Misereres and Exsultates

By Celine Armenta

We don't know much of Mexican Catholic nuns. How many are there , what do they think, what are they in search of, what are their dreams or nightmares? We don't know how they survive in an ideologically hostile environment, how they preserve their medieval structures, how they support themselves, love and live power, sexuality, economy, solitude and death.
In this book the author writes about her ten year experience in the convent through essays and reflections about nun themes.
This book can cause unease, dislike and incomprehension since the author is an ex-nun that has become a lesbian activist and an atheist. For some, her writings may seem ridiculous instead of dramatic, boring instead of sublime, grotesque instead of intimate. Some readers might even see pornography, bluntness , or aggression where the intention was only to show how complex everyday life among women living together is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DEMAC A.C.
• Release date: Feb 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311605269

Celine Armenta

English Bio Celine Armenta has more than 40 years of active involvement in education related activities. She has written and staged school plays,organised choruses, cleaned school desks, prepared chemistry practices, organised multiple field trips, given all sort of courses such as physics, special ed,cut and confection, etc.. She has reached students from kinder garten, elementary, middle school, high school, college and grad school students. She was a nun for 10 years and after leaving the convent she became a Biologist by the UNAM (Mexican National Autonomous University) and UDLA (Americas University in Puebla) and she also has a Special Education degree from Columbia University in New York. She describes herself as a lesbian activist, atheist, optimist with a strong "joie de vivre". Celine is an avid reader of all genres. Writing is her passion, her hobby and her identity. Bio en español Tras más cuarenta años de participar en muchísimas tareas relacionadas con educación- como escribir y montar obras de teatro escolares, organizar coros, lavar mesabancos, preparar prácticas de química, organizar excursiones, estar al frente de grupos de preescolar, secundaria, preparatoria y posgrado, dando clases de física, corte y confección, estadística, educación especial y otras materias- Celine Armenta afirma haberse ganado el título de educadora. Además, ahora vive de enseñar a futuros educadores y a maestros en servicio. Por otra, estudió biología- la profesión del asombro- en la UNAM, y luego, en la UDLA de Ciudad de México y en la Universidad Columbia en Nueva York, educación especial - la profesión de la esperanza. Se asume como activista lesbiana feminista, atea, evolucionista, optimista, entusiasta de vivir mientras la vida dure y lectora incansable de todos los géneros. Escribir siempre ha sido su pasión, su pasatiempo y hasta su identidad, aunque éste es su primer libro.

Book preview

Misereres and Exsultates

by Celine Armenta

2009 DEMAC Awards

Mexico, 2009

Misereres and Exsultates by Celine Armenta

First Spanish Edition, August 2009

Printed in Mexico under the surveillance of Graciela Enríquez Enríquez and Yvette Couturier

First English ebook Edition, January 2016

Translated by Robert A. Hass

Cover design

Retorno Tassier, S.A. de C.V.

© Copyright, first edition, Mexico, 2009, by

Documentación y Estudios de Mujeres, A.C.

José de Teresa 253,

Col. Campestre

01040, México, D.F.

Tel. [phone] Fax [phone]

Demac.org.mx

E-mail: [e-mail]

[e-mail]

Ebook published through Smashwords by 3Screen.com for DEMAC A.C. 2016

ISBN = 9781311605269

[e-mail]

No part of this book may be reproduced, translated or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage, information and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Documentación y Estudios de Mujeres, A.C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introito: Writing

2000: About the continuum in my identity

2005: About the difficulties to write

1991: About me and the truth, coffee cups in between

Premature Adolescence

1962: About adolescents, hunches and pedalling

1963: About the end of guilt and the beginning of light

1964: About martyrdom, its enchantment and some consequence

1965: About the warm surprise of loving as a group

1966: About two decisions which, not for being early, were less lucid

1967: About yellow roses and kisses on the forehead

Essay: Vocation: gyn/affection and congruence

About my own vocation, in hindsight

About the nun as a woman among women

About, at last, Janice Raymond’s gyn/affection

The entry to the novitiate

1969: About my brief stage as a university militant

1970: About the pale facts preceding my entry to the convent

1971: About my blinding experience of entering the convent

Essay: Erudite ignorance

About the little we know concerning nuns

About the vocation according to The Traps and according to me

About if it’s true that nuns hate men, as it is suggested in The Traps

About love in abstinence

To the mystic through the ascetic

1972: About the cloyingly pleasure of denying myself

1973: About incidents and nightmare

1975: About the extreme virtues

1976: About mystic outburst being really so

1976: About ascetic outburst that are almost something else

1976: About any one morning during Lent

1977: About an excursion to the other multi-colored planet

1977: About exsultates, psalmodies and chants

1978: About innocent female saints who are neither one thing nor the other

Essay: The voice of those who do know

About the demons of an almost real convent

About those who dared to break the great silence

Lucidity and Schizophrenia

1988: About statements in the pages of old diaries

1991: About the same cups of coffee described in the introito

1991: About social conscience and unconscious action

Essay: Answer to Marcela and her nuns

About nuns without time or place, but with distance

About oppressing and liberating vows

Unerotized, blurred, unidentified

About a blind and blinding obedience

The end of the adventure

1979: About the psychiatric diagnosis that made way for light

1980: About my departure

2001: About free dreams and yellow dresses

Glossary

Bibliography

INTROITO: WRITING

Ghe power of those paranoid mechanisms used to review the epistemological pact which we usually call reality should not be disdained just like that.

Sánchez Visal, 1994

2000: ABOUT THE CONTINUUM IN MY IDENTITY

For twenty years I wasn’t interested in putting in order or understanding my years at the convent. They seemed so far away from my present options that I simply ignored them, such as the dream that vigil puts aside in irrelevance. But now—lucidity or menopause nostalgia—I understand that between the mystic and obedient nun who I was, and the assertive and atheist lesbian that I am, there are more similarities than differences; although it’s rather difficult to believe it. There is one same attraction, calling?, for the radical decisions requiring unusual commitment and intensity. In addition, then and now I perceive myself as a paradox: tied to inalienable destinies and, at the same time, reinventing myself, free, at every crossroads.

The teenager who decided to leave everything behind looks too much like this woman who today want to undress herself in black and white. It is the same relentless urgency—perhaps coded in my genes, committed in past incarnations, or enacted by superior wills—and the same emotion to be choosing, conscious, soaked in the pain and the joy of freedom. The nun who I was and the activist that I am live what they believe—what I believe—and they are what they want—what I want. I enjoy knowing that I made myself, that I have decided my paths, my styles and identities. But with an intelligent skepticism I cannot deny that when I invent and reinvent myself perhaps I’m just complying with an inexorable mandate.

Regarding my intensity, passion and vehemence, the continuity is evident: then and now I seal my beliefs and decisions with shreds of life; so I display them or perhaps so I create them, and the reward is not negligible: every moment I am self-reliable.

There is also continuity in my interest in writing. Writing has always been in my plans, in my purposes, in my futures, and now I’m deciding—or discovering?—that I won’t postpone it more. I could begin with any subject, but I know that for the sake of authenticity, of freedom, of honesty, I must start writing about me and, at the same time, exorcising demons, disenchanting myths, conjuring those ghosts crowding my decisions and my destinies assumed throughout many years. I also choose—or accept—to write with my favorite attitude: insolence, as defined by Julian Marias, as the vital questioning of solences which, curiously, are negative practices: what is not usually done. No one usually talks about life at the convent; it’s insolence, defined as the unusual, uncommon, which is not usually done, rare, strange; and thus—take note, first of all ‘thus’—irritant, impertinent, challenging, insolent in the modern sense of the word.

Usually I refuse concessions to solemnity as they are incompatible with my conviction that the absolute lightness of my being—far from being unbearable—is really very likeable. My insignificance is the source of my rest, my satisfaction and my laughter. In addition, insolence combines well with the unpublished—unusual—of a book about life in a convent of women. Iconoclastic, disrespectful, insolent and joyful: so I am and I cannot nor I would write otherwise.

2005: ABOUT THE DIFFICULTIES TO WRITE

Years go by, and my pressing desire to write does not materialize. I pile up loose sheets of paper and disjointed anecdotes. In addition to the reasons and excuses that potential writers we use to create so prolifically—overwork, lack of time—it took me time to understand—or invent?—a more important excuse: a paralyzing fear to distort the endearing, to the fact that when paper would absorb my memories, it could also dry their essence, their fluid and kaleidoscopic transvestism.

At a DEMAC workshop with Bety Meyer, I discovered this excuse twined among my dreams: Over mixed sounds and feelings—distant detergent smell, barking of a dog, wore-out trimming of a sarape, humming of refrigerator—a non-existing scenario materializes somewhere in the back of my mind: a room with strong green walls, stained with grease, time and neglect. The center of the room is taken up by a long, very long and narrow table surrounded by several women. It’s a warm evening. Light comes in horizontally and fanciful, throwing golden thistle and casting shadows, besides hiding the women traits instead of disclosing them.

On the table, thread cones and tubes, chalks, clay and set-squares hide between pieces of velvet, silk, tulle, organdy, lace embroidered with spangle, wool felt and linen, a lot of linen. Tangled among fabrics, thin-pointed, buttonhole, thwart, tailor scissors. Below fabrics, threads and scissors, glimpses of dozen objects’ patterns drawn in one single large sheet of tissue paper which, I am certain, I myself unstapled and detached from a handcraft magazine.

Women chatter impatient, although I don’t distinguish their words. I try to concentrate. In my right hand I have a pair of tailor scissors, huge, like poultry’s, but longer and thin; with my left hand I smooth the paper folds which resist my efforts. Shadows and reflections prevent me from seeing clearly, but I start to cut. Whenever I lower the scissors’ blade, the table answers the scissors’ cut with a clack. Clack, clack. Women stretch their neck to see the cuts. I don’t distinguish their faces, I don’t understand their words, I don’t identify one single voice, but I know that they want me to finish once and for all; they are exasperated and each clack seems to exasperate them more.

On both sides of the paper, patterns of clothes and toys, quilts and kitchen mitts squeeze together and overlap; all of them life-size and available in several sizes nested one inside the other; the patterns are so intertwined together, that a slacker eyelid is enough to get lost between the lines.

The horizontal light doesn’t let me open my eyes at all; moreover, it pushes the scissors’ shadow just above the line that I’m trying to cut. Taking advantage of this light and shadow confusion, the patterns move and confuse. Clack, I cut where there’s no line; clack, clack, lines play hide and seek under the heavy scissors.

I struggle to separate the patterns that I want from those that I don’t. The front of a skirt on the bias, no; nor the turns of a formal attire collar, nor the pocket of a jacket nor the back of a doll. I do want the piqué bib and the denim shirt sleeve. I don’t want the tie, nor the cushion, nor the suede patches for the Aranese sweater; however, I do want the silk roses.

The women laugh and rush me, increasingly exasperated. The scissors clack, clack, weigh until my arm is numb. The patterns are drawn in blue and red, with continuous or stippled lines; it seemed easy to distinguish them, but now they mix up and I cannot hit on those that I want. The huge scissors, clack, clack, doesn’t obey me; or is it that the lines move as soon as they feel its blade?

I just wanted the shirt, the bib and the roses, but when I try to cut their patterns, not only I tear to pieces twenty projects that don’t interest me, but I also mutilate one of the roses. Moreover, when I cut the sleeves of the shirt, I mistake the armhole with the bottom of a trouser, and the cuffs with the tie. The cuts are wider each time; I remove large pieces of the tissue paper, I crumple them up and throw them to the floor. I know that there are parts of things that I wanted.

The scissors are heavier with each cut. On the floor, the stack of discarded patterns, paper patchwork, large pieces, little strips, wrinkled balls and confetti, keeps growing.

The women are exasperated, they clap their hands; my hand shakes with the tailor scissors, clack, clack. There are no traces of the bib; the shirt lacks some parts; and out of the three roses, I lost one and the other two, did the women took them or I wrinkled them by mistake?

As long as I didn’t start to write about them, my years in the convent were nothing more than a flow of images, feelings, rejections and nostalgia without clear-cut edges. Now, as I write, I define them; I chose this and that, and that over there. I cut a lot, I hurt, I repair, I alter. I try to stick to what I decide, but page after page I realize that I cut and lose not only what I wanted to put sideways, but also what I had chosen to rescue. In the end, only what was left remains. The printed word on paper, such as the scissors’ cut on the patterns’ sheet, divides forever. Written word—such as the scissor’s cut—cannot be undone.

1991: ABOUT ME AND THE TRUTH, CUPS OF COFFEE IN BETWEEN

What I write looks like reality; at least it is almost as amazing as reality. But it is not reality. And this is because such reality doesn’t exist removed of memories, phobias and loves. Today I realize it when I sit down to have some coffee with three friends of mine who are former nuns. We try to recreate, the four of us, what really happened that day, around that fact, behind those specific words.

For the first time, after years of silence, we compare what we remember, what we have built, recreated and invented over the years to give meaning to what we lived. At the convent, we kept quiet about everything; we learned not to share and, usually, we did so heroically. So much accumulated silence has had deforming effects, very different in each one of us.

On the other hand, I confirm that reality is constructed through dialogue; the sense, the meaning, the sequences, causality itself, did not exist until we started talking. We want to talk, we need to talk; we talk. We talk all at the same time, and we superimpose at least four versions of every fact and of every day when we shared the same air. What happened, how it happened, why I happened? For each question, four, five, six incompatible answers. I suspect that, as a protection and a defense, we’ve eliminated images and words of our memories. At least in their first expression, all versions tend to be pale, dull and unintelligible; but if we insist on defining them, then colors and edges, textures, contrasts, the unbelievable, finally appear. In the end, four or more versions face first, then they get braided, but they refuse to merge into a single reality; it takes us a lot of time to share them; each of us has matured her own way.

Interestingly, we coincide effortless in marginal or enveloping memories, such as odors, temperature, light intensity and tone of voice. We also share the uneasiness when we face the ambiguity of a lifestyle that could be the vanguard of a female, feminist, and Amazon culture, but that in fact was, and largely keeps being, a radical version of the prevailing misogynistic patriarchy.

We mix up our need to compare, contrast and validate our versions of the convent with anecdotes of our lives as ex-nuns. By dint of being closer, of having lived them in conditions of a greater dialogue and less secrecy, we find more matches despite the natural diversity. We identify the experience of being out with the argument of El Bulto, by Gabriel Retes. Also we were in a coma for ten, fifteen, twenty years; as Lauro, the central character of El Bulto, we had to restart our existence with a Mexico that we didn’t know, with music that had never heard and that we didn’t understand; with clothes, style of speaking, prices and goods other than those of our adolescence. Besides, the dates coincide: as well as Lauro, we left the world at the beginning of the 1970s, and we returned to it quite later.

As almost every time two or more former nuns we meet, we spend time assessing what we know of our contemporaries at the Congregation; especially those who entered with us: our cohort, our batch. Of those two or three who remain at the convent, usually we know their whereabouts. Of those who are leaving, with the exception of a few, generally we lose track of the rest. We review the names and the stories of the few that we are able to locate: one is a fairly conventional mother head of family; another keeps being the lover of a priest; another lives in a commune; three live alone and work in private Catholic schools. Of the rest, we don’t know with certainty what they do or where they live. We bet that the majority doesn’t recognize in public their years as nuns, although one, conversely, still dresses as a nun and asks to be called sister or mother.

After sharing what we scarcely know about those who are not with us drinking coffee around this table, the four of us four, with newly filled cups, we pick up the thread that originally draw us together: tune up memories. We try to describe our current feelings about religious life: there is one who complains of not having left it before; one who confesses that she normally prefers not to remember those times, and also one who, like me, considers that it was worth to be a nun: as it is worth to climb snowy peaks, skydive, fall in love or practice any other extreme sport.

In view of the extent of our disagreements, we desist from validating our memories; we prefer to take great delight in describing—and reviving—the intensity of the conventual climate, which at different times made us scream in pain or ecstasy, in guilt or sanctity; which pushed us to a martyr-type self-immolation or a desperate suicide. The emotional climate of the convent was intense, dense and complex. The directive of a heroic, unconditional surrender, didn’t neutralized a series of immodest struggles for power, envies and quarrels. Overlapping, but distinguishable, we lived generosities, scruples, depressions, eccentricities and childish behaviors, wrapped in an exaltation which, for being customary, was imperceptible; which fed itself on mortifications, secrets, loyalties, affective and emotional fasts, corporal and anorexic fasts, spiked belts, flagellation and other extremisms which, with remarkable frequency, generated —or at least alternated with—an affectionate, serene, sweet and balsamic, energizing, healing and humble peace, which contrasted with an unappeasable hunger for perfection, with the arrogance of those who know—that we knew, we believed it without any margin of doubt—that we professed the truth and improved in sanctity. And all of that, everything,