Pause for Nerdiness

Yes, this is a real castle.

How to Become a Nun

eHow has the penultimate guide. Their guide includes details like Convert to Catholicism, Don't get married or divorced, Take temporary vows, etc.

This is penultimate, of course, because the ultimate guide to becoming a Nun of the Convent resides on MBC.

The Medievalist's Guide to Becoming a Nun

1. Convert to Success. Desire it, surround your life with it, and hang pictures of Susan Rice on your vision board.

2. Forget about having a relationship. If you do, it will drain away time from Success. If you don't, you will be a more Successful nun. Those with past relationships are OK, it will give you angst and sufficient memories to fuel your dreams for the next 4 years.

3. Graduate from high school. The Convent requires all incoming Nuns to have seen High School Musical 3, read Kate Chopin and have a working knowledge of popular expletives.

4. Pretend to look at other Convents. People come and say, oh, but I'm thinking about Holyoke, or Smith, or Vassar, but that's not really a Convent any more as much as a Mixed Place for Successful people... but they know they're lying. All who come know where the true Convent is.

5. Identify orgs and majors immediately. These will become your lifeblood while at the Convent, so it is best to know them NOW.

6. Contact an unholy number of professors, org advisors, students, deans and cafeteria ladies to convince your parents you will succeed in the Convent.

7. Attend Spring Open Campus and be bedazzled by the Chapel to Western Postmodernism and the glamour of the existing Nuns. Also, draw smiley faces on the class-colored balloons.

8. Sleep on the cell floor. Once will convince you we have the best floors in the monastic world.

9. Submit your deposit. Your parents will wring their hands and try to remember that Hillary Clinton is a successful human being and not just someone who made incorrect marital decisions. Remind them that she did get married, and has anybody noticed that all the troubles in the Obama administration have not been caused by this Nun?

10. Enter the Convent. Be prepared for late-night swims, unsustainable hours of work, sleeping in the Science Center and knowing the location of Finnegan's Wake in the Clapp.

What can I say? We are truly devoted.

The Monks of MIT

BU to bed, Wellesley to wed and MIT to talk to.
- MIT fraternity explication of Boston
student women, not officially documented

Once upon a time, Wellesley Sisters cavorted with the good brothers of Harvard. They still do, of course, but the general opinion amongst the Nuns is that the brothers of Harvard have strayed from their original Rule. They used to serve Success by dating, and treating well, the Sisters of Wellesley. Those days were a Heaven by all definitions of a Heaven: the smartest men and smartest women in the nation, making uber-smart babies after uber-stylish weddings.

Those days are gone, to quote the bard Pink.

Now, the Sisters have formed a new relationship with the Monks of MIT. These Monks are a queer breed, not in terms of sexuality but in nature. To enter the Monastery, they must be fanatical worshippers of Success. Yet the Monks are ashamed of their devout reputation and instead found Fraternities, cults of the saints Alcohol and Male Stupidity, where they pretend to be popular men of the sort they weren't in high school.

The Sisters enjoy their relationship with the Monks, despite the Monks' lack of social skills and occasional use of HTML in every day language. Perhaps the Sisters like to display their own Nerd-Fanatical side, with responses in Java-Script. The words of advice quoted in the opening are offensive to the women at BU and MIT, of course, but the nuns of Wellesley know their worth.

For now, the monks of MIT enjoy their social status because they too recognize that Wellesley Sisters are in it for life.

A First Class Ticket to Silent Sisters

The refashioning of religious ideals that elevated the practice of silence to the highest constellation of Christian virtues confronted the Cluniacs with an unexpected challenge. In cloistered communities that sometimes numbered hundreds of monks, the cultivation of a strict and reverential silence conflicted with the fact that some form of communication was necessary for the operation of the abbey and the orchestration of its rituals.

Rather than relinquish their ideal of silence as an essential virtue, the monks of Cluny created a silent language of hand signs that enabled them to express their needs without recourse to any verbal exchange. - Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism, introduction

The Abbey of Cluny (emphasis, second syllable) was a lighthouse for medieval monasticism. Cluniac monasteries sprouted across Europe, following the Benedictine rule. This primarily took place around the year 1000, but there has been a renaissance of Cluniac ideals in Wellesley College.

The Sisters of the College have fully embraced the ideal of Silence. Silent Hours are put in place during the Final Masses of the Year, where poor nuns seeking to relieve their Piety with a Sandra Bullock movie are shouted at by the Superiors. Many eat alone in dining halls, seeking to cleanse their souls from the racket of incessant chitchat. And of course, most communication never takes place between a nun and another nun.

No, the Sisters use their own system of nonverbal communication: First Class. While somewhat developed from sign language, First Class allows the Sisters to talk to one another without braving actual human contact. First Class allows one to communicate with professors, administrators, even Cell Mates. The Sisters do all this communication without straying from their True Calling, homework.

Many Sisters, however, find that this religious ideal of True Calling hurts in a deep place. These Sisters keep First Class open all the time, and long to hear the Ding! of the mailbox. The Ding! is the sound of another Sister, or Monk, or Superior, reaching out across the vast emptiness of the Internet to communicate with her. It is not unheard of for Sisters to go a little mad in the head, and hear phantom Dings! where there is no real Ding!.

The Mothers Superior have cried an end to First Class, and are upgrading the nonverbal communication systems to Zimbra and Sakai, systems that vaguely suggest African roots and are more appealing than the bourgeois First Class. The Medievalist knows, however, that you may change the sign language, but you can't keep the Sisters from communicating.

Nonverbally.

FMyConfessional

If one wishes to become acquainted with the secret nature of life in the Convent, one needs to visit Wellesley FML, otherwise known as The Confessional. The purpose of Confession, for nuns in yesteryear and for many traditional Catholics/Orthodox Christians/others today, is to cleanse the soul by sharing their failures and sins.

The unique trait of the clergy and monastic community is that they both spoke confession and heard it. Those familiar with movies featuring Julie Andrews in a pixie cut will know that nuns confess to their Superiors, and their Superiors hear them.

This brings us to Wellesley FML. Begun in the fall semester of 2009, the FML is a public service for the Sisters. It allows us to relieve our guilty consciences of the men (and women) we've slept with, the teachers we've spat at and the homework we've skipped. That is, for those who post on The Confessional.

Others, like the Medievalist, simply read the Confessional and deliver Absolution. Absolution, in other contexts, means forgiveness for one's sins. The confessor gives penance: two Hail Marys, go tell your sister you broke her favorite dish, stay after Mass to help with clean-up, etc.

In the Sisters' Confessional, Absolution is delivered in three ways: Like, Dislike and Comment. The Medievalist just spent too much time delivering judgment on all sorts of sins: dieting, boring summer internships, sexual promiscuities and the lack thereof. The confident Confessors deliver Comments such as, "You poor dear, please come to Stone-D for cookies" or "You %#^&&*% %#$^&, you deserve all the $@#% you get." Stiff penance, in my view.

This public confessional is vastly different from the privacy of the box envisioned by movie directors. However, the Medievalist's professor at Wellesley College informed the class that in early periods (eighth, ninth and tenth centuries), confession was always public. If a member of a church had sinned, he or she would confess that sin to the community.

So Wellesley FML is not the propagation of a post-modern trend towards oversharing private details, nor a venue for intracollegiate gossip. No, instead it continues the medieval tradition of sharing one's burdens and confessing that we always fail to meet the standards of Success.

Our Predecessor, Gandersheim

Wellesley College's Alma Mater

The "Imperial free secular foundation of Gandersheim" (Kaiserlich freie weltliche Reichsstift Gandersheim), as it was officially known from the 13th century to its dissolution in 1810, was a community of the unmarried daughters of the high nobility, leading a godly life but not under monastic vows, which is the meaning of the word "secular" in the title.

Sound familiar?

Gandersheim Abbey's most famous pupil is Hrosvit, or Hrosvitha, a tenth-century dramatist. Not quite Nora Ephron, but close.

Speaking in Tongues, Pierced or Otherwise

"It is also said, 'A woman's tongue is her sword,'" I countered, " 'and she does not let it rust.'"

"' Maids should be mild and meek, swift to hear and slow to speak,'" said Agnes.

"'Be she old or be she young, a woman's strength is in her tongue,'" said I.

Agnes pointed her nose at me. "'One tongue is enough for two women.'"

Having run out of sayings to argue with, I pushed her and she sat hard in the eel pie.

-- Catherine Called Birdy, Karen Cushman

As the inestimable Catherine contests, one tongue is never enough for one woman. This is especially true in the Convent, where it is the vogue to speak three languages and the minimum to speak two.

This curious multiplicity of polyglots is good for the ears but bad for the soul. Sisters sharing cells with International Nuns can testify to the miraculous nature of Skype conversations at odd hours. Your cellmate usually chats with you about eighteenth-century literary revolutions in English, but switches to Hindi in order to converse with her mother about new sneakers.

International Nuns may find their Speaking Gifts natural. The Domestic Nuns must compete, through education if not through culture. Speaking only one language fluently -- that is, by not placing into a 201 level your first year -- is the same as not being blessed by the Spirit of Success at all.

The Holy Spirit of Success is that innate gifting of each Wellesley Sister that allows her to commune with Success. The Holy Spirit reveals Itself through perfect SAT scores, the ability to accomplish all one's homework in three hours once a week, and through the speaking of multiple languages. The last is the most common gifting, however, and without it one feels rather mute. Worst of all, the unolingual Sister questions whether Success has met with her at all: is she a Spiritless nun?

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills. - 1 Corinthians 12: 7-11, ESV

The Sisters Tackle the Twilight Dilemma

The Medievalist recently watched the trailer from the guys who couldn't sit through another vampire movie, entitled Vampires Suck. The guys are a bit offensive: they imagine that it is only groaning boyfriends who hate Twilight. In fact, Wellesley Sisters often question the values and virtues of the worldly world of Forks.

The question for the nuns is this: to Twihard, or not to Twihard?

To Twihard is to join the younger members of the millenial generation who read the books and shriek at the movies. In fact, when Twilight was simply a popular novel, the Sisters were the target audience. Most of us were literate young women with pocket money, some with more romantic success than others.

The Twihards amongst our community feel an emotional bond with Twilight: it was part of our mixed experiences of adolescence. We were fans before RPattz, KStew and TTautAbs joined in the frenzy. We love the movies, of course, for their display of well-developed male flesh. There is a lack of that at our nunnery, as the monks of MIT do not visit as often as Mother Superior KBott promised.

The Twihaters, on the other hand, believe their status as Wellesley women means they have Values and Standards. Their progressive philosophy, saturated in holy devotion to Feminism and Success, means they evaluate their choices critically. Notwithstanding Jon Stewart's sexism, the Twihaters despise Bella's vacuous stares and Edward's stalkerish tendencies. The writing is horrible, they point out, the fans annoy the educated world and the author is a Mormon.

In the history of the Church and the cloistered community, the phrase in the world but not of the world comes to mind. As the Christians struggled and struggle to understand how their beliefs implicated their behavior in a non-Christian world, so do the nuns of Wellesley struggle.

How do women who believe in strength, success and ambition watch movies? Do they turn off the TV in disgust at gender stereotypes and the upholding of feminine weakness? Or, like the Medievalist, do they vacillate between opinions and venture to see New Moon on opening night because they can't remember the last time they saw a man?

I ponder.*

*In the Convent, we do not come to Conclusions. We ask questions, discuss, debate, disagree, and then walk to the ville for coffee.