Catherine Coldstream on life as a nun
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Catherine Coldstream on life as a nun
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Join my conversation with Catherine Coldstream as we relax into a questing, rambling chat about the deep pull that many of us feel towards the quiet and gentle rhythms of the monastic life, and the risks of submitting so completely.
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Katherine May: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Thanks for listening. I am here with the very, very gracious Katherine Coldstream, who has agreed very kindly to re record our conversation, because we did this live a couple of weeks ago for the True Stories Book Club. And, um, we're Everything broke.We got halfway through, we were deep in conversation and I could see that people were talking in the chat that they were unable to hear us anymore and unable to see us. And I decided the best thing to do was to carry on with the conversation and then send it out to people later, but then later learned that nothing had recorded at all.
So Katherine, thank you so much for kindly agreeing to come back. I am so grateful to you.
Catherine Coldstream: No, it's a pleasure. It's absolutely lovely to talk to you again. We had a nice time. Yeah, because I haven't clicked anything. [00:01:00] No, we're good. Yeah, it's
Katherine May: lovely to be back. There's a little thing in the corner of my screen that says recording and I'm going to trust that.
Yeah, definitely. Good, okay. Bye. Yes, so, I mean, your book Cloistered, uh, My Years as a Nun, um, is just one of the favourite books I've read in the last year. I was sent a preview copy, which is one of the great privileges of being a writer. And, like, quite often, because I'm a terrible person, I get these books through and I just feel overwhelmed rather than happy about it.
You know, I know I should feel happy, but I just think, there's all these books and no time. Draw One, I sat down to read straight away and couldn't put it down because I, I have slight fantasies about being a nun. I have to admit to you, it's a, it's not a religious thing. It's. The quiet and the peace and the rhythm of the [00:02:00] day that deeply appeals.
Yeah,
Catherine Coldstream: that makes sense. Well, I'm sorry to say, I can see you, I can see you actually. Yeah, yeah, because actually, you know, I think there's the religion, obviously, it's an indispensable part of it, but I think some people are attracted to the, I hate the word lifestyle necessarily, you know, in this context, but actually it's the way of life.
They're attracted to the seclusion, the silence, the balance. Um, yeah.
Katherine May: Simplicity. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I, um, it's really funny because, you know, I talk to other people about your book, and it's kind of 50 50, you know, half and half. people say, Oh, I'd love to be a nun. And the other half say, Oh, that sounds terrible.
But both want to read it for that reason.
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, that's amazing. You know, I'm so pleased to hear you say that because, um, you know, it's lovely to think that when you saw the book hit the mat, you didn't think, Oh, no, that's another one. Um, but yeah, that you've actually. You know, got, you got [00:03:00] drawn in and really, really enjoyed reading it because I had no idea what to expect when it's my first book.
Um, and, uh, you know, and I, when writing it, I didn't know whether people would find a non memoir interesting anyway. Um, you know, there were those who encouraged me to write about my Bohemian family upbringing. Things like, things like that. So, um, It's great to know that it reached you and that it speaks to people on different levels, not just that, you know, religious, so to speak.
Katherine May: You know, I think, I think that's a, I think that's a key marketing insight, actually, that there's this. curiosity. But before we go on, for people that haven't read it yet, tell us a little bit about Cloistered. Where does it begin? Where does it end? And I think they'll be able to guess. I don't think it's a plot spoiler to say that you are no longer living as part of it.
Catherine Coldstream: Yeah, I can't write all day. Yes, I'm, I'm not sort of beaming this down from a turret somewhere. Um, so yeah, it's uh, it's about the [00:04:00] 12 years I spent as a contemplative nun, um, in a cloistered order. That means an order where we lived inside an enclosure, um, which means there's a physical separation, uh, from the world.
Um, you live behind a wall and grills. Uh, the grill is the floor to ceiling. bar, bar structure, which is a very medieval practice, um, goes back to 16th century Spain, actually, that, uh, that part of the order. So my branch of the Carmelite order was, um, reformed by Saint Teresa of Avila century. So it's got this kind of quite strongly Spanish, um, influence as well.
And, um, I, I entered the car at the age of 27, having had, I suppose, a sort of life changing conversion experience, a sort of classic conversion experience, in that I felt my whole world completely changed at the age of 24. when my father died. [00:05:00] Um, so my father was a lot older than my mother, um, nearly 30 years older.
So when I was 24, dad was, you know, nearly 80. And, um, when he died, it was a complete shock and triggered, uh, some sort of, you know, Some sort of deep, deep search for meaning and, you know, uh, the shock of facing, you know, mortality and, uh, you know, transcendence and this kind of sense that my father's soul lived on.
It all kind of coalesced into this massive sense of, you know, ultimate meaning, which, um, I connected with the Christian idea of God. And I then went on a search, which took me, um, first of all, back into kind of going to church, and then it took me into Roman Catholicism. Because I'm a bit of an enthusiastic type of person, I thought, right, I'm going to do this properly.
What do you do if you've had a conversion experience, you become a Catholic? Okay. You become a nun. And, you know, you don't just become a nun who [00:06:00] sort of goes out and does a bit of teaching. I chose the most extreme order I could find. Right, I'm going to be a silent nun, locked up. So I chose the Carmelites or, as I put in my prologue, it chose me.
There's a sense of that with a vocation that somehow you've been singled out to live this way of life. So the story's about how I joined this order and there was a tremendous sort of honeymoon period of it all feeling utterly wonderful and ethereal. Then after a couple of years you hit reality or it hits you and it becomes much harder and you realise it's just 20 women locked up together in an isolated rural area, in this case in the north of England.
And it's about how dealing with the interpersonal conflicts and then what effectively worsen. quite dysfunctional factors in that particular community at that time led to my running away in the middle of the night, 10 years later. [00:07:00] Um, and, uh, the book starts with a sort of dramatic prologue where I'm running away in the middle of the night.
Then with chapter one, it cuts to my first morning and goes chronologically through the 10 years. And then it ends with my running away 10 years later, and in the epilogue, it shows how I actually went back for two years before finally discerning, which was the kind of word we use, the vocabulary of discernment was used to kind of, when you are making big decisions about whether or not to be a nun, I discerned in the end that it was right for me to leave.
So, yeah, it's the
Katherine May: story of that. It's an incredibly powerful narrative art that, and I, I love the language of this whole world that you found yourself in. It was just so engrossing for me, you know, words like discernment and charism, which was a new one to me. I loved the, can you explain what that means?
Catherine Coldstream: Yes, the charism is, um, it comes from the [00:08:00] Greek root for gift, and of course we get the word charisma from the same, the same root, but In the Catholic Church, and particularly in the monastic traditions, there's this sense that each religious order, which is like a sort of a family, a religious family within the Catholic Church, has its own charism, which means like a sort of God given character.
So the charism is the kind of character of the order. So in the case of the Carmelites, The sort of character of the Carmelite life is one that's strongly defined by silence, solitude, simplicity, withdrawal from the world. It has a kind of otherworldly charism. If you look at something like the Benedictine Order, their charism is a lot more to do with community and balance and being sort of rooted in the world, but The Carmelite charism was more about, um, well, in medieval times they even described it as flight from the world.
So [00:09:00] it's got a very different stance.
Katherine May: Again, so appealing.
Catherine Coldstream: It's great for a few years. I think, you know, I mean, it, I mean, of course, it potentially is a wonderful, um, vocation to spend your whole life engaged in. But I think for me, the fact that I left after 12 years meant I've been there long enough to sort of have like this total immersion in a really, the really healing aspects of, um, retreat and withdrawal and silence and separation from the hubbub and the sort of toxicity of, you know, um, of very, of modern life.
But, um, I think that after, possibly after probably seven or eight years, I would have probably been ready to have sort of said, okay, this is, this has just really done me a lot of good. Um, when I went in, I was grieving my father. So I had a lot to process and a lot of grief to work through and actually a cloistered order is, is a really beautiful environment to be in.
Um, when you are, well, I was wintering in a way, I was wintering, wasn't I? I was going through grief, I [00:10:00] was going through loss, I was going through letting go of so much that it defined me as a, you know, growing up.
Katherine May: And making space for that.
Catherine Coldstream: Yeah, I mean because when I, When I was 21, the family, the house I grew up in was sold.
So there was a lot of, you know, and I was kind of displaced after that. So I think being rerouted in secluded monastic life was actually, on just a purely natural level, a really, a really healing and grounding. And, yeah, it was, it was an experience that helped me gain strength. But I think after perhaps about seven, eight year mark, it was becoming counterproductive.
And, you know, I think I was ready to, um, be, you know, to be more integrated, I think, as a person and go out into the world again. Uh, but that was strong. I'd love to
Katherine May: ask you in a minute, but maybe, maybe that would be telling the story backwards I need to resist it, but about how you came, [00:11:00] you know, what the, what you came back into the world and how you were changed, but before that, because that would be very much backwards.
Catherine Coldstream: Yeah, that's another, yeah.
Katherine May: Yeah, I would love to, I'd love to think first of all really about the day to day life in, tell us where you were and tell us, tell us what your day looked like. I mean it, it sounds, it sounds busy but quiet at the same time in a really interesting way.
Catherine Coldstream: Yes, that's, that's an interesting observation.
I mean, we were physically silent for most of the time, but when you say busy, I was surprised when I went in by how much Activity. There was so silent activity, but very purposeful. So at every moment of the day, you were giving your full attention, if not to the kind of communal or silent prayer times, which were all very structured.
You might be doing gardening or cooking or sewing, but whatever you were doing, you, you gave it your full attention. That was one of the [00:12:00] monastics of practices, which meant you didn't. You didn't dissipate your energy by doing, you know, by multitasking or by talking to people while you were doing things.
You were fully present, whatever you were doing, which was in effect making every action of your day a kind of prayer because you were making every action a conscious, intentional offering, if you like, to God. So there was that busyness and it was more, it didn't feel so much busy as intentional and, um, fully kind of, Yeah, you were going from one task to another, um, without much left up.
You know, you didn't have time in between to put your feet up or just sort of switch off.
Katherine May: But also, it struck me that, oh sorry, no, carry on.
Catherine Coldstream: No, well, I was just going to say, you know, to take you through the day. It, um, it started early. This is one of the things I did find difficult. It started at 5. 15. with a brutally loud wake up alarm.
I mean, really, really loud. It was called the [00:13:00] match track, uh, which is a French word. It's a Q U E word, which, um, because, because our particular, the English carbonates came over from France, actually. So we had all these French sort of words and practices as well as the Spanish ones. And, um, so the match track was this really loud rattle.
So it sort of worked a bit like a football rattle, but it was much louder. Swaggy. It was a sort of medieval contraption that weighed a ton. Um, and somebody, luckily it was never, it never fell to me. Somebody had to get up earlier than everyone else and go around the corridors ringing this thing. And, um, so you woke up, it was a really loud alarm, and you had to get dressed very quickly.
You washed in a bucket of cold water. Um, you had a jug, a water jug in the corner of your room, which was called a cell. Uh, so each had a cell. We didn't have basins or anything, it was just a jug. And you washed in cold water on the, on, so crouching on the floor. And, um, then you got down to the monastic chapel, which we call the choir, [00:14:00] in time to start morning prayer, which was also called Lords.
It started at 5. 45 and this was a very formal communal prayer which was based on the psalms and which we sang in kind of either lovely sort of psalm tones, some of it on monotone. The singing was lovely and I always, always, always, without fail loved that and it was One of the things I think that helped me keep going.
Katherine May: Yeah.
Catherine Coldstream: Uh, but you know, once you'd been, you'd kicked off the day in this very purposeful way, it went on like that. So, um, Lords was the first of seven. You could call them services, which were, which went right back to again medieval times they used to be called the monastic hours. Yeah. So you had each one, you know, lasted anything from 15 to 30 minutes.
And they were called lords, terse, sex, gnome. etc. and compliment at the [00:15:00] end. And um, your day was divided really between these formal times of prayer and community with the others, and it involved processing in in a very sort of formal way, and you didn't look at anyone else, you didn't speak, you just sort of, um, carried out this ritual in a very focused way.
And in between those, you'd get about two hours in between each of these services, where you would be either having silent prayer time on your own. Uh, so we had two full hours a day of completely silent solitary prayer, which was, you know, vaguely you could call it contemplative prayer. It didn't involve saying words.
It was a kind of sitting in the presence of God in a kind of receptive state. mode, I suppose. Yeah. Which is incredibly good for you psychologically, I think. I'm
Katherine May: sure, yeah. Yeah. I
Catherine Coldstream: mean, it was, it was marvellous. I obviously loved that side of the life, so that you had that wonderful kind of immersion in a silent attentiveness to, well, obviously we, for us it was God, but you could reframe that [00:16:00] as a kind of, not exactly, well, there was mindfulness, of course, to it.
And there was an element of just being in, in the moment. And, um, Then the other things that were slotted in between all the monastic hours, um, were things like, um, spiritual reading and then five hours a day of, of work, which we called manual labor, which sounded very severe, but it's, it could be anything from like, just sort of pulling up the nettles.
You know, you got your allocated tasks, you didn't have to talk to anyone, you knew what you were meant to be doing, so you'd either go to the kitchen or, you know, you might be sewing, you might be mending clothes, making clothes, uh, gardening. It was all very simple work and you were meant to be in a prayerful state.
Yeah. And, of course, there were meals too. And you had that all day. Yeah. And the meals were very simple, very quick. So whatever you did, you weren't chatting, you weren't meant to be even engaging or looking at other people. [00:17:00] You were supposed to be in a kind of hermit like solitude with God. Um, obviously, common sense was applied.
If you had to ask somebody, a question, you know, there was a formal way of doing it in a sort of special place, you'd write notes. And at the end of the day, there was a half hour slot called recreation, where, um, we all sat around in a circle and talked. So, so Teresa Ravele thought if you, if you have a, um, you know, in her case, in her day, it was about 12 or 13 women.
In my day, it was 21 maximum.
Katherine May: If you lock
Catherine Coldstream: these women up in a secluded way, they're not allowed to talk. They're not going to be able to manage that. People are going to be breaking the rule of silence. So she said, give them half an hour a day when they have to talk. And that should like be enough to, um, enable you to keep silence for the rest of the time.
So that bit really
Katherine May: interested me because actually It seemed to me that that didn't work in the way it was supposed to, perhaps I'm wrong about that, but
Catherine Coldstream: [00:18:00] you know, I think
Katherine May: like that, that time together was awkward once it came, felt really desolate, actually,
Catherine Coldstream: you know, you've just totally got it in one. Um, but the funny thing was, you know, recreation sounds like we used to call it recreating, you know, as though it was some sort of wonderful kind of time of letting your hair down and letting off steam.
Yes, that's right, that's what recreation means to me. Yeah, yeah, I like, I would have liked to like, you know, gone on a slide or run around the garden but for the first couple of years I found that the hardest thing, the hardest thing was recreation because it did feel stilted and it felt like, you know, so The role of silence was one I actually took to really naturally for some reason.
I liked being quiet. I liked the kind of solitude. I had a lot of processing that was going on, a lot going through my head. So I liked that. Um, you know, people find that difficult to understand sometimes, but what it was like, Oh, you've got to be silent all day, but at recreation, you've got to talk. And it was almost like the [00:19:00] more extra noisy you were, or could, you know, it was seen as good.
It seems healthy to be kind of quite Um, you had to talk to people without partiality, so that meant you, you didn't just go for your, the people you wanted to be friends with, you taught just as much to the people you found less naturally, um, likeable, maybe, yeah, appealing. So, that's such a
Katherine May: weird skill set, isn't it, to like on one hand be deeply comfortable in silence most of the time, but then to be super extraverted when the time comes, that's a hard switch to flick.
Catherine Coldstream: I know, I think there was, it was, it was, some people found it easy, because I think some people were naturally extrovert, they found the science oppressive, maybe, or whatever, more of a discipline, whereas I was sort of losing myself in the, in the science, and I was very into the whole, you know, I was a new convert to Catholicism, so I got very into the whole prayer, prayer thing early on, so I was, I was quite keen on on the sort of, you know, having a lot of prayer time.
And, um, [00:20:00] some people found it harder to get a balance. And some people like really went for the recreational mode. Um, but the other thing that was difficult about it was we were a very mixed bag. Uh, we hadn't chosen each other individually. So you've got people you don't necessarily feel on a wavelength with.
And you might have come from very different previous lives, different kind of families and backgrounds and, um, jobs and cultures. And you've got to somehow, um, try to be, um, connecting with them and focusing on them. Because the idea was you weren't really, you know, you still had to practice. What were monastic virtues like charity, which meant sort of basically being kind to consider it to people, but within a sort of structure of like, always trying to, um, listen to others rather than pushing yourself forward, which of course is a very valuable social skill, I suppose.
There was a sense in which everybody was bending over backwards to sort of try to be natural. [00:21:00]
Katherine May: Yeah, I can imagine. And there was
Catherine Coldstream: an awkwardness. But the other thing was there was a whole list of things you weren't allowed to talk about at recreation. So there was a taboo list you were given when you started.
It was like, we don't talk about work. So if your work was in the kitchen, you didn't talk about that. We don't talk about health. That was a massive taboo. We don't talk about our families. We don't talk about, there was such a long list. What could you talk about? Well, this was it. After about three years, I think I learned how to recreate Carmelite style.
And that was much harder than learning how to be silent and keep your head down. It was a funny sort of, because it had a social thing that didn't come naturally to me. Um, You know, I, I wasn't, yeah, and I, you know, I probably, you know, we, there were probably certain amount of neurodivergence as well. And I, I haven't actually done any of these tests and, um, I, I don't know whether I'm, I might be autistic or whatever, but I mean, it might, or it might just be that I'm, I was a [00:22:00] highly sensitive person or, you know, Um, whatever, but I did find it difficult.
It's the same thing,
Katherine May: don't worry about it,
Catherine Coldstream: don't worry about the distinction, they're identical. Well, I'm definitely somewhere on, on, but I just don't know, um, I don't quite know, but I'm, I did find it Because I think sometimes I took certain aspects of what we have been taught, quite literally, probably, and I, and I found it, there was a real mismatch between what was said and what was done that borrowed, what worried me.
I thought, well, if we're believing this, why aren't we doing this? And I think that's where my expectations as a new convert I came up against the reality that what was, that the theory and practice didn't seem to match. And I, I think maybe this was because I had, I expected it to work in a more kind of literal clockwork, uh, logical way than it did.
Um, but at recreation, I did really notice that, you know, there were kind of quite a lot of things that took me aback about how people related and behaved and I couldn't always naturally Um, get it, you [00:23:00] know, um, yeah. Yeah. And I found it also as very hypersensitive in those is I found it very difficult to feel cold shouldered by people if they didn't seem to, you know, want to talk to me.
And in, in a closed world, you can be terribly sensitive to, um, to the interpersonal dynamics and you know that, and learning how to. be a part of a group that already had a pre existing, um, style, it had its mode, and finding a place in the group and feeling comfortable. Right, that you
Katherine May: could fit in. Yeah,
Catherine Coldstream: so that was much, much more challenging than things like all the prayer and the work and silence, which I actually found really quite, um, A relief because in life that's a nice, easy bit, actually.
Lots of ways in a way that the bits that you were meant to find difficult, I liked. 'cause you know, again, if you, if you like a very structured life and routine, you know where you are at any time of the day. Mm-Hmm. In a very defined timetable. Uh, whereas the, the Met recreation you, you didn't [00:24:00] have any.
Easy way of navigating if you felt, there were people that I, people I naturally enjoyed talking to and there were some others it was a bit more hard work with, you know, and um, yeah, sure, you just have to learn. So recreation was a weird one actually in the monastic life, and it was, it was more, it was seen as more important than you might think.
You could see the most, I've not understood that
Katherine May: at all, yeah,
Catherine Coldstream: but one of the things, Yeah.
Katherine May: No, sorry. I was just going to say, yeah, sorry, carry on. I think you're about to talk about what I was going to say.
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, oh, sorry. Well, you could see, you could see the older ones looking at you and thinking, if you were, if you weren't quiet, if you were quiet at recreational, you weren't, if you seemed to be sad or quiet, that you, that you were a cause for concern.
So you had to be jolly and laughing and stuff. So you had to, and part of that was overcoming, uh, there's a big thing of overcoming yourself, overcoming your limitations. So, Yes, and this is what I was going to ask you about because,
Katherine May: well, it's just that I, [00:25:00] what, one of the things that really surprised me was the way that, you know, cause I, my fantasy of living in community in that way is the mutual support and the idea that you're part of a loving, affectionate community of, of women.
And actually you're, you were very specifically discouraged from. you know, sharing your concerns and worries, or seeking emotional support, or actually just being emotional. I think that that took me aback. Yes,
Catherine Coldstream: 100 percent discouraged. I mean, that was, that was the difficult thing. So I was also, you know, I was still very much so grieving my father.
I think I was an emotional young person anyway, by nature, an emotional, imaginative, sensitive person. And yeah, that was all seen as, Very, very bad. Well, bad, not bad, but you, you were told you had to overcome yourself all the time. So overcoming yourself meant, um, transcending all those things. Uh, well, transcending is a nice way of putting it, but somehow there was almost a doing violence to your own [00:26:00] temperament by suppressing or denying.
Your natural mood. This goes absolutely hand in hand with monastic culture, probably in all the monastic orders, but in ours it was a very, very stringently applied thing. You were meant to, um, well, you weren't meant to show your natural emotions, you sort of, um, somehow had to override them. You had to rein in your natural feelings about things a lot, and yet at recreation this kind of culture of, like, being jolly and laughing and chatting, um, It was framed as kind of, um, you know, being able to, you know, be yourself.
But you couldn't be yourself because it was like, it was like a force. You had to learn how to do it. You had to learn the right way to laugh, the right way to interact. And it wasn't really being yourself. It was more like, you know, You could laugh and chat, but you had to actually hide your real feelings about people and things because you weren't supposed to express those and you weren't supposed to express your emotions.
It was all [00:27:00] It was all like you were adopting a slightly stylized mode, which was the monastic way. Um, it sounds weird, but do you sort of
Katherine May: I get it. You were, you were becoming one of those people, like that, that was, that's the whole aim of it, isn't it? That you become a nun, and a nun is not just any old person with a habit on, you know, it's a very specific mode of being and thinking and behaving and, and You were expected to just integrate into that, I guess.
Catherine Coldstream: Yes. So this thing of seeking emotional support or being given affection, that didn't, that was literally just didn't exist. Um, if you, if you were a novice and you seem to need extra nurturing, like you, if you went to the novice mistress and, You know, um, if she saw you as being tearful, and I was quite a tearful one, I mean, a lot of people were actually, because it was such an emotionally charged way of life, and we were suppressing so much, so it would come out every now and then, you'd see people crying, it would come out in that way, because you just didn't really know [00:28:00] That was the only, that was the natural outlet, I'm sorry, but you were, you were sort of scolded more or less, like, oh pull your socks up, don't be such a crybaby, and you were told sort of, it was old school, this was the 1990s, but the novice mistress, who was the one who later became the prioress, she was called Mother Elizabeth in the book, in the book, I've renamed them all, um, she, she, that doesn't surprise me, yeah, yeah, I've had to anonymize, I've had to anonymize everything, and change the location, actually, but, um, she'd been in there since, I think she went in in the very early 1960s, so she'd been, she was a product of the 1940s and 50s, and these are the people training us, women born in the 60s and 70s, who'd, you know, our parents had known the hippie revolution, and I came from a bohemian North London family, but the people training me and the people who were bringing their expectations were people who were formed by you know, um, a post war culture that, you know, and as you know, um, this was quite a sort of different mindset.
[00:29:00] They were pretty tough and pretty strict,
Katherine May: and
Catherine Coldstream: it was like pulling your socks up while you're crying, and um, you just had to get, you know, get on with it, was what we were told a lot. Now, not all the monasteries are like this, and now, Um, you know, 20, 30 years on, I'm sure a lot of these monasteries have, um, have become a little bit more humane, but it was, it was psychologically, it was a psychological interpersonal toughness that was what I found really difficult, rather than the physical separation from the world, etc.
which I actually really liked, yeah. Yes,
Katherine May: but I, I guess, you know, in a weird way, We shouldn't be surprised, and that's where the fantasy is not going to match up, because actually this is a ancient culture, as you say, full of people who haven't had contact with mainstream society for decades. And, and, you know, we're all like, oh, that sounds quite old fashioned, but of course, yeah, it will be, won't it?
And it's intended to be in some ways, but in other ways. Maybe there was a sense that [00:30:00] some positive changes had happened in society that they just weren't even aware of, I guess. What did your family make of it? Like, you know, because you didn't come from a Catholic family.
Catherine Coldstream: Yeah.
Katherine May: When they, because you had some limited contact with, with them, didn't you, when you were in?
Yes. Yeah. Did
Catherine Coldstream: they,
Katherine May: did they see a change in you?
Catherine Coldstream: Yes, yes, yes. Uh, yeah. I mean, in my community, which was 21 when I went in, which was the maximum permitted, they, they went down because very old ones died and a few left. So, um, well, You know, I was one of only two who had converted to Catholicism. Most of the others were from Catholic, traditional Catholic families.
Um, so my family was not a typical family. I mean, nobody from my sort of North London arty background, you know, I don't think, I know, I don't know anyone else who became a nun. I think one of my distant cousins became a Buddhist nun, but that's, you know, that's like, Yeah, that was seen as a [00:31:00] bit more on my side.
Um, and she actually also left after about 10 years, but I think, well, my mother who had actually been brought up in a very strict convent orphanage for part of her childhood in that war was, she had been very scarred by it and she had left the church. So she was a lapsed Catholic and I, I grew up knowing very little about Catholicism.
So when I became a Catholic, she said, Kathy, you know, it's very strict. But that's the only, she said, Kathy, they're very strict, you know, and that's all she said. But it was enough for me to realize she was sounding a warning note and she was saying, I don't understand why you're doing this. But she never mentioned it again.
Because although my family was quite sort of, as I said, bohemian, there was all, we were also quite sort of old fashioned and people were sort of quite, we grew up being quite sort of polite and reserved about things. So, you You know, in a way, people just didn't, people didn't say everything they were thinking.
Nowadays, culture's become much [00:32:00] more sort of expressive, but I think my sister just sort of said, Oh, well, if that's what you want to do, um, you know, good luck to you, sort of. We were quite liberal, so people didn't, didn't, didn't, didn't. Really interfere. They just sort of said, well, you know, okay, they were liberal
Katherine May: about you going into a very illiberal environment,
Catherine Coldstream: which is really interesting.
You know that that's a really good way of putting it. They were absolutely, it was like, if that's what you want to do, and so. At the point of entry, when I went in, my family seemed almost, I mean, it was almost slightly, I've never said this out loud to anyone, but I think I was slightly hurt that nobody seemed to mind because the other nun who went in with me, her family were in front of tears, like, don't go in, you know, and it was like, and it was seen as painful.
I think it's quite normal for families to be really upset, um, because they were losing their daughter to the cloister. And, you know, there were parents who, you know, would be sad that they were never going to have grandchildren and that sort of thing. My family didn't seem to mind at all, so I thought, oh well.
There you go. There you [00:33:00] go. That's her. I think it was almost like, oh well, that's her sorted out, you know, married off to, you know. Um, but I think they were hiding a lot because of this kind of slightly polite sort of thing we had in my family as well. And because I only realized five and a half years later, the day I made my final vows, which I obviously made live vows in the end, and that was in a public ceremony.
It was, you know, we didn't have many of these public sort of events, but it was a big, big deal. It was like, you know, obviously like a sort of wedding day, really. And everybody. in my family who were in the, it was an L shaped chapel, so we nuns were behind the grill, the bars, um, slightly, more or less hidden from the, the public chapel, which was at an angle, but they all came up afterwards, sort of, you know, they were meant to be congratulating me.
They were all in floods of tears, and I was horrified because I didn't know they cared that much, you know, it's like, oh, I, I didn't know. It's a bad [00:34:00] moment to find out. But it was kind of, they wrote, you got the odd letter from your family and You know, you got the odd visit. It was all, you had to ask permission to write to them, and I wrote about once a month, maybe, and then my sister, who lived that, not that far away, would visit me every, perhaps about three or four times a year, she'd come to visit, and you'd be in what was called a parlor, where you were separated from the outside by the grill, and she'd come and see me, and it was nice, it was lovely seeing her, but then when she went, it was almost like, I just slotted straight back into the cloistered.
mode. When I was with her, though, I did sort of let off steam in a way I never did at recreation. I'd confide in her and stuff. It was different. It was more like being sisters outside again. It was quite nice in a way, but you had a strong sense of duty to the community and to going back into that mode.
But, you know, my mother didn't visit very often because she was a long way, way down in London and I was miles away up north. [00:35:00] And, um, you You didn't see much of your family and, um, it was such a shock. They were all in floods of tears and, um, my sister was really, really distraught. And she said that when she went into the chapel, there were all these, um, booklets, you know, like service, order of service for the, for the, profession, it was called the profession ceremony, and she said it just looked like they looked like funeral booklets, and she said she suddenly felt overwhelmed by this sense of the negativity.
What happens, you wear a white veil as a novice, and at your ceremony, you're quite life thirsty. You get a black veil, which is a symbol of death to the world. So it was all very, the symbolism was all quite sort of scary to somebody, my sister Frankie, to whom I'd always been, you know, really quite close before.
She'd never really got religion and she'd never, she'd always sort of, um, Yeah, so she, she, it was a little bit of a shock for her, I think, seeing this.
Katherine May: I can really understand that. Yeah. And then, you know, there is a [00:36:00] heavily symbolic, you know, it's a marriage and it's a death and it's a rebirth and, and that's, if you're not engaged personally with the symbolism of that, I imagine that can feel quite horrifying, actually, particularly maybe if you're, Your sister is submitting to it so willingly.
Catherine Coldstream: So you're absolutely right. Oh,
Katherine May: sorry, carry on. No,
Catherine Coldstream: just to say about marriage, death, birth, I mean, you're so right. You've really intuitive. Unless you already know a lot about monasticism and Catholicism. I
Katherine May: do actually. I did. Do you know what? I did my, um, my English open study on novels about nuns. Oh! Quite a longstanding interest of mine.
Oh!
Catherine Coldstream: Did you
Katherine May: read In This House a Breed by Ruma Godden? No, I didn't. Someone gave it to me later though, but yeah, no, I was only allowed.
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, that's okay, because you've really got the insights, because that's, you know, the rites of passage, the symbolism. Yeah, this is all really, really dominant in monastic life.
It's right up my street, I'm afraid. [00:37:00] Oh, right, okay. Okay, well, I feel like I'm
Katherine May: learning too much about me.
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, no, that's so interesting. Interesting. No, that's very interesting. Well, yeah, that makes sense actually with your, your insights with wintering and your own understanding of the human soul. Yeah.
Katherine May: So, but yeah, so the book becomes.
Gradually, like from the beginning where we're learning about this, the gorgeous textures of this world and the, the relief for you of being able to be in communion with God and to immerse yourself in this, this, the rhythm of this day. But then there, this creeping disquiet comes in with the way that that world is, is going really and the way that it's being run and your role in it.
And actually one of our, um, one of our readers asked a question, which I think probably gets the heart of this. Um, so it was Nikki and she says, um, she's referring to Karen Armstrong and, um, through the narrow gate. And she says, [00:38:00] do you feel having a searching, hungry intelligence can be a problem in the religious life?
Catherine Coldstream: Yes. Yeah. That's a very good question. Yeah. I mean, getting back to what you said about sort of You know, the textures and the atmosphere. I'm really glad that that kind of came out because, you know, I wanted to,
Katherine May: yeah,
Catherine Coldstream: thank you. Well, I, you know, at first I just wanted to tell the story of my time inside and kind of what, what went wrong as well as what went right.
But then I realized after a couple of, you know, people have read, read it and I was doing, you know, I was doing, um, Goldsmith's PhD in creative writing with Blake Morrison, my supervisor, and I realized people, however well read they were, didn't necessarily know, know much about monastic life, stuff I took for granted.
So I had to write these chapters, introducing the lay reader, if you like, to that world. I tried to take the reader into the cloister and the choir and the tool shed and the sal and the monastic liturgy [00:39:00] of the hours and all those areas and these are my kind of favourite chapters really that sort of take you into the what I loved about the cloistered life.
But, I mean, there was actually a chapter I think was cut called Recreation, which is, we've talked about this really nice that we talked about that because nobody's asked me about that. up to now in um, in a conversation. And that was actually, you know, a surprisingly dominant factor. And I think what we've already said today about the, the culture of recreation, the culture of like having to take on the character of the group and what was expected and the right mode of behaving and your own personality being not only subsumed into the group, but also.
having to cut off, cut yourself off from a lot of your natural modes and emotions. I think that taps into perhaps what you've just said about the things that became difficult, which was Beyond the framework of recreation, the whole life had, [00:40:00] uh, a culture and a mode that you had to assume. And while there were areas that were more intuitively pleasant or natural for me, um, like say spiritual reading and the kind of, um, the idealism of the life.
The idealistic, um, so the way those ideals were expressed in their life. That was all something I naturally took to. But then later on, my questioning mind, my just my sort of natural mode, um, you know, as you get older, you get to learn more about yourself and you know yourself. I know myself so much better now.
I didn't think of myself as being particularly sort of intellectual, I suppose, but I probably took for granted that I'd come from a family background and from, I'd had my friendships outside and, um, you know, close friendships, boyfriends, they'd always tended to be actually people who were, um, you know, I suppose, probably were quite intellectual, but I take them for granted, [00:41:00] that approach to life and to, that was just
Katherine May: normal.
Yeah.
Catherine Coldstream: My dad was a professor of fine art at University College London. And, um, you know, he, he didn't go around with a label intellectual at all. He was actually a visual artist, but he wasn't a highly intelligent person who you, it was a great conversationalist. So being in a culture where questioning and intellectualism all sorts of even, um, You know, um, unlike the Benedictines, who were the great teachers and educators and, uh, guardians of intellectual life in medieval period, um, and still run schools and things, unlike the Benedictines, the Carmelites had always been sort of withdrawing from mainstream culture, and there was almost, almost a bit of an anti intellectual stance.
Teresa of Avila, for example, had sort of said to people, you know, it's not in thinking much, but in loving much that we grow spiritually. Now, of course, there's a lot of, there's a grain of truth in that, you know, love is,
Katherine May: you
Catherine Coldstream: [00:42:00] know, I mean, obviously you could say love is the most important thing, but there was this tendency for her to discourage nuns from, in any way, um, she just, she discouraged, um, So she didn't like complicated polyphony, which was a big thing in 16th century Spain, you know, in the church, there was the music of the wonderful polyphonic composers, the Catholic Church, Thomas Lewis de Victoria, for example, in Spain.
She discouraged the nuns from cultivating this because it would make them competitive and it would make them vain. Yeah, so having an intellectual life or an accomplishment that was a bit sort of. you know, that might be seen as a higher culture. Heirs and graces. Heirs and graces. This was so discouraging.
So, I remember at recreation, um, being given a black look by the priors, just because I remember saying something, I was talking to somebody recreation, and I remember saying something about the renaissance, and I got this black look at me. And, you know, so you, you were supposed to keep it very [00:43:00] sort of, um, homely and, um, you weren't supposed to betray specialist levels of knowledge.
So, It was like you weren't really, nobody was meant to stand out, and there was the lowest common denominator thing, which did lead to a discouragement of. You know, being too clever, or being too,
Katherine May: you know. Yeah, and that's, that's so interesting the way that talks to women in wider society as well, because actually it's a sort of, a kind of replication of what we often experience outside of, of the world that you're talking about too, that, you know, never be too clever.
That's the, that's the greatest sin for, for women. Yeah, in many ways.
Catherine Coldstream: You've really put your finger on something there, and I haven't thought, I haven't tried, I haven't connected it with the way women are often, you know, outside. I still think in terms of outside. Outside, yeah. I'm where I am now, in the outside world, in mainstream culture.
Yeah, women [00:44:00] are not, yeah, not necessarily expected to stand out in this way. And that was difficult for me because I realized gradually that I was a bit more articulate and a bit more questioning and a bit more, yeah, I wanted to do, I wanted to look in more depth through discussion and things like that into, um, into different aspects of, of, um, our lives as nuns.
That was not welcomed at all. In fact, I kind of had to suppress that really. You were meant to, we had, we had what was called formation, which was like instruction, if you like, in, in the culture of the order and in monastic life. And we had, as a novice, you had this every day for an hour, but. Those were quite tense sessions because we were a mixed ability group and, you know, mixed ability, when I say mixed, we were a mixed bag and not everyone found it as easy as others to, say, read the writings Avila or John of the Cross, which were, you know, they're translated from the Spanish but you're still looking at 16th century.
And
Katherine May: they're [00:45:00] big, complex works, aren't they? They're big, complex works, yeah,
Catherine Coldstream: and I, I really enjoyed reading these and I realised some people felt quite intimidated by the whole thing, so I was That was a very difficult area to navigate as well. It always came down to the interpersonal and the kind of, um, there was a strong need to conform.
There was a strong expectation that you would conform to a kind of unthreatening level where you kind of did what was expected and you didn't stand out. That, I think that's where probably I just wasn't really quite cut out for it because I, ultimately, I needed to. I've realized that I'm somebody who, you know, for example, now being able to write is just so wonderful because I really, um, I think I just need to be able to explore things more in depth, you know.
Katherine May: Yeah, and it's, it's still quite contemplative and it still takes you into isolation for sure. Um, but yeah, maybe in a bit more of a way. So I, you know, I don't want to like, you know, give away all the exciting [00:46:00] dramatic bits of the book. So I'm going to like pussyfoot around this a little bit because I really think people should read it.
Um, there's a moment when, You decided it's time to leave. And interestingly, one of our readers asked, you know, why did you leave in the way you did? You know, what was, what were the choices you made around leaving? Because you, you ran very suddenly and very dramatically away. Like, what, what fed into that moment without, you know, having to tell us the whole plot?
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, yeah, well, I mean I think the Cloistered Life is a hothouse, and because we were so separated from the outside world, um, in the, you know, in other monasteries they might have been a bit more open to having priests give you a little bit more advice and having more people to talk to you from the outside or even counselling and things, but our, our Prior us was very anti outside influences and we were really in a kind of hothouse that didn't have any air coming in at all [00:47:00] from the outside.
So if you think of it, that's a precondition for, you know, it's not going to lead to good mental health really, is it? I mean, the silence and the solitude were great, but I think the hothouse did really make it a pressure cooker. So people were cracking up, people were having breakdowns, and I started feeling like, when's my turn?
I'd seen As I said before about the generation gap, those of us who were born in the 60s and 70s and who had come into the life, we were the ones who seemed to be having breakdowns. And while I was there, I mean, I never had, as far as I know, I never officially had a breakdown or anything, but there were two people who had terribly, devastatingly, publicly shocking breakdowns with, you know, physical collapses and outbursts and
Katherine May: all sorts
Catherine Coldstream: of stuff.
So there was this sort of going on. And then. there was anorexia, there were, there were a lot of mental health issues. And then I heard that from other Carmelite monasteries, again, it was always those in my age group who were really, really cracking up. And [00:48:00] I felt within myself, I was heading in a direction where I thought, you know, I'm either going to go mad or commit suicide.
I mean, that sounds so awful to say that, but I
Katherine May: did have
Catherine Coldstream: this. I did have this. I thought I'm either going to go mad or leave. And then I thought one day I said to myself, look, which is the worst of those things. And then the lesser evil obviously was leaving, but we've been trained to think leaving was absolutely terrible.
You just, you know, the people who people did leave, but it was seen as, you know, the last possible resort. So I didn't want to be one of them. I didn't want to be one of the bad ones who left. I wanted
Katherine May: to be really
Catherine Coldstream: good. So I tried to resist the temptation to sort of think about leaving. And I just think, I didn't really have the maturity.
If I, you know, now, I would say to my younger self, a good couple of years before I reached that cracking up point where I just ran away in the middle of the night, I would have said, look, you should actually talk to somebody about the possibility of leaving. [00:49:00] But, um, It was seen as so, it was seen as, you were just told, if you were thinking of leaving, you were told, it's a temptation, just don't, you know, resist it.
And it was this thing of, um, you know, overcoming yourself was activated. So you, you resist the temptation, you, put aside those thoughts, you put aside those feelings. And a temptation, of course, meant it was a temptation from the devil. So, of course, you weren't going to do that, because if it was the devil, you, obviously, you'd feel like you had failed God.
And so, I, I waited too long, I think, to recognize in myself the signs of stress buildup. That meant, yeah, I reached, I reached that point. Later on, when I came back, I went to, they, they took me to, you know, the doctor came in. We never went out to the doctor. The doctor always came in, but I, I went to see the doctor in the, the, the part where we saw the doctor, and he said it.
He said, oh, you, it was a, uh, is ital. Yeah, that's right. [00:50:00] So, I mean, whether, I mean, that was the label they put on it, but I think, again, not giving away the story, I'd read, what had pushed me to that point was really the collision between my ideals and expectations and what was taught us by the novice mistress and the prioress and the people who were passing on the tradition, if you like.
And I'd fallen in love with this monastic tradition, but what that collided with the reality, which was, things were being done in this particular monastery, and it doesn't happen in all monasteries, but there was a dysfunction going on whereby, um, we had a leader who had taught us one thing and she was doing the opposite in quite a few ways.
Um, and I'm not saying this in a kind of like you know, uh, completely rejecting. She was, she was a, uh, she was a very attractive, magnetic, charismatic person who had a lot of good qualities, and on one level I think we all, uh, were slightly in love with her probably. She was a very, she was a natural leader that we all wanted to be liked by, [00:51:00] but she was also, I think, using that magnetism and that charisma, um, unconsciously perhaps, I don't know, but, to bolster up this sort of inviolable citadel of her own primacy, and she was an autocratic leader who was actually, you know, later on talking to other people who were there, she was, she We know whether it was conscious, there was a ruthlessness there in her, which meant you obeyed and she didn't listen to any diet.
You didn't get listened to at all. You obeyed and that was the bottom line. There was no debate. It was called diet. We were meant to be, um, the Catholic church had moved on. Um, the Catholic church, I'm talking about, you know, from the sort of Vatican down, the teachings of the Vatican down. Had, had, had started, had started sort of disseminating these more, um, liberal teachings, um, since Vatican ii, which was, you know, in the 1960s, the second Vatican Council had [00:52:00] had attempted to change the culture of the Catholic church by making it more open to things like, uh, discussion, debate, listening, questioning, and there'd be more, more room for this.
Mm-Hmm, . But these Vatican II changes. take a long time to filter through to the closed orders, and my community was still struggling with, um, some of the teachings from, from Vatican II, which meant the prioress was really resistant to this idea that we should have dialogue and community discussions and meetings and everybody be listened to.
So it was all like, Oh no, this is modern stuff. No, this is kind of, we don't want any of that. You know, you just obey and, um, you, you don't get listened to. And what happened in the end was there was a, a really, a really difficult situation where, um, a new leader was voted in and, um, the old leader, Mother Elizabeth, um, just couldn't accept that, you know, there was going to be a change of authority, figured there was going to be a new leader.
So the natural, she was the natural leader who had always been used to being in [00:53:00] that position. And suddenly, There was, um, a new leader voted in who wanted to make changes and there was a complete, um, there was a clash of personalities going on at the top level. And we younger ones were like, just supposed to sort of try to make sense of it.
And this is where my kind of, you know, my literal kind of understanding of what was right or wrong in the order, according to me. How We've Been Taught just came into complete collision with what I saw going on and I thought, well this can't be right, um, but if you want to Well it makes
Katherine May: it makes loads of sense that would be really undermining if you've, if you've submitted completely to one regime and it sounds like you really had to and then that That all gets turned on its head, then you're left, I imagine, like, very undermined.
And it's so interesting that you, that your doctor talked about fight or flight, because actually, now in the kind of trauma world, thinking about people that have endured abuse and coercive control, we talk about fight, flight, [00:54:00] uh, form, or freeze. There, it's become four Fs. So, yeah, so, so yeah, yeah. So basically somebody who's been through excessive control may not run away or fight in the way that we traditionally thought, but may also shower the person that's controlling them with love in order to placate them.
Yes. And I just, I wonder if you might relate to that
Catherine Coldstream: a little. I do. I do. I do. And also Stockholm syndrome. This sort of idea that you, if you've got no escape from, um, you know, if you've got no escape from a situation, one of the options that the mind sort of can default to is actually loving the people who are harming you in some way, or who are disrespecting you, because by loving them and by kind of, yeah, the fawning I suppose, sharing them with love and adulation, and that, that's a way of [00:55:00] kind of experiencing a positive emotion.
As a response to a situation where you don't have many choices. Yes, it's really interesting. I mean, it was very difficult. And I think, again, you've got it, you just seem to have so much insight, Katherine, because you just seem to get it in one about this, the situation where, you know, um, Sorry, what was I saying, but it was like relating to the Prioress who, yeah, that's it.
So you'd be taught X, Y and Z and then suddenly it was turned on its head. What do you do? Um, and a whole load, a whole group in the community who are sort of like a coterie of people around this charismatic leader, Mother Elizabeth, she, she developed a coterie. Uh, it was a very sticks and carrots, is that the right word?
Sticks and carrots kind of. She rewarded people who, um, you know, for kind of. but behaving in ways that reinforced her sort of status, if you like. And um, you've got, you've got the black look and you've got the punishment for things that kind of just [00:56:00] didn't, um, that anything that was out of line, I suppose.
But she developed this coterie of fans who I think were all absolutely enthralled her and, you know, You know, she was pulling the strings. I mean, so much. And, you know, it was difficult, though, to sort of see it clear sightedly, because part of, in that world where you were so closed off from any outside, I mean, just to put it out here, we didn't have TV, we didn't have radio, we didn't have newspapers, except the Catholic Herald.
So, you know, we didn't have contact with the outside. So, in a very closed world, that is your only reality. I think, you know, it was difficult to be clear sighted, but I think, you know, I stood, again, if I was, you know, slightly neurodivergent or whatever, I could stand back and see, well, she's got this coterie of people who are enthralled to her and, um, but actually this is not what we're meant to be like.
We were meant to be dedicated to God as the ultimate, to truth. We were meant to be dedicated to truth. Yeah. Not to a person who was, um, she was meant to represent [00:57:00] God, but you know, when she started doing the opposite of what we've been taught and what she herself had taught, when she started creating a coie that was against the new, um, progress and I, I, it was obvious to me that this was, uh, not how it'd been taught to live.
Yeah. Yeah. So I was, I just thought that, well, I, I, I want to go with truth because that's what. We're about, you know, God is truth, and the truth, we're meant to be. I wanted to, I wanted to be true to what I understood as, you know, God and God's will and domestic values. And I felt, I could see there was something that was, wasn't right.
And, um, it all seemed to be about, um, cliques and partialities and personal preferences and loyalties. And you know how groups can fall into that, but that presumably should be. challenged, or at least, you know, that can become so unhealthy, because then you've got, you've got sister X against sister Y, and it's like, oh, you're one [00:58:00] of the young ones, or you're one of this clique, or you're one of that clique.
And I felt the other factor was, we'd had some sisters transfer into our community from another community that just had to close, because it was doing the numbers were dwindling. Yes, that was another factor that they were just kind of outside us. And it, I felt this was all so toxic, these cliques and these kind of gangs.
There was a gang that was, you know, this. So I stood outside of that and I suppose became a spokesperson who kind of like, Hello, what's going on? Why are we, why are we splitting into these groups? Why has, why have people started behaving in a way that's not actually the way we're taught? Um, the community dynamic should be with, uh, obedience to God.
Why has it become, you know, um, adulation for this particular person? And, you know, when you say those things out loud in a group that, you know, wants to be in denial about this and isn't ready or able to talk about these things in a open way and say, actually, I felt we [00:59:00] should have been able to say, actually, you know, things aren't necessarily working brilliantly.
Why can't we sit down and talk about it and have some discussion? I don't know. I mean, they, the community treated this as like a crime just to mention these things. So when one or two people started saying, can we talk about this? We were all told to. to retract what we've said and apologize. And it, well, read the book because it does escalate.
Exactly. I want to, yes. And let's not, let's not give it away, but
Katherine May: you know, the huge neurodivergent audience for this podcast will be recognizing very strongly that, that instinct to say, why do people form these cliques? Why won't they hear? Dissent. Why is there no opportunity for discussion? I think, I think there's going to be a lot of people going, yes, that's how I feel about social groups as well, so you're not alone.
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, good, good, good. I'm so glad to hear that.
Katherine May: Yeah. Well, look, in the interest of not keeping you on the phone forever for the second time, I just want to kind of close by asking you [01:00:00] about the process of writing this book, because I know loads of our listeners were curious about that too. There's been a really big time gap between living this.
and writing about it. What would it, what was it like to re approach that? You know, did you have a diary, somebody asked, or did you do it by memory? And what were the quality of those memories? How fresh did it feel? How sensory? How direct?
Catherine Coldstream: Well, I mean, on one level, I think the monastic life has never really left me, and for a long time after I left, I would still dream at night.
I was back in those corridors, I was back in that atmosphere. Um, for a long time I still felt very monastic. So, for the first few years that I was out, I tended to live, you know, quite a sort of, um, cloistered way. I mean, I went to university there, and I left, and I, I came to Oxford and did a theology degree, and I lived after that.
I went on living in, um, a theological college, because I didn't really have any home base of my own to go to, long story, [01:01:00] but, you know, I didn't have, like, a family unit to go back to, because, you know, anyway, um, my mother was, my mother was, um, sort of doing her own thing at that point, and my father had died.
So, um, I very much sort of continue to live in my study bedroom as though I were a bit sort of separate from everybody else for quite a few years. I mean it took me years to feel comfortable going to social events and things. Um, but, um, I did do a big offload draft, if you like, the year I left. So I left in 2001.
I left in 2001. So, or was it 2002 by the time I'd finally done the disseminate, but, you know, this is 22 years ago, but I did write an enormous longhand account of my time inside. I wrote it using a biro in ring binder files, later sort of got it typed up, but it came to 135, 000 words. Years later, I thought, you know, I didn't even think of, I wasn't [01:02:00] thinking of publishing it, but I wrote it to, represent my perception of the situation and my experience as a nun and I really wrote it to show a couple of, um, friends, friends of mine and particularly a priest I wanted to sort of, um, you know, because he was helping me and I wanted to sort of share it with him.
Um, and that of course was much too long to be publishable and it was much too raw. It was very, it was an early When I look at it now, part, it, On one level, it was much more pious than the way I write now, but it was also more angry. The anger, I, I just felt I was so raw from the whole situation. I just had to get this out of my system.
So that's still there as a resource, if you like. And then about eight years after writing that, I had time to kind of look over it again. And I did, try to revise it into something more disciplined. And I ended up trying to fictionalize it at one point. So over the 22 years, I've revisited [01:03:00] that draft and I've,
Katherine May: yeah, I wrote a
Catherine Coldstream: novella kind of at one point when I did an MA in creative writing.
And, um, again, you know, I needed to keep, I needed to work on my writing and, um, There were parts of it that were very overwritten, there was some purple prose in there, you know, there were other parts, it was uneven and, you know, but I think having done an MA in creative writing, I did the creative nonfiction at Norwich and then I did the Goldsmiths, um, with Blake Morrison.
I have had quite a lot of time to work my writing into sort of, um, finesse or, well, what's the right, hone it down, you know. So, you know, I've excluded a lot of the rants, the rants. That's just how writing
Katherine May: works.
Catherine Coldstream: I've been through that whole thing. So what, what you see in Cloistered is a kind of distillation, I hope, on some level of distillation and also my editor at Chateau, Clara Farmer, was absolutely fantastic with sort [01:04:00] of, you know, Saint, you know, giving me ideas for structure.
She's the one who said, put it into parts, um, rather than just have 30 something chapters. So I've got part one, two, and three. Of course it had to be three parts. I said, no, it's got to be Trinitarian. And she said, we used to not pick up on that. I said, no, it's got to be three. Um, and, you know, and, um, yeah.
And, you know, then I also sort of, Yeah, editors were really great with suggesting like opening with the dynamic, uh, the drama and coming back to the end. Otherwise, it probably would have been a little bit more contemplative in mode, but I realised that to connect with readers, you know, to sort of have a through line was helpful.
So, um, the next thing I write might be a little bit more contemplative, I think, because I've got a lot more, I'd like to say, um, on the ideas, but this book has got a storyline that I think helps give it coherence. So yeah, to answer the question, I mean it's not, it's not that I left it, it's not that I left and [01:05:00] 20 years later thought I'm going to write about it, it's the pandemic, what am I going to do?
It's more like it had never left me and I'd, I'd tinkered away at sort of different bits of writing in different ways on and off over the years. And I now feel now that it's actually out there. Yeah, now that it's only when I visit when it was physically a reality and I saw it in book form, I suddenly felt, oh, I've done that and I can let go of it.
So really lovely feeling suddenly feeling, you know, because right up until the final I don't know if you relate to this but right up to the final copy I did. and going to, going to typeset. I was looking over and thinking, oh, I want to change that word. I want to change that. Oh, always. I never stop. Yeah. I felt really guilty.
I felt like I must be really abnormal because I, I emailed the typesetter and said, Oh, do you mind if we change this bit? And she was really nice about it, she said, that's fine, just, you know, but once it had gone to print, I just let go of it. It was great. So I've let go of it now. Um, but I do feel [01:06:00] it's just, it's never, it's never left me.
That part of my life is the dominant, it's the dominant story in my life. And it's, it's never left me.
Katherine May: And one, and just a final question, because one of our listeners asked, um, this brilliant question, which I'd love to close on, which is, um, what is your romance with God today?
Catherine Coldstream: Wow. Like all romances, you know, it, it morphs, it changes.
So the honeymoon period was when I was in my twenties and then, you know, the dark night of the soul was in my thirties. Um, now I'm a lot older and wiser. I feel. It doesn't feel, I mean, romance, is it a romance? It's more like something that permeates my awareness of, it permeates my experience of life. So it's sort of natural for me to wake up in the morning and just greet God and greet the new day.
And, you know, thank God that I've woken up. [01:07:00] I'm alive. There's a whole new day ahead. It's natural for me to thank God, you know, for the things that come my way today, the food. You know, that's permeated me, this sense that everything is a gift and that life is a gift. But I'm much less religious and pious than I was.
I'm much more, it's more about feeling I'm living in the presence of, of gift and of life. Life is a gift. And you know, God is, is, is, somehow the trans, the transcendent source of life within, you know, with which I'm in, with whom I'm in, some sort of relationship. But I think it's all much more diffuse and integrated into just who I am and my stance, my, how I approach life and my, my way of being in the world.
So I do go to church, um, but I don't always go to the Catholic church. I don't go every week. Sometimes I go to the Anglicans. I find the Quakers have a lot, you know, I have huge respect for the Quakers, so I'm [01:08:00] much less like We're all
Katherine May: drawn to the Quakers, that's all, I think that's a middle aged woman thing.
Do you know what, that's all we ever talk about me, and my friends are like, Should we join the Quakers?
Catherine Coldstream: I know, I know, yes, there's always that question on the, on the periphery, and it's kind of like, I'd have to start knitting my own socks. I don't know, I'm so sure, but yeah, I sort of feel like, Yeah, I feel like drawn to the Quakers and yet, and yet, I think what I miss, I love the silence but I think I miss the beauty of the music, musical side of the Catholic liturgy.
So, every now and then just having a really good sing and, and, um, Uh, there's so much in the biblical and etiquetal tradition that is really resonant for me. So, I can't let it go. I still feel Catholic, but I feel much, in a much broader way. And I feel you can find God, you can find God everywhere and in everything.
Um, and, you know, I just feel, I'm hoping, I'm holding on to the positives from what I gained. [01:09:00] Asanaan and from Catholicism. There are, there are less positive areas. There are areas that I feel I've had to let go and You know, I've had to let go, of course, of the more structured and, um, overbearing side of religion I'm no longer attached to.
So the authoritarianism and, um, that sort of side of Catholicism is something I've had a lot of questions about and I'm, yeah. Um, I'm on a journey and, um, I still feel, I still feel that God is, you know, Well, obviously God is central and overarchingly important for how I perceive my life, but religion itself is something I'm always interrogating and I'm always hoping one day I'll find the, the perfect community or the perfect incarnation of, of those traditions.
But I think it's difficult to find. I think religious groups do have a lot of work to do because there's, you know, there are [01:10:00] groups and traditions, you know, are always morphing and developing and they have problems. So, yeah,
Katherine May: yeah, I'm so it's actually, I think that's the, that's the perfect close to this because in a way it's over to them, isn't it?
Like you've, you've done your thinking and it feels like it's time for the institutions to change too. Well, Katherine, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming back. It's so generous of you, but also thank you for your incredible book, which I know everyone loved and I loved and, um, and for telling your story so generously.
Thank you.
Catherine Coldstream: Oh, thank you so much, Katherine. It's, it's been a really lovely conversation. I've really, really, uh, so lovely talking to somebody who's already, you know, sort of seems to get, you know, to get it, uh, it's so understanding and insightful. So I've really enjoyed it. Thank you very much indeed.
Show Notes
A couple of weeks ago, I talked to Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun, and disaster struck. Halfway through the conversation, the tech failed in a spectacular way, and we lost the whole recording. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from me.
But Catherine very kindly offered to re-record, and so we got together last Friday to capture this new conversation. I was worried that it would feel stale and rehearsed a second time around, but I needn’t have worried. Having got to know each other a little, we could relax into a questing, rambling chat about the deep pull that many of us feel towards the quiet and gentle rhythms of the monastic life, and the risks of submitting so completely.
If you’d like to know more about Catherine and her book, check out our reading guide, and please consider buying a copy of the book if you can: it’s out now in the US and the UK.
Links from the episode:
Catherine’s website
Catherine’s book, Cloistered
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“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
