How I Was Saved By A Nun

Now that the intense pain associated with the memories of May 2004 is gradually beginning to subside, I can finally bring myself to write about how I first met Sister Mathilde. It was on a bright sunny morning last year, May 3, that I received an email saying that my girl-friend of nine years had been killed in a car-crash in Tampa, Florida. I felt that a giant abyss of nothingness had suddenly yawned up beneath my feet and I had been sent plunging into its cold and fathomless depths. For weeks, I tried in vain to find something solid to hold on to, some temporary stopping-place on my downward descent into myself. I found it impossible to sleep properly at nights and also to keep up with my work during the day in the university library. I finally went to my doctor who after several visits put me on prozac and some other sedatives. That helped to some extent but very soon I began to experience sudden attacks of panic during which I would feel that the solid ground on which I was walking would open up with no warning at all.

My doctor asked me to visit a specialist consultant at St Thomas' in London, and it was to St Thomas' that I went on a July afternoon. On the way, however, I came across a small school called St Hilda's For Girls with beautiful red-bricks and shining green roofs. Having spent twelve years in a Roman Catholic school in a small town in the northeastern-most part of India, I have always experienced a strange peace in the atmosphere that suffuses Catholic schools, and I decided to spend some time sitting down under an elm tree within its campus. After some time, I saw four nuns, dressed in their spotless white habits, moving towards the black iron gate. When they reached the gate, however, one of them saw me and came up to me.

'Hello, my dear. Are you all right?'

'Yes', I replied brusquely. (Though I really wanted to scream at her : 'Just leave me alone and go to hell, will you? I don't want any of your bossy preaching right now.')

'Ah, you are not all right then, my dear.'

'What makes you think so?'

'Oh, you know how it is with you men. My dear, you people are so predictable. When you say Yes, you usually mean No.'

'And how on earth would you know such a thing?', I asked, unable to hide my rising irritation.

'Oh my dear. You think that I would know nothing of men just because I am a nun? You don't know how I spend the whole day, the whole night, and the whole year talking to my Man on the Cross? You see, He is very much like you men, if I may dare to say so. But hush! Don't go telling the others out there that I have been speaking to you about all this. My dear, every morning, when I pray to Him, He seems to say Yes to me, but in the evening, I know that He had actually meant No. How typical of Him to do that! Why does He not say No to me in unequivocal terms straightaway at matins?'

There was something about her reply that made me stand up. I had always carried with me this mental image of nuns as stuffy, outdated, and imperious martinets who were completely unaware of what was going on outside the cloistered haven of their cosy convents, but here was a nun, if I may say so, with a difference. As I frantically tried to find words to frame some sort of a reply, she called out to the three other sisters standing at the gate to come closer to us. And that is how on the afternoon of July 4, 2004, I met Sister Mathilde for the first time. Five days later, I went down to Yarmouth Abbey, seven miles outside the picturesque town of Canterbury, at the invitation of Sister Mathilde to see how the nuns of the Franciscan Order live, work, and pray in their convent. That evening, after she had shown me around the place, Sister Mathilde asked me to go with her to the chapel after vespers.

'But I am not religious', I protested.

'My dear, do you think that I am religious? If I were to tell God, "O God, just look at me. Just see how religious I, Sister Mathilde, am", God will laugh me to scorn! My dear, just come with me and sit down beside me for a while.'

And so Sister Mathilde knelt down before her God, and I sat down on one of the brightly polished benches, silently gazing at the wooden Cross. I began to wonder what I was doing there, for I knew only too well that it would not be God but my friends who would surely laugh me to utter scorn if they were to find out that I had been running away to a convent. Sister Mathilde spoke nothing for half an hour, but her face was aglow with a wonderfully warm radiance that seemed to emanate from her, flow outwards into all directions, and envelope me in its loving embrace.

I started going to Yarmouth every weekend, and slowly and slowly, I began to feel healed in the presence of Sister Mathilde, to feel that some of the deep fissures that had suddenly opened up within me were being knitted together with masterful care, love, and patience. Sister Mathilde, however, would never talk to me about God, and puzzled about this omission I once questioned her : 'Are you trying to make a Christian out of me?'

'My dear, what amazing thoughts you have! Do you really think that I am capable of such a feat, a poor old nun like me?'

'So why are you doing all this to me?'

'Do you feel that I am helping you in some way?'

'Yes, you are.'

'Do I need a reason to help someone?

I remained silent.

I saw Sister Mathilde for the last time on December 28, 2004 when I went down to Yarmouth with some fruit that I had bought for her from a Sunday market near Cambridge. There was something different about her on that day, about the light on her face and the tone in her voice, as if she somehow knew that her time had come. She took me again into the chapel in the falling dusk, and she knelt down and remained silent for a few minutes. Then she turned towards me and spoke to me with a soft whispering voice.

'Do you feel the love that is pouring out from the wounds on His crucified hands? Someday perhaps, my dear, you shall experience that love gently flowing into you and transforming you from within. Then, my dear, you shall also feel that everything else in this world is but a fleeting shadow, a sign of times when all suffering shall be removed.'

On January 5, I went to see her grave with a bundle of her favourite red geraniums. On her epitaph was written : 'Sister Mathilde / Anyone who does not love her brother whom she has seen cannot love God whom she has not seen.' For a long time after her death, I felt her gnawing absence in my life acutely and could not bear to go to Yarmouth for fear that the familiar sights, sounds, and smells there would only remind me of her. Gradually, however, I was able to accept the bitter truth that Sister Mathilde is not with me, that she is not here, not there, and will never be anywhere around me. And yet in some sense I know that she is everywhere, that she has become as omnipresent to me as the expansiveness of the blue sky over my head.

Today, of course, I also know that outside her Order nobody will remember Sister Mathilde in a few years. She will never make it to any of the headlines of the national papers; nobody will give her a Noble Prize, not even one for Peace; and many will, in fact, continue to believe, as I myself had done once, that nuns like her are self-absorbed aliens isolated from humanity, a drain on the country's gross national income. Not that any of this bothered Sister Mathilde in the least when I had pointed them out to her one autumn evening as the tired evening was settling into Yarmouth. She had said : 'My dear, do you really believe that I am living in this world to earn votes on a television opinion poll? Everyone, my dear, keeps on saying that all we need is love. If only, my dear, we knew how difficult it is to hold on to it even when it is all around us.'