Shared Contemplations in the Convent

The Medievalist has read, in her few weeks offline, that culture is best understood as “shared understandings.” This is a useful paradigm, as her beloved professors would say; the Medievalist thinks that it is a simple truth.

To enjoy her return back to the light, the Medievalist would like to elaborate on a few of the shared understandings of the Convent. They are numerically ordered but not numerically significant.

1. First Class: this is the girl we love to hate, the boy we hate to love, the music we complain about and then purchase. First Class is the silent signal of the Sisters. Because it is silent, we bemoan its existence and pretend to welcome the advent of Saint Zimbra and Saint Sakai. However, because we use it to communicate, we worship at its small altar in secret.

2. Serving Success: We all serve the same God, although she may reveal herself in different forms. No, the Medievalist is not referring to a cultural or technically religious god. This God of Success is worshipped by the pre-med Sisters, the pre-law Sisters, the pre-vet and pre-dental and pre-grad and pre-life sisters.

3. Pre-Life: Sisters at Wellesley, perhaps more than at any other convent or monastery, have a shared confusion about life at Wellesley. We prepare more for life after our beloved convent than we often do for our life here. The same sanctimonious Sisters who have their ten-year-plan to achieve Secretary of Health often do not sleep enough, do not exercise or eat with a sense of moderation (moderate salads, moderate cream cheese brownies.) We are all pre-Life.

4. Vocation: with few exceptions, all Sisters are here because they are Called. Wellesley does not accept those who merely toil without a sense of Vision. All Sisters are driven by their Call, a deliberate belief that they will achieve significance in this vain world. It is a horrible master, this Call; but also beautiful, as it reveals itself in Tanner presentations and precious lunchtime confessions and pieces of artwork in the Jewett Gallery.

We are all Called, for the better good of the Convent.. Now the Medievalist is called back to her rituals of devotion to Health, a personal favorite saint.