So I'd grown up in a very sort of expressive kind of family. I loved ballet, I loved art, I love poetry, I loved music. I was very emotional. Yeah, I mean, people couldn't understand it when I suddenly went really kind of pious

and, you know, kind of quite penitential after my father's death. I think what it was was that when my dad died, I was 24, and he had been going downhill in a really kind of very, a very, very painful decline that lasted four years. So from the age of about 20, I'd been going through an awful lot of sort of angst. And, you know, the word trauma is overused. But, you know, I'd been going through a very unhappy time. My family more or less disintegrated.

And I think I needed something radical. I was looking for something radical. And, you know, I was looking for it through music at first, I was really into the whole kind of experimental music stuff, Stockhausen, John Cage, Boulez, and all this sort of stuff. So I probably always had slightly extreme tendencies. When the kind of hammer blow of bereavement came, I was utterly thrown and completely bereft, obviously, and devastated. And I think I just started another kind of radical search, which took me to different kind of churches. I looked at, you know, I spent time sitting in Greek Orthodox churches. I spent time going to Catholic churches, charismatic churches, all sorts of churches. I think I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died.

And that led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought, you know, religion maybe had the key. I think that transcendent experience you're referring to after your father died was seeing his body. Can you describe why that was a transcendent experience? I think it's the sort of combination of familiarity and completely alien things at the same time. So you go into the room and it's the dead body of your beloved parent. It was the first time I'd seen a dead body. And I think obviously there were familiar things about this body.

The irony was his hair was moving in the breeze. It might have been a ventilator system or it might have been a window open, but his hair was moving as though he was still alive. But everything else, of course, was utterly static. And it's just the shock of seeing the complete vacancy of a body that you're used to seeing in life. And I think I just felt immediately that he couldn't possibly have died. He was somehow present in the room. And there was some sort of huge sense of presence, I suppose, divine presence that, you know, just surged through the room and that hit me at that point. The fundamentals of the Carmelite life revolve around total devotion to God,

pretty constant prayer and reflection and total self-denial. Would you describe how that translated into daily life? Yes. Well, I suppose one of the big aids, as we would have called it, to self-denial and discipline and virtue and all these other things was the structure of the rule and the constitutions. So there was this ancient document called the Rule from the 13th century, but it was supplemented in the 16th century by the constitutions of St. Teresa of Avila. So there were these kind of written texts that, you know, were meant to govern all aspects of your life. How did it translate into actual everyday life? Well, we had a very disciplined horarium, we called it, like a sort of timetable, which started at 5.15 with a mat track, which was this kind of really loud rattle that shook the whole house almost, and you jumped out of your bed. You weren't allowed to lie there, you just had to get

straight up on your knees. You washed in a bucket of cold water, you went straight down to what we call the choir, which was our monastic chapel, and you were praying 25 minutes later. And this went on throughout the day, there were bells, there were times of prayer that alternated with times of work. But it was all very strictly regulated. You knew exactly where you had to go when. And you were silent most of the time and very focused on what you were doing. So there were all these kind of external structures like the texts and the timetable and the bell that meant you could sort of focus on your inner life

and not be always needing to talk could sort of focus on your inner life and not be always needing to talk or sort of make decisions. It just strikes me you chose an order that was like the opposite of the family that you were brought up in, which you described as free spirited, totally artistic. You were totally artistic. You'd been in Paris before returning to England and joining the monastery. You know, yeah, you were reading books of philosophy. You were playing avant-garde music in addition to more standard repertoire of classical music.

And so you chose this order where it's all about structure and all about discipline and self-denial. And the arts aren't about self-denial. They're about expressiveness and creativity and trying new things. And especially the avant-garde that's about breaking the rules and seeing what life is like, what music or literature is like outside of those borders. And you entered a world that's all borders. And how did you fit yourself into that? Well, it was difficult, obviously. But I think the key thing is that that part of me, and obviously a huge part of me, which was searching for expression or for something transcendent through the arts, that was the part of me that found a kind of freedom in the interior life. So although the outward life for Carmelite is regulated and full of boundaries and borders

and structures, the silence and the solitude that facilitates is actually like a huge expanse of freedom in terms of like your interior life. life so basically we'd have two hours a day of completely silent prayer and you know times for reading and although our reading material was pretty restricted you could be as free as you liked in your prayer time and I think we focused on prayer which sounds really uncool and really kind of weird to people I guess if they if they're not used to the idea but prayer was I, I approached it like an art form. Well, not an art form, but I think I approached it like a philosophy. For me, I wanted to plumb the depths of this kind of way of silent prayer

because I felt, you know, almost in a philosophical sense that this was the answer. And so I didn't, I think I went in with a kind of quite intellectual attitude to it, thinking, thinking you know this will follow on from my interest in in transcendence through music or searching for the truth through reading

I would be following the same sort of search but through prayer but of course once you get really deeply into it and you're in a very confined and restricted world it's not all plain sailing. But I think that the prayer life was where we had freedom and a sort of sense of something really special going on on a personal level. I'd like you to describe the physical building that you

were cloistered in and what the grounds were like around it. It was what we think of as like a sort of grand old manor house, really. It was a large, rambling Gothic building with loads of outbuildings and sheds. But it was like a very large grand family house from the days when minor aristocracy lived in these kind of beautiful buildings and had lots of grounds. So it was a house that had staircases, you know, great big sweeping staircases and stained glass windows and high ceilings and a great big hall with flagstones, black and white flagstones. And yeah, it was it was a really beautiful house. I mean, it had grown derelict after the war. And so when the nuns took it over, I think they needed to do a lot of cleaning up.

And they basically would have just kept it really bare. So it was like a sort of, if you think of somewhere, not as grand as like Brideshead Revisited, but on a much smaller scale or Downton Abbey. But it was a smaller version of that, but completely bare inside in a very sort of stark, austere way that was actually really kind of spiritually inspiring. You know, there's a lovely sort of echo and lovely light and a sense of space. And cold, cold floors, cold rooms. Yeah, it was very cold.

We didn't have central heating. It was really far north of England, very drafty in winter. The windows rattled and the, you know, cold air would come in. But there was something really beautiful about it. It was, I think it was very, because it was very isolated. And it was in beautiful countryside, farmlands everywhere, lakes and trees and meadows and hills in the distance. So you had a sense of being protected, actually, from the modern world. You felt like you'd gone back in time to somewhere that was sort of almost magical in its beauty. I want you to describe your cell,

because each of the nuns had a cell that was just for them. Describe the cell for us and why it was so important to have this like totally private space. Okay, well, I suppose the cell idea had come down from the caves the hermits used to live in. So the idea was you had your own space that was completely dedicated to your relationship with God and to your solitary life of being a hermit and seeking God. So each of us had basically it was like a medium size or smallish bedroom. Some monasteries have much smaller cells because their purpose built. But because we were using this, we had this great big old period house, the rooms were quite big, actually.

So we had a sort of medium sized bedroom and it was like, you know, plain. When I first went, I think it was wood floor. And then at one point, they put some lino down, which seems awful today. But the walls were plain. They were like a creamy, we call it distemper. It was like a sort of creamy chalk paint, white um we had no no images or decorations or anything like that there was an enormous great black wooden cross on the on the wall um when i say enormous i mean it was kind of about four foot four foot high i mean it wasn't like a little crucifix and um there was no there was no figure of christ on on the. We used to call it the corpus. There was no corpus on the cross. And this was because you yourself were meant to become the sacrificial figure on the cross.

So you were meant to think all the time in terms of being crucified with Christ, offering your life as a sacrifice. So can you describe the first time you put on a habit and what it meant to you and if you felt transformed by it in any way? It was a rite of passage and taking a new name, taking new clothes, these are all sort of quite, I guess, probably universal accoutrements of major life changes or rites of passage. I mean, if you think of it, getting married is like that. So yeah, it did trigger a sense that you were somehow changed at quite a deep level. I mean, putting on the actual physical stuff of the habit doesn't change you, but it does make you feel part of the community in a more complete way. It also makes you feel very heavy and dragged down because there were layers and layers of stuff.

The main habit was made of this brown serge, which is like a rough, thick wool. And we had sort of basically two layers of that, the main habit, and then what we call the scapula, which is like an extra sort of aprony bit on the front. And then we had under that we had a tunic, which was a thick cotton thing. And then we had four layers of linen on our heads. So you did feel kind of really you felt encumbered by a lot of cloth at first and all these pins, which you could easily stab yourself with. And people did. You're always by mistake sort of scratching and sticking the pin in the wrong bit. But you felt weighed down but quite quickly like with all these things we are a very adaptable species you quite quickly get used to it um and find new ways of sort of um if you if you've got to work in the garden you tuck up the habit and

pin it up the back um the actual right of being clothed of course was a great sort of transition from being somebody who was hoping to become a nun to somebody who really felt she was and belonged to the community. And you often got given a new name. Mine wasn't very different. I went from being Catherine to being Sister Catherine Mary. In the book, I just say Sister Catherine as a sort of simplification, but my name didn't really radically change. But some people did want to have a new name. In the olden days, you had to have a new name, and you were just given a name, often a man's name. So yeah, you were taking on a new identity. You were putting yourself aside in a way and putting on this new identity with these new clothes. Yeah, because I was wondering, what's the point of a habit if you're cloistered? Because in

the outside world, the habit, when nuns wore habits in the outside world, the habit signaled certain things. It signaled a modesty. It signaled that you were a nun and were worthy of being related to that way. And it was a symbol of a certain amount of respect that you should just automatically give to that person. So, but inside, when you're all nuns, you don't have to communicate that to each other. So what's the point? Yeah, that's a really intelligent point. And I've never thought of it like that.

But I think you're absolutely right. It's a symbol of having been set aside. Consecrated was the word we use. So you had somehow left the main body of humanity and you're specially set aside. Why signal that when you're all doing the same thing? I think part of it is that there were strangers or visitors to the chapel who would see you glimpse you in the distance through the grill and they'd see you floating around sometimes you know you catch the odd glimpse of them so you wanted to signal that to outsiders just as the grill signaled to outsiders that you were

people living a set aside a set apart kind of life but within our own world i think it was really a powerful thing that we all wore exactly the same clothes um when i say exactly one or two people had slightly different shades of brown and you know you really notice the tiny differences like some people had special shoes you know whatever but basically we were wearing the same habit and i think that was a very powerful symbol that we were well the idea was we were equal we were meant to be um differences between us were meant to be eliminated and that extended to other areas of the life you weren't supposed to talk about anything about your own identity from before you'd been a nun that would be in any way likely to sort of set up uh set yourself up as

different or special or to trigger any sort of envies or rivalries so you were subsumed into this new identity. And I think the fact that you all wear the same clothes was just a way of making everyone, trying to make everyone as equal as possible, which was a great idea. Of course, in reality, groups of people are never equal. So let me introduce you here.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Catherine Coldstream. Her new memoir is called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun, and it's about her more than 10 years as a Carmelite nun. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. Hi there, it's Tanya Mosley, here to share more about my new series of Fresh Air Plus bonus episodes. I love when he casts his mom

in movies. It feels so authentic. I know. You know, she was also in the film Goodfellas, which I also love. I need to get that screenplay, by the way. I don't have that one. For the next few weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, I'll be talking about all of my favorite movies with my colleague Anne-Marie Baldonado. If you want to hear what movies I love and which screenplays I actually own and use as creative direction, sign up for Fresh Air Plus at plus.npr.org. As a nun in the Carmelite Order, you were married to Christ. Yeah.

What was your interpretation of that? And did that interpretation change over the years that you were cloistered? That's a really good question. It certainly changed. Yes. I think when you start out, it's all a matter of aspiration. You know, you want to be a bride of Christ. I mean, it all goes back to this thing of before you've actually even crossed the threshold, you somehow or other fallen in love with this whole idea of, you know, you might have fallen in love with the monastery, you might have fallen in love with the idea of monastic life. But, you know, strange though it may sound to people, on some level, you'd fallen in love with God. You know, it was an obsessive vocation.

And I think that all-consuming desire to get closer to God, it goes really deep once you really sort of go with it. We had this idea that, you know, for us, Jesus was a real person and he was the embodiment of perfect love and, in a sense, the answer to all our deepest desires. And we wanted to be united with him. So there was a sort of analogy in romantic love that is a really ancient tradition in the Old Testament and as well as in the New Testament, whereby God is kind of the spouse, the lover of, in the Old Testament, the lover of the people of Israel or the community of the faithful.

However it's conceived, the Song of Songs in the Old Testament is all about this. And of course, the Song of Songs was, you know, largely based on ancient marriage ceremonies from other cultures, Assyrian or Mesopotamian or Egyptian, I can't remember. But I mean, I think it had drawn on other ancient cultures. And it was basically, you know basically a text for celebrating a marriage between man and wife. So the Carmelite sort of relationship with God was a sort of sublimated version of marriage. You were married

to Christ, and he was real for you. So you refer to the romantic side of being married to Christ. And I want to read something from the Bible that you quote in your book. And this is from the prophet Hosea. And some translations went even further and said, I will seduce her and speak to her heart. Did it feel erotic to you or do you sense that it did to other young women in the order? I think it's not necessarily just that passage, of course, but that passage, I think, shows in a particularly clear way and vivid way that the extent of the romance we were having with God. So in the Prophet Hosea, he has a whole section where he's comparing the chosen people, as they were called, the people of Israel, to a faithless wife. And he was the loving husband pursuing her

and forgiving her and all this sort of stuff. So there's a very strong sense of nuptial, we might call it, or spousal relationship. It was a sort of metaphor for the relationship with God. And yeah, I think we felt that very strongly. We felt a very strong sense that we were in a romantic relationship with Jesus. I mean, it was very, very personal.

And just because you are wearing a habit and you're a nun and you've taken vows of chastity doesn't mean you never have erotic feelings. We were supposed to, of course, deny them and not encourage them. And so we were very sort of controlled and very strict about all these sort of things. But I think there were involuntary feelings that might sort of arise. And it wasn't necessarily arousal in a specifically sexual sense that you might feel towards Jesus. But I think there was definitely a very strong sense of romance. I think if you read some of St. Teresa's writings on her relationship with Jesus in prayer, you do also get the sense that really deep prayer can actually be quite romantic. And I think, yeah, there might be a sublimated eros going on, definitely. I want to ask you about the different views of an

authoritarian community. One of the older sisters referred to the supernatural spirit of obedience. But then there's the question of, is that just authoritarian or is that something that could lead to any form of transcendence? And I suspect you saw both sides of that. very common currency. The idea was that we weren't living lives that were merely natural, we were living supernatural lives. And supernatural was the kind of the effects of the Holy Spirit and the effects of our relationship with God. So obviously, you can reframe authoritarianism as, I mean, you could reframe anything really in supernatural terms, and we did. So was talking about a supernatural spirit of obedience which meant we saw god through the prioress and whatever the prioress said we saw us coming straight from god was um you know was it supernatural or were there elements of control

going on that were actually less benign uh it's impossible to know. But obviously, if you accord all power and agency and authority to one person in a group of 20, and that person is continually reelected and never challenged, never questioned, never open to discussing or reviewing things, you've obviously got a setup where it's very, very open to abuse because you've got one person who's basically given carte blanche, and everybody else will let her do whatever she wants. And I think it is a real danger in very isolated religious communities, that what starts off as something that's conceived in a spiritual way, can become all too human in that, you know, human beings do, when they've given power, they can abuse it. And communities can be very complicit in that too,

especially vowed communities of nuns can be very, in those days, very compliant and very unquestioning and timid. So I think there was a timidity that gave free reign to one or two people. And at one point that kind of expanded into a sort of clique. There was a sort of coterie of people who were really like the sort of power group who were driving everything. And their agenda was to keep everything unchanged as it had been. And we're very resistant to any suggestion that we should have more dialogue or questioning or more discussion. So, yeah, it was really difficult.

I want to ask you about something very extreme and shocking and horrifying that happened to you, which is that the sister who had become, you know, basically the mother superior of the monastery, although the word is prioress. Yeah, prioress. She beat you. She kind of like dragged you out of bed across the floor and beat you. Yeah. What happened? Yeah, well, this was not the perennial prioress.

It was quite strange. We had a sort of prioress who was the sort of natural leader who everybody was um everybody loved basically but had quite big problems with as well i think some people did um this was another process this is a relatively new progress that in my later years when there had been some changes in the structure of the community and um i think she was having a breakdown i think she was i mean i've often wondered why she took it out on me so physically but what was happening was this was an expression of a much much wider kind of thing that was going on in the whole community there were breakdowns happening there were tempers uh flying

there were people um you know being carted off the community to the infirmary having had um physical breakdowns I mean the community went through a time of sort of sickness, if you like, when there was this massive, stressful eruption of disagreement about who should be prioress and how the authority of the prioress should be mediated. And basically there were two points of view, there were two groups, and there was a sort of breakaway clique

who resisted the rest of the community. So it felt like the community was split in two. And I think people were just struggling so much. This particular moment when I was beaten, I think that the prioress who did that to me was basically somebody who was experiencing such extreme frustration. She just didn't know how,

you know, she was just taking it out on me. I don't know. But when you said it was an extremely shocking thing, I know it reads as shocking when I describe it in the book. And people notice that, of course, it's a dramatic moment in the book. In reality, I think that there were other things that were far more shocking. I think that the fact that somebody cracked out and beat me, yeah, of course, it's horrible. But I mean, basically, I felt that the psychological sort of psychological cruelty was much more difficult to cope with. Because this was something that lasted 10 minutes when I was dragged out of bed and beaten. And nobody knew that we were alone again, you know, behind closed doors in an infirmary cell. And, you know, I wasn't disabled by it. I mean, I wasn't sort of, you know, I could still function afterwards. I was just a bit bruised and a bit sore and a bit shocked.

But basically, psychological sort of cruelty, I suppose, for want of a better word, is something much harder to deal with when you're very isolated, and you've got nobody to talk to about it. So when you talk about the psychological aspects being worse, can you give us an example of what you mean? Well, I think there was a sort of withholding of human warmth and affection. And there was also lots of deliberate little humiliations that certain people might, in authority, administer to younger sisters in order to, quote-unquote, keep them humble or break their spirit. This was a very traditional thing in monasticism, that you would be made to feel small,

that you'd be made to feel unloved or rejected. And it was all part of sort of character formation. It sounds stark, just saying it in the cold light of day, but it was like that, and you felt terribly lonely and terribly crushed by some of these sort of things. My guest is Catherine Coldstream, and her new

memoir is called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun, and she was a Carmelite nun for over ten years. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. At some point, you decided to literally run away. So briefly, like, was there a breaking point for you? We decided I can't handle it anymore. Well, I think the night I ran away, I'd obviously reached breaking point. But I didn't break. I think I actually I think I ran away to forceful breaking point. I'd seen others breaking. And I thought,

why are so many people in my age group, we were the younger ones, you know, why are so many people having breakdowns, and a few people had to go to hospital and had to leave because they were having, you know, mental breakdowns and things. And I, I thought, I thought, gosh, you know, the pressure is so great maybe maybe I'm gonna have a breakdown so I kind of ran away to maybe avoid reaching breaking point actually um yeah I um but I did go back after that for two years so I hadn't reached breaking point um I don't think I did reach breaking point in the sense that, you know, I was ever made, you know, I think I always retained a sense of buoyancy and hope somehow, on some level, and maybe that's why I had to leave.

I was worried that I'd be broken if I stayed. You explained why you ran away from the monastery, and then you returned for two more years, but decided after those two years, to leave for good and to do it, you know, the legit way. Why did you leave the second time around? I think going back to monasticism after having done something as dramatic as running away meant it was never going to be the same again. And although there was a large part of me that was very at home in the Carmelite life in that later stage, I think I eventually realised that part of me had moved on,

part of me had developed beyond what could really be held within the cloistered life. I'd done too much questioning by then and And I felt, I think I just felt ultimately that it was the right thing to do. Yeah. But it was, it was very difficult. When you first entered the world, and you knew it was for real, and it was permanent, what were some of the hardest things to adjust to and some of the most joyful things to welcome? Again, beautifully put question because it was dual. It was two-edged.

The hardest thing was the noise. I was very used to a completely silent world. So I found noise very difficult. And I found talking to people very difficult, actually. I mean, now I... You were out of practice. Yeah. I disliked any sort of intrusive human contact.

I liked being left alone and I was used to it. I found everything very messy and dirty and just too much going on. So that was really difficult. And I didn't like the sense of um well obviously I I got used to a very ordered and structured world that had a kind of peaceful vibe although of course you know as I described things were simmering and seething under the surface because we were human beings but outwardly it was a very quiet and peaceful way of life um but there were things, of course, I hugely enjoyed. I mean,

I love the feeling of just being physical, the physical freedom of just being able to just go wherever you wanted to. I remember the first time I went to the sea and, you know, just running on the beach, hair flapping in the wind, jumping into the waves, you know, I mean, the physical freedom was wonderful um you know i enjoyed going for a drink as well i mean you know this is i remember i spent a bit of time in a sort of halfway house outside the monastery where i was having a bit of counseling and there was another nun there it was some sort of more secular type of religious order and there was another nun from a much more um outgoing sort of um apostolic order and i remember we went to the

pub together and that was brilliant i mean i really enjoyed having a pint and i really enjoyed going for an indian meal that was amazing so there were things i enjoyed like just nice food and just freedom and um and being able to lie in in the mornings and have baths you know just creature comforts that i've been denied that i was my body was aching for relief and and rests, you know, just creature comforts that I've been denied, that I was my body was aching for relief and rest. And, you know, I hadn't had any form of, you know, pleasure was all really paired, you know, drained out of our lives. So those pleasures were great. And I really enjoyed it. But I did feel slightly overwhelmed by, yeah, a noisy, busy, messy world with so much going on. After you left the monastery, you eventually studied theology at Oxford.

How did studying theology at one of the most prominent places of learning in the world affect your view of religion and your understanding of God? I really, really enjoyed studying at Oxford. I mean, it was just the right thing for me because I'd been bottling up all these questions and I had a very active mind that wanted to sort of understand things. So that had been very held back in the monastery. I really enjoyed studying theology and I loved being with loads of bright, buzzy people to have lots of discussions. But the actual questions that were raised by theology, of course, were really challenging for me because I did have I'd grown into a view of religion that was very, very, very traditional Catholic. And that, you know, I'd got used to accepting some very, very traditional points of view on Catholicism.

And that was all turned upside down. There was a time after I'd been studying theology for about a year that I was really scared that it was going to ruin my soul and lose my faith completely. And I did struggle with my faith for a while. I mean, I, yeah, I found the more you know about Christian history and the way the scriptures were put together and things, the more questions you've got and the harder it is to believe in it all. And I did go through some real challenges to faith. Where are you now in terms of faith? I think I've come through the sort of phase of feeling really worried that there were loads of things that were contradictory within the Christian teachings. What faith is for me now is much more personal, holding on to the essence of what was good in that experience. Because there was a lot that was good within the cloister, and there was a lot that was good in that relationship with God.

And because it was such a personal relationship, it's kind of always been more or less in the fabric of my being. My guest is Catherine Coldstream. Her new memoir is called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun. This is fresh air. Since you saw yourself as married to God, as nuns are supposed to feel, by leaving the monastery, you basically, in some ways, divorced God, especially now since you're actually married to a man. You're married to a human.

So do you feel like if you still have a relationship with God and a personal relationship, that God is offended that you, you know, divorced him? That's the hardest thing for me. I mean, I didn't really want to divorce God. I've never wanted to divorce God. And I think what it was, was it is like a divorce, but I think the divorce was with the community, sadly, the community that promised me God and that I or that I sought God through. There was a rupture and a rift in leaving that's been a source of great sadness for me. But I hope, I've just had to hope that the God that I fell in love with and who showed me such love in so many ways is something that's bigger than the church and it's bigger than even the formal vowed life

and that somehow that relationship carries on in a very sort of deep way. It's more to do with the ground of being. It's more to do with something that's really, really immovable within oneself, that where God dwells, it's the kind of really the deepest part of you. And I think I've had to just focus more on that core of myself that I feel is in communion with God, and less on the outward things that really were proved to be very flawed through my time in a very authoritarian institution. Do you go to church? I go to church sometimes.

I don't, I don't, I'm not that involved in church. I go to sing in church a lot. I go to sit in churches. I go away on retreats. I go to monastic retreat houses. But I've obviously had an experience of the institutional church that's raised questions for me and it's been disillusioning in some ways. So I don't rely primarily on going to church.

I rely primarily on my inner life where I still can have a sort of channel of prayer to God. And, yeah, I have quite a contemplative life still because I have a lot of silence in my life. I spend a lot of time in my inner world through writing, reflecting, reading, praying and making music. Again, music is a huge channel for me. Yeah. So I've evolved and the whole relationship's evolved. The things that had always defined you before you entered the monastery, loving music, reading philosophy, literature. I'm sure painting was a part of your life. You know, seeing paintings, because your father was a painter and an art professor.

All those things had to be kind of packed up and put away when you were in the monastery. And like free thinking, idealism, enthusiasms, those things are all frowned upon. And you were not supposed to express them. But now you're able to express them again. Do you feel more whole in that respect? I do feel, I feel more whole in that I feel I'm living a fully human life now. There's part of me that misses the intensity of monastic life and the purity of intention and the fact that, you know, your life feels so important.

It feels so important that, you know, you have a vocation. But I feel it is, it's not a complete human life in a way. It could be, I suppose, in an ideal monastery with really wise leaders and a bit more breadth in how things are implemented. But I feel now that I've reintegrated music and writing and thinking and all these more creative things, I'm now living to the full. I'm living the person I'm meant to be

because I need to express that side of my person. So, yeah, it's a more rounded life and it's a more fulfilled life in many ways. Although I feel a sense of loss on some level. Thank you so much for talking with us. And I have to say I admire your courage entering a monastery because you give up so much to do it. It's such a stark life. No matter how rich it is, you give up so much. So I imagine I admire your courage in doing that.

But I also admire your courage in leaving and at some point knowing it wasn't the life you wanted to live any longer. And I thank you for talking about all of that with us. Well, thank you, Terry. I mean, it's been fantastic having this conversation. Thank you so much for your interest in the book. And yeah, it's been really good talking to you. Catherine Coldstream's new memoir is called Cloistered, My Years as a Nun. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, although marijuana has been legalized in some states, there's a thriving illicit market dominated by Chinese organized crime. It's connected to China's authoritarian government, money laundering, bribery, violence, and environmental damage. Thank you. Follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salad, Phyllis Myers, Anne Rebo Donato, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. This message comes from Grammarly. Back and forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at grammarly.com slash enterprise.