Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  convene a peaceful conference of both parties at Strassburg, or Tübingen, or Heidelberg, or Frankfurt, and attend the conference in person with some pious, upright, and moderate men. "If you class me," he concludes, "in the number of such men, no necessity, however pressing, will prevent me from putting up this as my chief vow, that before the Lord gather us into his heavenly kingdom I may yet be permitted to enjoy on earth, a most delightful interview with you, and feel some alleviation of my grief by deploring along with you the evils which we cannot remedy." In his last extant letter to Melanchthon, dated Nov. 19, 1558, Calvin alludes once more to the eucharistic controversy, but in a very gentle spirit, assuring him that he will never allow anything to alienate his mind "from that holy friendship and respect which I have vowed to you .... Whatever may happen, let us cultivate with sincerity a fraternal affection towards each other, the ties of which no wiles of Satan shall ever burst asunder." Melanchthon would have done better for his own fame if, instead of approving the execution of Servetus, he had openly supported Calvin in the conflict with Westphal. But he was weary of the rabies theologorum, and declined to take an active part in the bitter strife on "bread-worship," as he called the notion of those who were not contented with the presence of the body of Christ in the sacramental use, but insisted upon its presence in and under the bread. He knew what kind of men he had to deal with. He knew that the court of Saxony, from a sense of honor, would not allow an open departure from Luther’s doctrine. Prudence, timidity, and respect for the memory of Luther were the mingled motives of his silence. He was aware of his natural weakness, and confessed in a letter to Christopher von Carlowitz, in 1548: "I am, perhaps, by nature of a somewhat servile disposition, and I have before endured an altogether unseemly servitude; as Luther more frequently obeyed his temperament, in which was no little contentiousness, than he regarded his own dignity and the common good." But in his private correspondence he did not conceal his real sentiments, his disapproval of "bread-worship" and of the doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body. His last utterance on the subject was in answer to the request of Elector Frederick III. of the Palatinate, who tried to conciliate the parties in the fierce eucharistic controversy at Heidelberg. Melanchthon warned against scholastic subtleties and commended moderation, peace, biblical simplicity, and the use of Paul’s words that "the bread which we break is the communion of the body of Christ " (1 Cor. 10:16), not "changed into," nor the "substantial," nor the "true" body. He gave this counsel on the first of November, 1559. A few months afterwards he died (April 17, 1560).

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It is doubtful whether it would have been satisfactory. The old hero was then discontented with the state of the world and the Church, and longing for departure. But Calvin prevailed on a young gentleman of tolerable learning to undertake the journey for him. He gave him a literal Latin translation of his tracts against the Nicodemites, together with letters to Luther and Melanchthon (Jan. 20, 1545). He asked the latter to act as mediator according to his best judgment. The letter to Luther is very respectful and modest. After explaining the case, and requesting him to give it a cursory examination and to return his opinion in a few words, Calvin thus concludes this, his only, letter to the great German Reformer: — "I am unwilling to give you this trouble in the midst of so many weighty and various employments; but such is your sense of justice that you cannot suppose me to have done this unless compelled by the necessity of the case; I therefore trust that you will pardon me. Would that I could fly to you, that I might even for a few hours enjoy the happiness of your society; for I would prefer, and it would be far better, not only upon this question, but also about others, to converse personally with yourself; but seeing that it is not granted to us on earth, I hope that shortly it will come to pass in the kingdom of God. Adieu, most renowned sir, most distinguished minister of Christ, and my ever-honored father. The Lord himself rule and direct you by His own Spirit, that you may persevere even unto the end, for the common benefit and good of His own Church." Luther was still so excited by his last eucharistic controversy with the Swiss, and so suspicious, that Melanchthon deemed it inexpedient to lay the documents before him.892 "I have not shown your letter to Dr. Martin," he replied to Calvin, April 17, 1545, "for he takes many things suspiciously, and does not like his answers to questions of the kind you have proposed to him, to be carried round and handed from one to another .... At present I am looking forward to exile and other sorrows. Farewell! On the day on which, thirty-eight hundred and forty-six years ago, Noah entered into the ark, by which God gave testimony of his purpose never to forsake his Church, even when she quivers under the shock of the billows of the great sea." He gave, however, his own opinion; and this, as well as the opinions of Bucer and Peter Martyr, and Calvin’s conclusion, were published, as an appendix to the tracts on avoiding superstition, at Geneva in 1549.893 Melanchthon substantially agreed with Calvin; he asserts the duty of the Christian to worship God alone (Matt. 4:10), to flee from idols (1 John 5:21), and to profess Christ openly before men (Matt.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  CHAPTER XVII. CALVIN ABROAD. Calvin’s Correspondence in his Opera, vols. X.–XX.—Henry, III. 395–549 (Calvin’s Wirksamkeit nach aussen).—Stähelin, I. 505–588; II. 5 sqq. § 159. Calvin’s Catholicity of Spirit. Calvin was a Frenchman by birth and education, a Swiss by adoption and life-work, a cosmopolitan in spirit and aim. The Church of God was his home, and that Church knows no boundaries of nationality and language. The world was his parish. Having left the papacy, he still remained a Catholic in the best sense of that word, and prayed and labored for the unity of all believers. Like his friend Melanchthon, he deeply deplored the divisions of Protestantism. To heal them he was willing to cross ten oceans. Thus he wrote, in reply to Archbishop Cranmer, who had invited him (March 20, 1552), with Melanchthon and Bullinger, to a meeting in Lambeth Palace for the purpose of drawing up a consensus creed for the Reformed Churches.1222 After expressing his zeal for the Church universal, he continues (Oct. 14, 1552):— "I wish, indeed, it could be brought about that men of learning and authority from the different churches should meet somewhere, and after thoroughly discussing the different articles of faith, should, by a unanimous decision, deliver down to posterity some certain rule of doctrine. But amongst the chief evils of the age must be reckoned the marked division between the different churches, insomuch that human society can hardly be said to be established among us, much less a holy communion of the members of Christ, which, though all profess it, few indeed really observe with sincerity. But if the clergy are more lukewarm than they should be, the fault lies chiefly with their sovereigns, who are either so involved in their secular affairs, as to neglect altogether the welfare of the Church, and indeed religion itself, or so well content to see their own countries at peace as to care little about others; and thus the members being divided, the body of the Church lies lacerated. "As to myself, if I should be thought of any use, I would not, if need be, object to cross ten seas for such a purpose. If the assisting of England were alone concerned, that would be motive enough with me. Much more, therefore, am I of opinion, that I ought to grudge no labor or trouble, seeing that the object in view is an agreement among the learned, to be drawn up by the weight of their authority according to Scripture, in order to unite Churches seated far apart. But my insignificance makes me hope that I may be spared. I shall have discharged my part by offering up my prayers for what may have been done by others. Melanchthon is so far off that it takes some time to exchange letters. Bullinger has, perhaps, already answered you.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  101a; Tosefta Sanhedrin 12.10). In Christian tradition the Song was most often read as an allegory for the love between Christ and the church. The association of the Song with Solomon is due to the fact that his name is mentioned six times (1:5; 3:7, 9, 11; 8:11-12), while there are references to a “king” in 1:4, 12, and 7:5. These references led the editor to ascribe the Song to Solomon in the superscription. Solomon is never the speaker in any of the passages that mention him. In some cases, he is introduced in the context of explicit comparison (1:5; 8:11-12). In chapter 3, and in the references to a king, there is most probably an implicit comparison between the beloved and Solomon. Opinions vary widely on the actual date of the poems. The appearance of a Persian word, pardes, “garden,” in 4:13, requires a postexilic date. Some scholars place it as late as the Hellenistic period, but decisive evidence is lacking. Besides the traditional allegorical interpretation, the major modern interpretations of the Song see it as (1) a drama with either two or three main characters, (2) a cycle of wedding songs, (3) a remnant of a fertility cult, (4) a single love poem, or (5) a collection of love poems. Neither the dramatic interpretation nor the theory that relates the Song to a fertility cult can be maintained without distorting or rearranging the poems. Neither is there any clear indication of a wedding context. The crucial factor in appreciating the literary structure of the text is the recognition that there are several changes of speaker. Most often the speaker is a woman, sometimes addressing the beloved directly, sometimes speaking to “the daughters of Jerusalem.” In 1:7—2:7 there is a dialogue between male and female. In 4:1-15 the voice is that of the man, and this is again the case in 6:1-10 and 7:1-9. In view of the changing voices and perspectives, it is difficult to defend the structural unity of the poem. Even those who argue for an overarching unity still distinguish a number of songs within the composition. The number of songs is also a matter of disagreement, ranging from as few as six to more than thirty. The analysis followed here distinguishes eleven units: I. 1:2-6: the woman expresses her longing for the beloved and introduces

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  It took weeks, but little by little, the fence was erected and the outside world disappeared—the people who lived in the multifamily houses across the street, the open field where children played, the rag man and his horse and buggy, the banana man who pulled his cart and shouted, “Whoop! Ripe bananas, ten cents a pound apiece.” The fence was painted red, and it formed the circumference of the walled city that encompassed the seven houses in which the married couples and their children lived and where we now had our communal meals and the chapel. The nearly forty single adults continued to live in two separate houses, one each for the men and the women, outside of the red fence. The phrase “out in the world” came to represent the world beyond our compound. “That’s where the bad people live,” Mariam told me in her know-it-all way, as we sat eating our bread, butter, and oregano sandwiches on the picnic bench in our enclosure. I knew the litany of who the bad people were—the Jews, the pagans, the heretics, the infidels, the Protestants, the Freemasons, and the pious frauds, or as Father called them, “PFs.” They were the Irish Catholics of Boston who had turned against him and sided with Archbishop Cushing. The more the world was shut out, the more I longed to see it. One evening, while playing in the newly enclosed yard, I made a discovery. By putting my right eye up to the small sliver of space between the gate and the post to which it was hinged, I was able to spy the top of Boston’s tallest building, the John Hancock in Copley Square. In the fading daylight I could see the steady blue light shining from the weather beacon. [image file=Image00019.jpg] The entire adult community in the summer of 1953. My mother is fourth from the right in the front row; my father is on the far right in the back row. “It’s going to be sunny tomorrow,” I announced with confidence to my father. He had taught me the verse that interpreted the color of the light, which was a weather beacon. Steady blue, clear view. Flashing blue, clouds due. Steady red, rain ahead. Flashing red, snow instead. The only other glimpse I now had into the world beyond the red fence was on Thursday evenings when Father continued to give his once-famous lectures. The throngs of listeners in his heyday were now replaced by a small coterie of ladies, loyalists to Father. Their arrival in an array of “worldly” attire—hats and high-heeled shoes, pocketbooks, and all manner of coats, furs, dresses, and suits—was a feast for my eyes. When a couple of them would head off to “powder their noses,” an expression I found baffling, I followed them to the ladies’ room. Once inside, I stood silently, my back against the wall, observing their rituals.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  From back when we lived in Cambridge, before the PL rule was in place and when she was still Alberta Maria Rensaglia, I knew she had graduated from Radcliffe College and spoke both Italian and French fluently. She was also an artist, but most intriguing to me was that she had studied to be an opera singer. Now garbed in her nun’s attire, Sister Maria Crucis displayed none of that worldliness that fascinated me; on the contrary, she invoked an asceticism that I bridled against. She demanded an almost obsequious reverence from the five of us Little Sisters who were her charges. She was Queen Bee, and we the humble drones did her bidding, following her smothering set of rules. A hypochondriac, perhaps from being a pampered only child, Sister Maria Crucis took to bed at the first sign of a sniffle. And she treated us similarly, as though we were delicate china, fragile and breakable. It was late February, a month after we’d moved, and the flu epidemic returned. I prided myself on being one of the few children who hadn’t succumbed. Then one night, I coughed as Sister Maria Crucis came into my cubicle to kiss me goodnight. Just a little nothing cough. “I think you’re coming down with the flu,” she exclaimed. “Oh, no, I’m fine,” I responded, desperate to maintain my status as one of the “strong” and “healthy” children. But to her my cough was an opportunity to envelop me in her protective cocoon. She swooped into action, armed with a jar of Vicks VapoRub that she proceeded to slather on my chest. “I’ll be back with some brandy,” she said as she headed off down the corridor to return with the only enjoyable part of the treatment—warm brandy mixed with honey that, with the help of additional heavy woolen blankets that she piled on top of me, was meant to sweat the flu out of me. Even story time (Sister Catherine reintroduced bedtime stories) was ritualized. Sister Maria Crucis would position herself in the middle of the bed in one of our cubicles, with her back against the wall. Once she had sorted her long black skirt so that it lay in a tidy fashion around her legs, she signaled the five of us to set ourselves up on either side of her, with our hands in our laps and our bathrobes neatly closed and tied. As Sister Maria Crucis read to us, my mind would wander…. What is Sister Elizabeth Ann doing? Why can’t she be reading to me? 18 Leonard 1958 A s I reached the edge of the pine forest, I bounded ahead of the other children with my best friend, Leonard. Nine months younger than I was, Leonard was like a brother to me. We’d been almost inseparable since birth. We both loved nature. Now hand in hand, we ran through the woods.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Brother James Aloysius will drive you to the bus stop in Ayer in the morning and pick you up at night, and I’ll have dinner with you in the evening.” It would be years before I came to appreciate the irony of this new arrangement. Sister Catherine, having failed in her mission to mold me into a bride of Christ, rid herself of me by handing me back to my parents after more than a decade of enforced separation from them. * * * In the darkness before dawn each morning, my father drove me to the Greyhound station where I took the hour-long bus ride into Boston to attend secretarial school. Riding in the car with him and engaging in small talk as we made the fifteen-minute journey was a novel experience. “Do you have your gloves?” he would say if the weather was frigid. I adored him, but I wasn’t used to his playing the role of father and felt at a loss for how to respond in an intimate way, unfamiliar as I was with the natural role of father to daughter. But I would always give him a kiss as I bolted out of the car. In the evening when I stepped off the bus, he would bring me back to the seclusion of St. Joseph’s House, often accompanying me inside so he could have a brief conversation with my mother, in what seemed like a husband-and-wife kind of way. It pleased me to see them together talking softly. Then he’d depart, and Sister Elizabeth Ann and I would eat in the dining room that she had set up in an elegant fashion. For the first few weeks, our conversation at dinner was reserved, almost formal. I was afraid of scandalizing her with a question or a comment. After dinner, in the privacy of my locked bedroom, as I did my homework, I turned on the transistor radio I’d bought during the summer, using earphones to keep my secret secure. I’d tune in to WBZ and listen to Bob Kennedy’s hour-long show Contact , which featured politicians, authors, and celebrities of all kinds, as well as discussions about controversial topics like the death penalty, Vietnam, and abortion. The show inspired me to read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice , as well as Richard Wright’s Native Son , books I was well aware would be anathema at the Center. So I kept them hidden under the mattress. My knowledge base was expanding—from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” during the summer to radical politics—and only a stone’s throw from Sister Catherine’s office. It was empowering, even if I had no one with whom I could exchange ideas or ask questions. Now Christmas was upon us, and with it came a sense of dread. I could remember something special, something that spoke of joy, about each Christmas for the eight years we’d been in Still River.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I couldn’t find the sin, the evil, or the blasphemy in it. On afternoons when my aunt went out grocery shopping with the two youngest boys, I found books that opened my eyes to the real world. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care , in its paperback version, the pages worn from an abundance of use, was a veritable tutorial on the matter of procreation, a subject so closeted at the Center that biology was proscribed as a course in high school. Alone in the house, I pored over the book, and returned it to its place on the shelf before anyone returned. Within a couple of weeks, I had learned “the facts of life.” At 11:30 at night, the local radio station brought its broadcast to a close with the theme song from the recently released movie, Doctor Zhivago . The music was so hauntingly beautiful, so full of romance, it brought tears to my eyes each time it was played, even though I had no notion of the story behind it. A trip to the movies was a venture I was reluctant to take on, lest the word get back to my parents and then to Sister Catherine, who would undoubtedly condemn me to the whole community and ensure that I never saw my siblings again. My curiosity in the sphere of movies was further piqued when my cousin announced that he and his buddies were going to see the season’s newest movie, Georgy Girl , deemed by some reviewers to be risqué. Although my uncle claimed to be shocked at their lack of judgment, he did nothing to prevent them from going, and I found myself fantasizing about what might make the movie so scandalous. Before long, I had memorized the popular theme song with its catchy opening line (“Hey there, Georgy Girl….”), but I wasn’t yet ready to take that giant step into the forbidden land of wicked movies. When my father came down for his weekly visit on Sunday, I saw a man more worldly than the cassocked Big Brother of Still River. Clad now in a black suit and crisp white shirt, his required attire when traveling, he’d settle down on the sofa in his sister’s living room with a copy of the Boston Globe , devouring news on the Red Sox and tennis. He’d chat about things secular—from world affairs to a vast array of cousins. Most particularly, he and Eleanor would reminisce about old times, and I noticed with pleasure how he happily discussed his past life. He was the life of the party at the dinner table, and when he left to return to Still River, I would wonder if he might not prefer the life I was leading to his own. The weeks passed, and as they did, I found myself a little less lost, a tiny bit more comfortable in putting my foot on the first stepping-stones toward assimilation into the world.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  It took weeks, but little by little, the fence was erected and the outside world disappeared—the people who lived in the multifamily houses across the street, the open field where children played, the rag man and his horse and buggy, the banana man who pulled his cart and shouted, “Whoop! Ripe bananas, ten cents a pound apiece.” The fence was painted red, and it formed the circumference of the walled city that encompassed the seven houses in which the married couples and their children lived and where we now had our communal meals and the chapel. The nearly forty single adults continued to live in two separate houses, one each for the men and the women, outside of the red fence. The phrase “out in the world” came to represent the world beyond our compound. “That’s where the bad people live,” Mariam told me in her know-it-all way, as we sat eating our bread, butter, and oregano sandwiches on the picnic bench in our enclosure. I knew the litany of who the bad people were—the Jews, the pagans, the heretics, the infidels, the Protestants, the Freemasons, and the pious frauds, or as Father called them, “PFs.” They were the Irish Catholics of Boston who had turned against him and sided with Archbishop Cushing. The more the world was shut out, the more I longed to see it. One evening, while playing in the newly enclosed yard, I made a discovery. By putting my right eye up to the small sliver of space between the gate and the post to which it was hinged, I was able to spy the top of Boston’s tallest building, the John Hancock in Copley Square. In the fading daylight I could see the steady blue light shining from the weather beacon. [image file=Image00019.jpg] The entire adult community in the summer of 1953. My mother is fourth from the right in the front row; my father is on the far right in the back row. “It’s going to be sunny tomorrow,” I announced with confidence to my father. He had taught me the verse that interpreted the color of the light, which was a weather beacon. Steady blue, clear view. Flashing blue, clouds due. Steady red, rain ahead. Flashing red, snow instead. The only other glimpse I now had into the world beyond the red fence was on Thursday evenings when Father continued to give his once-famous lectures. The throngs of listeners in his heyday were now replaced by a small coterie of ladies, loyalists to Father. Their arrival in an array of “worldly” attire—hats and high-heeled shoes, pocketbooks, and all manner of coats, furs, dresses, and suits—was a feast for my eyes. When a couple of them would head off to “powder their noses,” an expression I found baffling, I followed them to the ladies’ room. Once inside, I stood silently, my back against the wall, observing their rituals.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “The Center,” first located a short walk from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and subsequently transported to the bucolic hamlet of Still River, Massachusetts, evolved into a social experiment of sorts, whose purpose was to create a pure-hearted community in which no material thing, no cultural influence, not even the bonds between family members, could impede the path to God. Dedicated to a rigid adherence to Catholic orthodoxy, this community of nearly one hundred people, including my parents and thirty-nine children who were born into it, lived a life completely shielded from an outside world that was considered to be fraught with evil. I was educated within the confines of my community from nursery school through my senior year of high school. For much of my childhood, I grew up without the daily love and attention of my parents. I was just six years old when Leonard Feeney and Catherine Clarke made the decision that my siblings and I were to live apart from our parents. Later, Leonard Feeney pressured my parents to forsake their marital vows, no longer living as husband and wife. A celibate existence, they were told, was more conducive to a life dedicated to God. And so my parents complied. On only one occasion during my life at the Center was I allowed to listen to the radio. That was when the community assembled to hear the inaugural address of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. I felt transported at that moment into the vast unreachable outside world—a place I longed to experience. I was eleven years old at the time. I had heard of the Beatles only because Leonard Feeney had once played a fifteen-second snippet of their hit song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a demonstration of “music of the devil.” The eruption of rock and roll onto the world stage was lost on me, as was the sexual revolution that came in its wake. Within my community, any personal attachment, any demonstration of familial affection, any expression of romantic love was prohibited. As for sex, the word itself was verboten. There was no explanation of the facts of life, as though by revealing nothing, the course of nature could be manipulated, and the lack of knowledge would lead to lack of interest. But the absence of understanding such things did nothing to inhibit my natural desires. As I matured into my teenage years, I fell into a series of crushes on the grown men within the community, with not a glimmer of understanding about why it happened, what it meant, or what to do about it. Though I’d never had a date, much less kissed a boy, my innocent interest was viewed as subverting God’s will, which was deemed to be that each of the thirty-nine children should embrace religious life and celibacy.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Now, dears,” she said in a serious voice, “you must promise me that you will keep this a secret. You mustn’t breathe a word of it to Father. He doesn’t understand little girls the way I do.” I got the picture—Father didn’t want us to have dolls because they were worldly. But I also pondered Sister Catherine’s words—that she understood little girls. I wanted to believe her, and I wanted to think of her in a motherly way. She was now the only person at the Center who could dispense love and I craved it from her. But those moments were fleeting and her love always felt conditional, as though a temporary reward for obedience to her. Bedtime stories, banished in Cambridge by Sister Matilda, after we were separated from our parents, were re-instituted by Sister Catherine. In addition, she took to reading to us during dinnertime several evenings a week. My favorite book was Fabiola , which had the subtitle, The Church of the Catacombs . A nineteenth-century novel by the English Catholic cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, it was a tale of conversion and martyrdom, the latter generally depicted in gruesome detail. The heroine was an elegant and brilliant young woman named Fabiola, the much-loved daughter of a wealthy pagan Roman. Her mother had died when she was an infant. Her confidante was Syra, her most valued slave and a Christian in hiding, who eventually converted Fabiola. While Sister Catherine was endeavoring to inspire us with the honor of martyrdom, what captivated me was the vivid depiction of daily life in a wealthy Roman household in the fourth century. I longed for Fabiola’s lifestyle, her many-roomed mansion with servants and silver, her elegant clothes and expensive jewelry—in particular, a radiant emerald ring. The vivid imagery provided endless new material for reverie, as I imagined myself as Fabiola. Pagan or Christian, she was my model. If, instead of engaging in a session of reading, Sister Catherine had business on her mind, it was evident from the force of her stride, from the glint in her eye, the set of her jaw, and the pursed lips, as she took the few steps to her post in the doorway between our two refectories. And she’d come to the point without any small talk. That’s what happened the evening she introduced the Big Punisher. “For those of you who break the rules, there will be a new form of punishment—the Big Punisher—and it will be unlike anything you have ever experienced before. It’s for the good of your souls.” She didn’t describe it or show it. She deliberately left it a secret, so we had to imagine what kind of device the Big Punisher might be. But the threat was enough to convince me that I would do everything I could to avoid being beaten with it. The Big Punisher was immediately put into use.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I couldn’t find the sin, the evil, or the blasphemy in it. On afternoons when my aunt went out grocery shopping with the two youngest boys, I found books that opened my eyes to the real world. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care , in its paperback version, the pages worn from an abundance of use, was a veritable tutorial on the matter of procreation, a subject so closeted at the Center that biology was proscribed as a course in high school. Alone in the house, I pored over the book, and returned it to its place on the shelf before anyone returned. Within a couple of weeks, I had learned “the facts of life.” At 11:30 at night, the local radio station brought its broadcast to a close with the theme song from the recently released movie, Doctor Zhivago . The music was so hauntingly beautiful, so full of romance, it brought tears to my eyes each time it was played, even though I had no notion of the story behind it. A trip to the movies was a venture I was reluctant to take on, lest the word get back to my parents and then to Sister Catherine, who would undoubtedly condemn me to the whole community and ensure that I never saw my siblings again. My curiosity in the sphere of movies was further piqued when my cousin announced that he and his buddies were going to see the season’s newest movie, Georgy Girl , deemed by some reviewers to be risqué. Although my uncle claimed to be shocked at their lack of judgment, he did nothing to prevent them from going, and I found myself fantasizing about what might make the movie so scandalous. Before long, I had memorized the popular theme song with its catchy opening line (“Hey there, Georgy Girl….”), but I wasn’t yet ready to take that giant step into the forbidden land of wicked movies. When my father came down for his weekly visit on Sunday, I saw a man more worldly than the cassocked Big Brother of Still River. Clad now in a black suit and crisp white shirt, his required attire when traveling, he’d settle down on the sofa in his sister’s living room with a copy of the Boston Globe , devouring news on the Red Sox and tennis. He’d chat about things secular—from world affairs to a vast array of cousins. Most particularly, he and Eleanor would reminisce about old times, and I noticed with pleasure how he happily discussed his past life. He was the life of the party at the dinner table, and when he left to return to Still River, I would wonder if he might not prefer the life I was leading to his own. The weeks passed, and as they did, I found myself a little less lost, a tiny bit more comfortable in putting my foot on the first stepping-stones toward assimilation into the world.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  My favorites were the twin stories by Lucy Fitch Perkins—Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Filipino, Spartan, and more. Each volume was like a trip to a family home in a foreign country. There, a pair of twins, always a boy and a girl, lived with their parents. And somewhere in the middle of the book, the children would head out on their own for an adventure that invariably went terribly wrong. Gypsies kidnapped the Italian twins, and the Filipino twins were marooned in a typhoon, while the Norwegian twins had to kill a wolf. I was spellbound. Reading the stories again and again, I imagined myself as one of the twins, always relieved when they made it safely back to their home and their parents. It wasn’t lost on me that children in the storybooks were able to live with their parents. 13 A New Home 1957 W hile the red fence was meant to shield us from the evils of the world beyond, it was failing to protect us. One afternoon, during our music lesson, a pellet from a BB gun flew through the open window, hitting our tutor’s eyeglasses and knocking them off her face and onto the floor. From the street, hidden from view by the red fence, came the sound of boys’ laughter. We sat in fright as Big Sister picked up her shattered glasses and hurried us out of the room. A few weeks later, while I was getting ready for bed in my third-floor room that overlooked the street, a crashing thud startled me. I looked toward the window, expecting to see the venetian blind had fallen, but it was still in its place. As I glanced at the floor, I became paralyzed with fear. There, not two feet from where I stood, was a rock so large I couldn’t pick it up in one hand. For a few seconds I stood frozen in place, unable to speak or even move. Then I let out a bloodcurdling shriek as I flew from my bedroom around the corner and into the kitchen where the other Little Sisters were drying their hair or polishing their shoes. Sister Colette, the Angel in charge that week, leapt up and held my shoulders in an effort to calm me. “What is it?” she asked. The only word I could manage to gasp was “rock.” Taking me by the hand, she brought me back to my room. I pulled back as she entered, fearful of what might happen, but she strode past the rock and the shattered glass to the window, peering through the wide-slatted venetian blind to look down on the street below. Then turning to me, she muttered, “Those dogs!” and shook her head. As she swept up the hundreds of shards of glass strewn across the floor, I asked her, “Did they hurt the dogs, too?” She laughed softly. “No, honey,” she said. “That’s what those scoundrels are.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  matter became more interesting for a twelve-year-old girl whose main endeavor was to learn as much as possible about the world beyond the Center. There were numerous episodes of television serials from the 1940s. Don Winslow of the Navy, a twelve-part adventure series about a U.S. Navy commander during World War II, and Kit Carson and the Mystery Riders were popular Friday night fare, as was Laurel and Hardy. But like the books in our library, the movies we watched were prescreened by a trusted Big Brother. Often in the middle of a movie, the screen would go dark, the lens being covered to prevent us from viewing what was considered “inappropriate material.” From the context of what we were viewing, I figured out what those “bad” parts were about. It was usually when a girl and a boy came into view together. Travelogues were among my favorite movies, adding visual stimulus to my years of fantasizing about the many cities and towns I had become familiar with from the lives of the saints. Far-fetched though it might have seemed, I allowed myself to revel in the belief that one day I’d find a way to see the whole world. I’d fly in an airplane. I’d visit all the cathedrals in Europe and eat in fancy restaurants and swim in the Mediterranean Sea. I’d see the cedars of Lebanon and go to the Isle of Lindisfarne. Someday, I will. I repeated to myself, over and over. Someday, I will.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “The Center,” first located a short walk from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and subsequently transported to the bucolic hamlet of Still River, Massachusetts, evolved into a social experiment of sorts, whose purpose was to create a pure-hearted community in which no material thing, no cultural influence, not even the bonds between family members, could impede the path to God. Dedicated to a rigid adherence to Catholic orthodoxy, this community of nearly one hundred people, including my parents and thirty-nine children who were born into it, lived a life completely shielded from an outside world that was considered to be fraught with evil. I was educated within the confines of my community from nursery school through my senior year of high school. For much of my childhood, I grew up without the daily love and attention of my parents. I was just six years old when Leonard Feeney and Catherine Clarke made the decision that my siblings and I were to live apart from our parents. Later, Leonard Feeney pressured my parents to forsake their marital vows, no longer living as husband and wife. A celibate existence, they were told, was more conducive to a life dedicated to God. And so my parents complied. On only one occasion during my life at the Center was I allowed to listen to the radio. That was when the community assembled to hear the inaugural address of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. I felt transported at that moment into the vast unreachable outside world—a place I longed to experience. I was eleven years old at the time. I had heard of the Beatles only because Leonard Feeney had once played a fifteen-second snippet of their hit song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a demonstration of “music of the devil.” The eruption of rock and roll onto the world stage was lost on me, as was the sexual revolution that came in its wake. Within my community, any personal attachment, any demonstration of familial affection, any expression of romantic love was prohibited. As for sex, the word itself was verboten. There was no explanation of the facts of life, as though by revealing nothing, the course of nature could be manipulated, and the lack of knowledge would lead to lack of interest. But the absence of understanding such things did nothing to inhibit my natural desires. As I matured into my teenage years, I fell into a series of crushes on the grown men within the community, with not a glimmer of understanding about why it happened, what it meant, or what to do about it. Though I’d never had a date, much less kissed a boy, my innocent interest was viewed as subverting God’s will, which was deemed to be that each of the thirty-nine children should embrace religious life and celibacy.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Now, dears,” she said in a serious voice, “you must promise me that you will keep this a secret. You mustn’t breathe a word of it to Father. He doesn’t understand little girls the way I do.” I got the picture—Father didn’t want us to have dolls because they were worldly. But I also pondered Sister Catherine’s words—that she understood little girls. I wanted to believe her, and I wanted to think of her in a motherly way. She was now the only person at the Center who could dispense love and I craved it from her. But those moments were fleeting and her love always felt conditional, as though a temporary reward for obedience to her. Bedtime stories, banished in Cambridge by Sister Matilda, after we were separated from our parents, were re-instituted by Sister Catherine. In addition, she took to reading to us during dinnertime several evenings a week. My favorite book was Fabiola , which had the subtitle, The Church of the Catacombs . A nineteenth-century novel by the English Catholic cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, it was a tale of conversion and martyrdom, the latter generally depicted in gruesome detail. The heroine was an elegant and brilliant young woman named Fabiola, the much-loved daughter of a wealthy pagan Roman. Her mother had died when she was an infant. Her confidante was Syra, her most valued slave and a Christian in hiding, who eventually converted Fabiola. While Sister Catherine was endeavoring to inspire us with the honor of martyrdom, what captivated me was the vivid depiction of daily life in a wealthy Roman household in the fourth century. I longed for Fabiola’s lifestyle, her many-roomed mansion with servants and silver, her elegant clothes and expensive jewelry—in particular, a radiant emerald ring. The vivid imagery provided endless new material for reverie, as I imagined myself as Fabiola. Pagan or Christian, she was my model. If, instead of engaging in a session of reading, Sister Catherine had business on her mind, it was evident from the force of her stride, from the glint in her eye, the set of her jaw, and the pursed lips, as she took the few steps to her post in the doorway between our two refectories. And she’d come to the point without any small talk. That’s what happened the evening she introduced the Big Punisher. “For those of you who break the rules, there will be a new form of punishment—the Big Punisher—and it will be unlike anything you have ever experienced before. It’s for the good of your souls.” She didn’t describe it or show it. She deliberately left it a secret, so we had to imagine what kind of device the Big Punisher might be. But the threat was enough to convince me that I would do everything I could to avoid being beaten with it. The Big Punisher was immediately put into use.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  bathe and dress in the morning because her breakfast consisted of a handful of pills (her “vitamins” as she called them) washed down with several large gulps of “water,” as she described clear liquid, which was quite obviously vodka. The routine was the same each day. After extricating Mrs. Taylor from her bathtub, terrified that I might break her rail-thin bones either by holding on to her too hard or by letting her slip and fall, I helped her through what generally ended up as a two-hour dressing ritual. Stumbling her spindly legs into a pair of white linen trousers was the first step in the process. Once seated at her makeup table, she embarked on a ceremony of sorts—namely, re-creating Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, debutante of the year 1938. Between sips of what she kept referring to as water, but I knew better, she drew with a deep black makeup pencil the shape of her eyebrows, which were nonexistent, as well as her once famed widow’s peak, which was now simply part of her nearly bald head that she adorned with a jet-black wig, another replica of days gone by. By the time she powdered her face and painted on her ruby-red lipstick, she looked more Kabuki than debutante, more a caricature than a re-creation of her once exotic beauty. Despite her intense reliance on pills and alcohol, Mrs. Taylor had a bright eye, a sharp tongue, and a wickedly good sense of humor. And deep inside there was also a kind, but badly broken, heart. Snippets of stories from her past that spilled out of her as we drove each day depicted a woman who craved love because it had been denied her. For a reason I couldn’t explain to myself, likely because I was well aware that this was a temporary employment situation for me, I found her fascinating rather than revolting. After visiting her psychiatrist, who seemed oblivious to her state of addiction, she and I would lunch at the Ritz Carlton, the same meal every day—beef tongue on rye bread with mustard for each of us, accompanied by a double martini (for her alone). By then she was inebriated as well as exhausted, and I took her home and helped her into bed, leaving her to the staff, which took over with understandable trepidation—I’d hardly be out of the bedroom when she’d start screaming at her maids. In the few hours that were left in the day, I scrambled to set up interviews and secure a job that would take me where I was determined to go—up that ladder in the financial world.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  weeks wore on that summer, I came to enjoy and fully memorize “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine,” the summer’s hot numbers, despite thinking that the lyrics were inane. In the evenings, I watched The Lawrence Welk Show and The Red Skelton Hour with my uncle and aunt, and while I soaked up the world of polka dancers and corny jokes, it wasn’t lost on me that my teenage cousins always left the house just as the shows were about to start. Was it the desultory fare they were avoiding, or were they also bolting so they wouldn’t have to explain me to their friends? As to Sister Catherine’s dire warnings that television would cause me to lose my soul, I was mystified. I couldn’t find the sin, the evil, or the blasphemy in it. On afternoons when my aunt went out grocery shopping with the two youngest boys, I found books that opened my eyes to the real world. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, in its paperback version, the pages worn from an abundance of use, was a veritable tutorial on the matter of procreation, a subject so closeted at the Center that biology was proscribed as a course in high school. Alone in the house, I pored over the book, and returned it to its place on the shelf before anyone returned. Within a couple of weeks, I had learned “the facts of life.” At 11:30 at night, the local radio station brought its broadcast to a close with the theme song from the recently released movie, Doctor Zhivago. The music was so hauntingly beautiful, so full of romance, it brought tears to my eyes each time it was played, even though I had no notion of the story behind it. A trip to the movies was a venture I was reluctant to take on, lest the word get back to my parents and then to Sister Catherine, who would undoubtedly condemn me to the whole community and ensure that I never saw my siblings again. My curiosity in the sphere of movies was further piqued when my cousin announced that he and his buddies were going to see the season’s newest movie, Georgy Girl, deemed by some reviewers to be risqué. Although my uncle claimed to be shocked at their lack of judgment, he did nothing to prevent them from going, and I found myself fantasizing about what might make the movie so scandalous. Before long, I had memorized the popular theme song with its catchy opening line (“Hey there, Georgy Girl....”), but I wasn’t yet ready to take that giant step into the forbidden land of wicked movies.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  A thought occurred to me. “And will Brother James Aloysius be able to come and visit me while I’m there?” I asked. “Of course,” Sister Catherine replied, “He can come once in a while.” Once in a while, she had said, but that was enough for me. Now he, too, could visit with his family. I was elated and tried to imagine what life at the Learys’ home might be like. Did they play games together? What kinds of meals did they have? What did their rooms look like? Would I be able to go to Mass every day? Forgetting about what I was leaving behind for just a few moments, I actually looked forward to the summer. * * * As my last days of life at the Center loomed before me, the focus of my greatest unhappiness now centered on Brother Basil. The feeling I had had for him for the past several years felt like true love and had not subsided with time. I was wracked with the anguish of never seeing him again. Yet I still had no clue as to whether he knew of my feelings or of my impending disappearance. My last night alone in my cubicle, I cried uncontrollably for all that I was leaving behind—my adored parents and siblings, my family of Big Brothers and Sisters, and Brother Basil, the love of my life. He might be out of my sight, but I promised myself he would never be out of my heart.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  Here in Still River, at least, I could observe the outside world a bit more successfully than when we lived behind the red fence. Every day, the local dairy farmer, Buzzy Watt, delivered fresh milk. He arrived at the same time each morning, just as we were finishing second breakfast. When I spotted his truck coming down the driveway, I’d put on my winter coat and head out the door so that our paths would cross. Ever cheerful, Buzzy, a short, rectangular man with bright blue eyes and a Hollywood smile, walked up the pathway to the basement kitchen door carrying cartons of freshly bottled milk, his one-year-old son John in tow. “Guh monning,” he would say in his clipped Yankee accent and then follow up with a quip, “Nice one, isn’t it?” or, when it was snowing, “Good for sleddin’.” “Good morning, Mr. Watt,” I replied. I reveled in this brief exchange, in the ability to talk to someone who lived out in the world. As I then crossed the yard to St. Ann’s House, I imagined what life was like in the Watt family house. What did Mrs. Watt look like? Was John their only child? Would they have more? Every glimpse at outsiders, every stare at visitors, brought to mind the same questions over and over. What is their family life like? What would it be like to live out in the world the way they do, with my own family?