When six women's faces light up at the mention of a visit to the dentist, you know you are in exceptional company. For most of us, the prospect of a dental appointment is an unpleasant but necessary part of everyday life; certainly not something which is anticipated with excitement. But for these six nuns who have chosen to live their lives in prayer and silence, separate from the outside world, it is one of the few times they will ever leave the walls that enclose them.
The thought of life in a contemplative order is one which still arouses incredulity in many people. It is one of the last arcane frontiers of society. Yet the remarkable fact is that the numbers of women choosing to enter enclosed Catholic orders, such as the Poor Clares and Carmelites, has remained constant over the last few decades.
The Council for Research and Development at Maynooth holds records of those entering religious life: in 1975, 175 women did so. Of those, 14 were to enclosed orders. In 1985, the overall numbers were 123, with 16 going to the enclosed orders. By 1996, the last year for which figures are available, there were only 19 female entrants in total. Nine of these were to the contemplative orders: an extraordinarily consistent figure in face of the overall drop.
To track the figures over 30 years is to discover that the so-called "active orders" of nuns have seen their numbers steadily decline, with not a single year seeing a larger entry number than its predecessor. Yet their contemplative sisters have seen their numbers bob up and down like a steadfast boat that shows no sign of sinking.
A typical day begins about 5 a.m. and is punctuated by a complex routine of chapel prayer at least seven times, for periods up to two hours. In addition, there is a daily Mass. All meals are taken in meditative silence. Both the Poor Clares and Carmelites make altar-bread hosts to support themselves, work which takes up several hours of each day, and which is also undertaken in silence. There are two short breaks a day for recreation.
Every day is the same, except at religious festivals, when more time is spent in prayer and less at work. The Poor Clares retire at 8 p.m. and get up again at midnight for an hour's prayer. The Carmelites go to bed for the night at 10 p.m. It is a life of utter simplicity, structured by the routine of prayer and the rhythm of the church year.
TO visit these convents is to feel unexpected resonances with Japanese culture and Noh theatre (the stylised Japanese drama which developed from a religious dance). There are sliding doors and panels, and faces which are masked behind grilles. There is the formality of the tea-ceremony: the tea-tray arrives in the room via a revolving cupboard, placed there by unseen hands at the other side of the wall. Like a play, there are complicated entrances and exits by the various nuns and myself, since symbolism demands that neither of us can be in the same room at the same time.
Sr Maria Maher (43), is a Carmelite nun in Roebuck, Dublin. It's so cold in the parlour that I keep my coat on. There is a solid counter between us - like a waist-high wall - but Roebuck took away the bars which were on top of it some years ago. Each house is autonomous, and adapts itself to such matters as it sees fit. The low wall between us is to represent the separateness of the nuns from the rest of the world. It is in this parlour that they see family members for a two-hour visit once a month.
Sr Maria entered the Ursuline order of nuns when she was 18. "I first felt the call in first year at school. I felt all the time it wasn't my doing, it was God's will. He wanted me." For 20 years, she taught Home Economics and religion. Then, "out of the blue" during a retreat, she heard the words "the contemplative life" and they stayed with her. "I felt I was being called again: called to give more prayer." She joined Roebuck five years ago.
As she's relating this, dogs start barking in an adjoining room. It's such a secular sound that we both laugh. "That's Bruno and Cleo," she says. "They're terrific. Whenever they see us going out for our walks, they come out with us." The Roebuck house has 40 acres, and the nuns grow their own fruit and vegetables. When asked how they exercise, she says that there are pathways in the grounds. "We cycle up and down them."
At Roebuck, they take The Irish Times three times a week. One sister will listen to the RTE evening news each day and relate it to the others. "So we keep up with what's happening in the world." Recently, they've been praying for Algeria. Sometimes they focus their prayer on world events, but usually it's up to themselves to choose what they wish to pray for.
Religious life, like life in the lay community, has its own pecking order. The self-sacrificing contemplative orders are high up that hierarchial scale, and know it. Sr Maria does not seem enthusiastic about my comment that current statistics suggest figures in contemplative orders may actually rise in the future. "Only a few can give witness," she says. "If there were hundreds of nuns, we couldn't give the same witness. It's the quality of the prayer that counts, not the quantity."
Sr Clare Donnelly (41) has been in the Carmelite House at Knock, Co Mayo, for a year and half. "Ten years ago I was engaged, I had a gold Visa card, I was assistant manager of the AIB in Galway." What happened? Her relationship collapsed, her job took a different direction and she took a redundancy package. "In 1992, I was at a wedding, about the time Somalia was in the news. I remember sitting there and looking around at all the wasted food and thinking how wrong it was. That was a point of change in my life." She started going to prayer meetings once a week in Galway, which took place in private houses. "You hear about them through the grapevine."
All this time, she was going home most weekends to the family farm near Ballinasloe, Co Galway. Their mother had died in 1985 of meningitis and herself and her sisters went as often as they could to "help Daddy and our brother on the farm. Daddy had built up this beautiful farm. We'd do all the housekeeping for him. We all rallied round." The sisters were all single at the time, so it was easier to manage the commitment. They did this for years. Asked if she has ever read John McGahern's Amongst Women, she says no.
In 1994, she "prayed for direction. I prayed that if I was to marry, that I would meet the right man. At the end of that year, I felt that I wouldn't get married and I decided to dedicate my life to Jesus." The following April, her father died. "I didn't know how I was going to live after he went. We'd grown so close." Sr Clare starts to cry.
"I knew when he was dying that it didn't matter what sort of farm he was leaving behind; what mattered was the type of man he was. It was for him, not the farm, that we all went every weekend." That June, she began to think about entering a contemplative order. She entered the house at Knock soon after.
At the Poor Clare convent in Galway, four nuns sit facing me across the bars, arms folded into the sleeves of their habits. All four are from Galway and all entered directly from the lay community.
Sr Bernadette Duggan (26), came in three days after her 21st birthday. "My parents told me to wait until I finished college, but I had such a pull inside me that I couldn't wait that long." Sr Faustina Grealy (23) entered a week after graduating with an arts degree. Sr Gabriel Grealish (35) was working as a local government auditor until three years ago. "Materially, I had everything, but I was resisting the call. Once I entered, I felt such peace descending and all my restlessness went." Sr Colette Hayden (34) qualified as an accountant in 1992. "The day after I qualified, I heard the call." She entered a year later. After asking all the nuns their ages, they start giggling. "You know what age we are now," Sr Faustina says mischieviously. "What age are you?" "Yeah, go on, tell us," Sr Bernadette squeals with delight, so I tell them, and suddenly we could be anywhere, a group of women exchanging confidences and having a laugh.
So what is this mystical-sounding thing, The Call? It is a consistent feature in all these women's stories and explanations of why they entered religious life. They struggle to define it. "I knew deep down I'd never be free until I tried to answer the call," Sr Faustina says of her experience. "It's like a pull inside you, touching your heart," Sr Bernadette muses. For Sr Colette, "It was like love at first sight". "It's up to each individual to decide what they want to do with the call," Sr Gabriel says. "For me, once I decided to follow the call, I realised it was what I had really wanted all along."
The nuns receive hundreds of letters every week, asking for prayers. "And thousands at Christmas. In some ways, I've learned so much about life and relationships since I've been in here," Sr Faustina says. She points out that members of the public tell them the most extraordinary things about their lives and problems - which must make contemplative nuns the hidden agony aunts of Ireland.
What do they miss about their secular lives, apart from their families? "A glass of wine. And open fires. We only have central heating here. Besides, we're never free for more than threequarters of an hour at a time, so there would be no point in lighting one," says Sr Colette. "My dog," Sr Faustina admits wistfully. "Make-up," Sr Gabriel says. "I used to wear it every day. And I can tell you, it wasn't our brown habit that made me want to enter the convent!"
Sr Bernadette looks at a place on the wall behind me. "I'm from a family of nine. For me, it was a very big suffering to give up the possibility of having my own family. When I entered first, I couldn't bear it when someone came into the parlour here with a newborn baby. I had to go out." There is a silence, tight as a drum.
If they remain in the convent for the rest of their lives, as they say they want to, these women will never walk by the sea again, never sit by a fire, have a glass of wine, hold their own child, do their own shopping or any of the everyday things that most of the world takes entirely for granted. They will not leave even for the funeral of a family member.
Whatever it is that has compelled these women to choose this way of life, it must be very strong to merit such sacrifices. "We are instruments through which the power of prayer operates," Sr Gabriel says intently. "We don't have the power ourselves, but we believe in the power of our prayers. Otherwise there would be no point in being here. We'd all leave tomorrow if we didn't believe that." The others nod their agreement.
"But we go out to vote. And to the dentist," they tell me. And they all start smiling like mad at the prospect of polling booths and dentist's drills.
