Cardinal Sin

Thomas Rain Crowe

 

“ Because the beautiful and the good in God

are praised by the removal of all.” -Thomas Aquinas

 

 

Out of all the women in France, why I would fall in love with a nun remains an enigma.

I had been given the job of gardener in a convent outside of Grenoble. I had moved there from Paris due to the inability to hook up with other poets and a paying job. Paris, in 1972, was still full of literary ghosts, inspiring architecture, and beautiful women, but none of these French beauties came with an inheritance sympathetic to the gypsy-like needs of an aspiring ex-patriot American post-beatnik from the mountains of North Carolina. Grenoble, on the other hand, had taken me in (or rather the Catholic Church had, with the idea of converting me from my angst-driven atheism to a lifetime of spiritual obedience) and placed me, delicately, inside the walls of the Carmelite convent in Fille Sur Sarthe, just outside of town. The Bishop of the Grenoble diocese had even gone so far as to find me a room over the Vitreaux D’Art across from the train station. A wonderful south-facing room with stained-glass French-door windows looking out onto the square that looked squarely into the eyes, at any given time, of at least a dozen trains.

         The first couple months as gardener in the convent were carried out routinely, with a discipline that demanded hard physical work in the enclosed garden until morning tea, which consisted of breads, chocolates, and all the tea I could drink from a tea cup large enough for soup. After tea there was more gardening work until lunch, which was served at precisely one o’clock.

         Lunch time was, more often than not, spent dining with visiting dignitaries who happened to be in Grenoble on church business. Vicars, Bishops, theological scholars, and even occasionally a Cardinal would be my guest at an elaborate luncheon--a full meal of several courses complete with at least three different grande cru wines. This was an opportunity for me to converse in French with philosophers, theologians, and the like, for an hour and a half before I would be obliged to return to my gardening chores.

In particular, I remember a Cardinal Jauffret, who was introduced to me by the Mother Superior as the most published clergyman in the world on the subject of “original sin.” Since I had long since outgrown the Southern Baptist idea of being “born a sinner” with a biological inheritance of guilt as a result of evil deeds done in the womb, and since Monseigneur Jauffret was most eager to share decades of acclaim as an authority on the matter, our allotted hour-and-a-half lunchtime conversation went well into the afternoon. “Sin” was, it seemed, the only thing on this man’s mind. And if original sin wasn’t enough, everything that we did after birth, seemed to be no more than occasion for the piling-on of misdeeds, accompanied by the mandatory lifetimes of guilt. With no clear winner in this debate, and with neither of us being able to budge the other an inch from his stubborn theological position, the debate was finished in a draw, as well as were three hefty bottles of first class French wine.

        And, so, I looked forward to lunchtime with anticipation all morning as I weeded the mauvais herbes from the vegetable beds, or hauled around large rocks to make walls or borders for new garden paths. But little did I know, that my lunchtime discussions were about to become even more interesting.

        After I had been at the convent for approximately two months, I was visited one lunchtime by the Mother Superior. Over coq au vin and a brilliant French Bordeaux (the nuns eat well!) the Mother Superior informed me that a young sister from Avignon had just arrived. And would be there for an indefinite time as she was being considered for an open position as a member of the Fille convent. The Mother Superior told me that the sister was originally from the States, and from Chicago--which I thought to be coincidentally interesting, as Chicago had also been my place of birth. But the Mother Superior went on to say that the young nun had taken her vows in Canada and that she still spoke English. She suggested to me that I might want to talk to her about things spiritual since it would be easier for me to speak in my native tongue. I had no interest or desire, whatsoever, to carry on conversations in English at this point. In my mind, I was no longer an American and was more interested in perfecting my fluency in French. But, since the Mother Superior was so insistent that I would enjoy speaking with this young sister, I didn’t really resist her invitation for me to meet, during my luncheon break, with this potential new member of the order of Sur Sarthe.

        The initial meeting and the conversations that followed took place once a week immediately after lunch. The Canadian sister was introduced to me as Soeur Marie Lucille. But in order to convert and caress my lost soul with the manna of Catholic dogma, before I knew it the meetings were taking place three times a week, after lunch, and in a large barren room just off the chapel. Here, Sister Marie Lucille and I held our own brand of dialectic communion--conversing on topics including everything from celibacy to the sublime. She addressing me in forgotten English, I, her, in my surrealistic French.

           It was in this big barren room full of high windows, where we would sit and talk for exactly one hour, that I was, eventually, to be saved from my narcissistic nihilism and brought into the fold of Christ-the-Shepherd. At least this was the plan of the Mother Superior and he flock of nuns. But, apparently, their God had other ideas. This barren room, this hour, was to be the time and place provided, even donated, for me to fall in love. A sort of arranged courtship, albeit unsuspected by its perpetrators. And with a “married woman” at that! This cloistered “bride of God.”

*

 

        Hell is not being able to see your enemy. And an absentee Father had become my nemesis. The zealous husband. The domineering patriarch. And Sister Marie Lucille, in this case was the subservient wife. It became both my resolve and my mission to save her form this abusive marriage. From this homeless false sense of security. Battered by silence. Battered by lies. Abandoned by the Jesus of history’s ethers.

        As she scrutinized my pagan loyalties, I questioned her Catholic crusade. And so our conversations went. Back and forth. Point, counterpoint. She trying to make a Christian out of me, I trying to make either an adulteress or a widow out of her. She out of loyalty, I out of love.

        Weeks went by. The more we talked, the more she opened up to me. The more she opened up, the more I pried, the deeper I dug into the psyche of her soul looking for any door that might lead to the holy grail of her heart.

        Marie Lucille’s story of conversion and “marriage” was as surprising as it was sad. She had been engaged to be married. She was seventeen and the wedding day had finally arrived. She was being married right out of high school to a boy she had known her whole life and for whom she was saving herself, although with great difficulty as she desired him more than a hungry stomach would food. But being an obedient child from a good Roman Catholic family, she was convinced she was doing the right(eous) thing in waiting. Anyway, wedding day had come and she was there in a church full of family and friends, at the altar waiting for a groom who never arrived. Never arrived at all. In fact he disappeared completely. And Lucy never saw or heard a word from him again. It was as if he had been abducted from her life by aliens. Aliens who, thoughtlessly, never returned him either to her or to the Earth. Just took him out of her confused and shattered seventeen-year-old life forever.

        In the hysteria and confusion of being so brutally jilted, she had opted for some safer “reality” and had jumped ship. Walked the gangplank of unrequited love, falling right into the jaws of a waiting God. “Good luck for God” I thought sitting there staring into those Joan-of-Arc eyes and imagining that I were He in that watery moment of her fall from grace. But her story, which went on, quickly pulled me back into the moment, back inside those convent walls, into the straight-back chairs that so reluctantly decorated the conversation room where we talked.

        It was only a matter of days after being stood-up at her wedding that she was in Canada and knocking on the doors of a Carmelite convent. And only a few days after that that she was in--beginning her four year journey from the Canadian woods to Avignon, and from Avignon to Grenoble and Fille Sur Sarthe. And along the line of that descent, married on the rebound to an apparition with no last name.

 

*

 

        During those hour-long visits three days a week in the barren room with high windows, I often wondered whether she was coming to our meetings of her own desire--or whether she was coming always and totally out of duty and directive coming from higher up the chain of command. She had been careful not to give herself away, or to give any indication that she might be there solely for the purpose of my company, and I had not been forward enough to ask. I was too young and too shy and my good Southern manners too great an obstacle, somehow, to reach through the walls of our debate and pull out from her a heart-felt response or sign.

        There was something about the fact that everything but her hands and eyes were hidden, made the mystery of her concealed body all that much more alluring, seductive. From those beautifully blinding eyes surrounded by flawless facial skin and a pair of snow white dancing hands across from me on those designated days, came the hologram of a body no man alive could resist. It was as if her habit was skin-tight and every perfect twenty-two year old curve and line were etched in a sensuous spandex light only the eyes in x-ray fingers could perceive. And my radioactive eyes saw them like poetry pacing desert dunes looking for that one and only perfect rhyme.

        There was something in my cannibalistic heart that wanted to devour her. Sexually and spiritually possess her as part of me. Put her inside of me as part of that gastric and blood-pumping universe. Looking into Lucy’s eyes was like drinking a good Bordeaux. Everything changed. Everything became intoxicating. Fragrant. Enticingly forbidding. Everything moved. Became exquisite. Became intimate. Became skin.

         Where does the heart of a captive beauty go when it wants to go out and play? To hide and seek.. To gather stones. To break the habit of sex as the orgasm of prayer---

I imagined, at night, back in my little room across from the railroad station, above the stained-glass studio: her hair. Like God’s tinsel. Like Spanish moss hanging perfectly, yet naturally, from the ancient oaks along the south Georgia coast. Like a soft wall of rain along the concubine shore... Everything about her that had been kept hidden from me and that I couldn’t see, lit up at night in my dreams, or in the mind’s eye that kept me from sleep. She was everywhere. In me. Around and under me. And all the time a married woman. Married to God. And even though I never saw her hair, never saw even the cloth-contoured outline of her body, it was all there in her eyes. A double-barreled mirror of light that not only filled the barren two-chaired, high-windowed room, but filled my much larger heart.

*

 

          It ended badly. Badly, at any rate, for a North Carolina mountain boy of twenty-two. A month and a half after the lunchtime meetings began, our conversations began being monitored by the idol-like presence of an older nun who was positioned in a third chair beside the door. Our two straight-back chairs, which were placed in the very center of the rectangular room, were far enough away that if we talked in whispers, the monitor-nun could not have heard us. But I refused to talk in whispers, as did she, and so we talked normally, knowing (or at least naively suspecting) that the listener-nun only understood French.

        These chaperoned conversations went on for a few more weeks. Then, without notice, our trinity of weekly meetings suddenly was edited to a Christ-less pair. And finally, to a single ghostly hour. Still with the statuesque nun guarding the door. And then it all just, suddenly, stopped.

        I was told by the Mother Superior one Monday at the time when I would normally meet with Lucy, that she had been delegated to other duties in the convent that demanded attention and would no longer have the time to continue with our conversations after lunch. I responded to this ambush of news with an aching silence, yet with eyes that, staring directly into those of the Mother Superior, must have resembled the reaction of a victim to a nuclear blast. Instead of walking into the south-facing, high-windowed room that Monday, I walked out the northern door into the winter garden that had been put to bed until spring...

        Within the week I was dismissed from my job. Told only that “there was no longer any need for a gardener at the convent, since money was tight and spring several months away.”

        Sitting in my room above the stained-glass studios, I was convinced in the end that she couldn’t resist me. Couldn’t resist the integrity of my plea for her release to the world of the living. To a world of love. A world of physical love, even if it was overpopulated with heathens and the unsaved.

        My knocks on the convent door during the days that followed, went unanswered. The door, unopened. My letters, no doubt, were also unopened. My bleeding and tearful words unseen by the girl from Chicago with the Joan-of-Arc eyes.

        As the letter-less days and weeks went by, I became truly jobless. No one in Grenoble had work for me. And what little money I had managed to save was running out, as was the patience of my landlord at the school for stained glass art for the excuses I offered up for my perpetual delinquency in paying the rent. It was as if the word of God had come down and all pagan poets had become blacklisted. Taboo. Winter has set in, it felt like, for good. Only the snow in the frozen air was colder than my heart as I boarded the train to the south of France in the station next to the square across from the room with the stained-glass windows above the Vitreaux D’Art.