I confess to groaning just a bit when first hefting this book, which arrived from the Amazon pre-release Vine
review program. A 540-page autobiography of a nun isn't exactly my idea of light reading! But this turned out to be a real page-turner that kept me up past my bedtime: every chapter poses a new challenge for the author to face, and she is breathtakingly honest about how she successfully met, or embarrassingly failed each of them. It really does read like a well-crafted novel, and the knowledge that it's a true story makes it even more fascinating.
Mary Johnson (or Sister Donata, to give her the name she chose as a religious) started out as a very intelligent but also quite naive teenager. She tells in the book how she developed into a mature adult over the next twenty years as a nun in Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity order. This order, in particular, calls for a life of absolutely unquestioning obedience and physical hardship and isolation: even newspapers, telephone calls, and mail are highly restricted. I'd last about twenty minutes, but she made it for twenty years. The group dynamics of an organization like this can have strange results, and it's most interesting to see what sort of people prosper and reach leadership positions in such a group. The group turns inward on itself and the degree of pettiness can be unbelievable. At times this can be amusing: when attending mass, the sisters were enlisted as enforcers of liturgical purity, and I suspect that one offending priest may still be wondering why they stopped responding to his wishing them a good morning! After a good deal of frustration and soul-searching, Sister Donata left the Missionaries of Charity without bitterness or rancor, and it's fair to say that she had, in effect, simply outgrown the order.
I have to admit that I picked this up in hopes of confirming the negative impression of Mother Teresa which I had derived from Christopher Hitchens' notorious book. I ended up being both disappointed and relieved. The author met Mother Teresa many times, and do we get a vivid picture of her as a human being: flawed in some ways, but not a picture that's likely to offend her admirers.
Since Sister Donata spent most of her time in Rome, we do get a lot of information on the symbiotic relationship between Mother Teresa and the Vatican, and the complicated political manoeuvering that goes on. Many well-known ecclesiastics put in an appearance, and Ratzinger himself even turns up briefly. The political complications of the Vatican are truly mind-boggling and rival anything to be found on Capitol Hill.
We're all brought up from childhood with a set of religious beliefs (or sometimes non-belief). Some of us stick with them forever, others move on at some point in our lives. The change may be sudden and dramatic (St. Paul on the road to Damascus comes to mind), or it may be less dramatic but still rapid (my own reading of Bertrand Russell, for example, and the discovery that he made more sense than what I heard in church). For Sister Donata, the process took twenty years and a good deal of pain, but also involved profound self-discovery. Hearing about her growth over this period was one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in a long time.
...From Phelps Gates http://www.flickr.com/photos/22014050@N08/ Phelps Gates- After a career first teaching Linguistics and then implementing computer language interpreters for a software company, Phelps is now enjoying retirement with his partner, Ian. He recently finished hiking the Appalachian Trail