Living with nuns -a weekend in London
Mae govannen, dear f-list. I am back and exhausted after my strange weekend in England. We stayed in a convent with Ursuline nuns. Ye Gods...
WARNING: You probably shouldn't read this if you are a strict Christian!
We took the bus from Dublin to London via the ferry and drove down England all night. It was such fun, especially as Efa and myself were plugged into Divine Comedy/Jeff Buckley/Janis Joplin. It was a bit surreal, zooming past empty towns drowned in orange street lamps, with a stranger sitting beside you snoring loudly and smelling faintly of whiskey, whilst Eminem rapped about Toy Soldiers. (LOL)
Anyway, we arrived in London at 6am, and promptly tramped towards Buckingham Palace in the hope of seeing Prince Harry (Efa is positive that she is destined to marry him). We sat outside the palace for ages, whilst the guards eyed us suspiciously, and all of London seemed to hurry past on the way to work. After an hour, we gave up with the Harry-hunt, and took the tube to Parliament Square. I'm a sad politics geek and insisted on seeing Westminster. Well, the whole world was ruled from there at one time! There was a wonderful anti-Iraq protest going on there. Jeez, I think Blair regrets it now, with elections in 9 days! Then we zoomed on round to Notting Hill (Efa was hoping to see Hugh Grant *snirckle*) and Portobello Road market, which is amazing. I bought so much stuff that I think I have permanantly damaged my flippin' back. Including a Complete Works of Shakespeare dated from Sept. 1939 -wow! Just as the war began...
We went to stay with Efa's great-aunt who is a nun. Our visit was officially to 'study French', which we thought was a plausable excuse for a pleasure jaunt 6 weeks before our Leaving Certificate. We thought we'd just have to do an hour or two of French, and then the rest would be fun. Man, we were wrong.
As soon as we arrived at the convent, we were plonked down at the table and forced to write 2 pages of French. That was to be the pattern of the whole weekend. Sister Gabby turned out to be a lovely octagenarian perfectionist who lives in a completely different world. As soon as the gates to the convent clanged shut behind us, it was like we were back in the 1800's. Oh lordy. Neither Efs or myself had the heart to tell the nuns that we are agnostic (LOL) So we had to spend the whole time pretending to be good catholic girls, attending prayers, watching the Pope's 3 hour mass at dawn on Sunday morning (felt like!), going to mass numerous times, saying prayers whilst going on our evening walks.
I'm MTV Generation! No TV, no sarcasm, no phones, no shopping, no chocolate, no internet, no music except church music for 3 days :O We were in bed by 9pm, and up again by 8am. Doing French the whole day. There are about 20 nuns in the convent, all of them are over eighty and dying. Horribly frail, and amazingly innocent. It was a crazed time-warp.
The Ursuline nuns are a charitable organisation, they've set up schools all over Britain, and I actually go to an Ursuline school here in Waterford. But they are all too old now to do anything except pray and wait for death. They live in a beautiful old house, and get anything they want, including a three-course meal every day. They have an army of cooks, carers etc. and do NOT live in poverty and modesty and piety and all that jazz. They are delighted that the conservative Ratzinger has been elected Pope, and hope that he will bring people back to the church. He won't. Not young people anyway, because like these poor nuns, Catholicism is in a strict timewarp, and the mystic authority of the church just doesn't interest us any more. We don't want to get up early Sunday mornings to attend a 2 hour yawn-athon mass, full of cult-like crap. I'm 18, I want to be lying in bed with a cup of tea listening to my i-pod, recovering after a night of boozing.
One of the funniest examples of the gap between teenagers and the church is the wonderful Father Dan, who is parish priest. He is about 28 and very cute. The nuns are delighted with him because he is bringing young people back to the church. Bulls**t! People are going to church because he is HOT. Fact! Whilst Sister Gabby was praying after communion, Efs and I were thinking impure thoughts about the priest and calculating how we could wrangle an introduction. OK, so we're going to go to hell, but it just shows how out of touch the poor nuns are. I think that priests should be allowed to marry, that women should get some importance in the church, that divorce and homosexuality should be recognised, that contraception should be encouraged. Do they want the AIDs epidemic to spread? The church needs to rationalise and modernise, then perhaps all my friends wouldn't be so disallusioned with a paedophile-sheltering, OAP, stifling religion. The Ursulines are sad that their yougest nun is 80, because they are going to die out, yet they still spout delirious beliefs that Catholicism will outlive the Church of England. Well, the Ursuline Order is a symbol of Catholicism -and it is dying. Efs and I went on evening strolls with Gabby, singing holy songs and listening to tales of St. Peter. Sweet Lord! It was an Experience.
Most people go to London to have a bit of craic. We went to learn French with the nuns. LOL!