REMOVING THE HABIT OF GOD

Former Ursuline Sister Mary Christine explains why “irreconcilable differences” finally led to her secular life.

Writing about her years as Sister Mary Christine, YA author and teacher Pickford (Marching Through Time, 1996, etc.) attempts to answer the question she’s heard ever since she quit the cloth in 1968: “So why did you become a nun?” Her short answer? “I have no idea.” In 1959, as a 17-year-old Catholic high school graduate, she entered the Ursuline Novitiate at Blue Point, Long Island, in New York. A self-described “dateless semi-nerd,” she had notions about God’s will and the advantages of following orders from a religious superior: “Whatever happens, it’s to the good. If you mess up, then you offer that to God in humility. If you succeed, then it’s God’s will, so you can’t be puffed up about it. Either way, it’s a win-win. For me, a timid and immature person, that approach to life was like attaching training-wheels to a bike,” she says. “It took away the fear of falling and failing.” Pickford enthusiastically embraced the Ursuline sisters’ education mission, but ultimately it was not enough. “Paradoxically,” she says, “I was also naturally argumentative and strong willed.” The next period of her life, she says, “is difficult to understand even for me….I don’t have an easy answer, even after all these years.” Letters to her parents “stoked the coals of memory and prodded” her into “bright bursts of recall,” resulting in this account. Yet, as Pickford admits, the letters, like much of the memoir, contain mostly “childish, insipid sentences…devoid of feeling”—which perhaps explains the narrative distance that creeps into her account. Readers looking for a sense of passionate involvement with others or with God might be disappointed, though armchair psychiatrists could enjoy reading between the lines. There’s plenty here about everyday life as an Ursuline Sister and its stages of commitment, but those passages inadvertently highlight Pickford’s frustrating inability (or refusal) to satisfy her own or the reader’s curiosity about what for her made religion so appealing and eventually repelling.

A flat, matter-of-fact glimpse into one woman’s joining and leaving a religious order.