The final part of a story by Brian Doyle in Best Catholic Writing 2007 on The Sisters of Mount Angel (return to the beginning of the story)

If we are to properly honor and celebrate the legacy of such graceful and strong people as the sisters at Mt. Angel, who have bent their whole lives to the promise that love will defeat darkness, then we must march into our days with rage and song, with hammers in our hands and prayers in our mouths, and build us a new Church and a new world and a new, roaring poem, with all the grace and strength and sweet, wild magic we can muster. It can be done. It’s being done as I write these words and as you read them. These brave women bet their lives on that premise. My mama bet her life on that premise. Are we to tell them they were wrong, and the task is too big? I don’t have the courage to tell my mother such a thing, for she is a tart, tough, tiny Irish Catholic woman from New York City, and even my brothers, strapping men far taller and broader than I, quail at the thought of telling our mum what cannot be done; and it would take a far braver man than I to stand up to tiny Sister Alicia and tell her that the work she has chosen to do is a bust. She would laugh in my face, and she would be right.

So let us go, then, you and I, and forge a new thing. We do not know its shape, but we know the astounding idea at its heart, the idea that has driven the Catholic clan through two thousand years, the idea that remains, I believe, the key to the moral evolution of the human race, the idea that fell again and again from the lips of the gaunt, dusty man with starlight in his veins: love, love, love, love, love.

The End.

Last year my colleague Jim Manney shared with me the Foreword of a book that he had just finished editing, The Best Catholic Writing 2007 (a series that Loyola Press publishes annually). Brian Doyle, who wrote the Foreword, tells of his experience with the Sisters of Mount Angel. Loyola Press graciously granted me permission to reprint the story for you here at A Nun’s Life. The story will be done “serial-style” with a few paragraphs each day during the Christmas holiday. I’ll be interjecting occasionally to comment and to converse with you. Enjoy!

Some time ago I gave a characteristically rambling talk to a group of Benedictine nuns at their monastery in Oregon. As usual I set out to tell stories and sing prayers and tell jokes and draw tears and foment cheerful chaos and try to connect at some deep, inexplicable level that has everything to do with laughing and weeping, and as usual I was granted more epiphany and delight than I could ever have delivered, which happens to me all the time, which is one of the reasons I feel like the richest man on earth, even though my back is sore all the time and my wife is a confusing country and my children never make their beds and it rains so much here that everyone gets a little mossy come winter.

Anyway, I arrived early at the monastery and wandered around the grounds for a couple of hours, out of respect for my hosts, trying to see and sense something of their lives and loves: their salty days, the way the wind slid through their fir trees, the geometry of the gravestones in their tiny cemetery, the way the hop fields and vineyards stretched away in corduroy rows beneath their little hill, the keening of hawks overhead, the secret words that dragonflies and damselflies spelled in the air among the old stone buildings. I wandered and wondered. I walked the simple stations of the cross that someone had carved in trees along a path. I examined the old washhouse, where millions of prayers had been murmured over socks and frocks during the last century. I sat in the tall grass and prayed quietly for all sorts of things, even for the one-eyed cat glaring at me balefully from the brambles, and then I went to give my talk.

First there was a meal, of course, and before the meal were prayers, and the three nuns offering prayers were a microcosm of the monastery….

Check in tomorrow for the continuation of The Sisters of Mount Angel.