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On 7 January, 2016, I asked Google, “what religion is Barack Obama”? After considering the problem for .42 seconds, Google offered more than 34 million “results.” The most obvious answer was at the top, accentuated by a rectangular border, with the large word “Muslim.” Beneath that one word read the line, “Though Obama is a practicing Christian and he was chiefly raised by his mother and her Christian parents…” Thank you, Google.
At its root, Islam is as much a Western religion as are Judaism and Christianity, having emerged from the same geographic and cultural milieu as its predecessors. For centuries we lived at a more or less comfortable distance from one another. Post-colonialism and economic globalization, and the strategic concerns that attended them, have drawn us into an ever-tighter web of inter-relations.
Anglo-Saxon England may seem like a solidly monochrome Christian society from a modern perspective. And in many respects it was. The only substantial religious minority in early medieval Western Europe, the Jews, was entirely absent from England before the Norman Conquest.
As part of the Oral History Association conference, we asked Abbie Reese to write about her film-in-progress, which evolved in parallel to her book, Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns. This summer, Abbie was awarded a grant by Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library to conduct follow-up interviews with a half dozen women she began interviewing more than five years ago — women contemplating religious life. Abbie is preparing for post-production of a collaborative film made with and focused on a young woman in the process of becoming a cloistered contemplative nun.
Recently, a journalist asked me how I convinced the Poor Clare Colettine nuns, back in 2005, to let me write a book about their lives, and how I convinced them to help me in that endeavor. I explained that was not my approach. I asked the Mother Abbess if I could undertake a long-term project about their lives; I said that although I did not know the outcome, I would keep the community apprised.
At that time, I wanted to understand: What compels a young woman to make this radical departure to a cloistered monastery? I believed that there was value in the stories, perspectives, and memories of women who remove themselves from the world to pray for humanity — to become mothers of souls and saints on earth.
About the same time that I began to engage with the Poor Clare Colettine nuns in oral history interviews, I began interviewing young women around the States in the process of “discernment.” Each was contemplating if she had been called to a religious vocation.
I arranged to meet “Heather” in 2005. We met at her dorm at Elmhurst College in the suburbs of Chicago, and then we met up again a few hours later at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford where she would stay overnight for the first time. (She stayed in an area outside the enclosure and visited with the Mother Abbess and the Novice Mistress, separated by the metal grille.)
Heather and I met over the years; I interviewed her as she maintained hope that she would join a cloistered order. Her parents required her to finish college first, and then she dealt with school debt as she struggled to find a job.
In 2011, I met Heather and her family at the monastery when she was delivered there. I continued to conduct oral history interviews and I was allowed to enter the enclosure to record video footage. At that time, I was enrolled in an MFA in visual arts program at the University of Chicago. I had sensed even before she joined the Poor Clares that Heather was hesitant in our interviews. I wasn’t sure the reason: her uncertainty, not knowing if she truly has been called to cloistered contemplative life; the familial opposition that led her to talk less about the prospect of a religious vocation; or the possibility that she was not as articulate verbally as she is sophisticated visually. (She was a painter and studied graphic design.) From her blogs, I read her open tone.
Two nuns work in the wood shop of the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Ill. The Poor Clare Colettine nuns make vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. Courtesy of Abbie Reese.
An expatriate, Heather has made the exodus from mainstream society. A year after entering the monastery, Heather became “Sister Amata” in the Clothing Ceremony. (She chose both aliases to reflect and preserve the Poor Clare value of anonymity.) As she slowly integrates, Sister Amata is governed by a schedule that determines when she prays, sleeps, eats, and works, while she learns the expectations and the culture. Sister Amata continues the six-year formation process as she transitions into a new social role and new identity as a member of a community following an 800-year-old rule.
The enclosure is an intermediary space. The Poor Clare Colettine nuns intercede between humanity and an unseen realm; they believe their prayers and penances can change the course of history. Like the Poor Clares, Sister Amata inhabits a threshold — a space between worlds.
A contemporary practice that depends upon social contracts and long-term relationships is a complicated endeavor; representing others and representing otherness are problematic territories, following an imperialistic tradition of exploiting native resources. As in Bronislaw Malinowski’s model, boundaries between insider and outsider collapse, and the notion of “the outsider” slips. This hybrid of genres has probably sustained my focus and dedication because I find it challenging and nuanced.
To enact co-authorship and shared authority, to remove myself as the mediator holding the camera and the microphone, I obtained permission to lend Sister Amata a video camera. In essence, I chose Sister Amata as the cinematographer. I asked her to use the camera as if it were eyes encountering her world. I made three requests: document the daily rhythms of prayer, meals, and manual labor within the monastery’s rich material culture; record impressionistic moving images that place primacy on the visual over the discursive; and turn the camera upon herself to make video diaries of her impressions and motivations and experiences as she assimilates into the community.
Even though I was not physically present, my relationship with Sister Amata is embedded in the visual dialogue that transpired; the history of our engagement since 2005 fed the new film endeavor. Sister Amata’s video diaries are raw, sincere, and vulnerable. The nature of this as an exchange is evident when she addresses me directly.
The nuns gave me all of their documentation and I agreed to give them copies of it, as well. I met with Sister Amata and her novice mistress, “Sister Nicolette,” to download the digital files, to look at footage and to discuss it with them. I made additional requests.
Because of other nuns’ interest in contributing documentation, I lent a second camera. (The older nun constructed enactments of monastic life, instructing fellow nuns what to do, when.) I also recorded video footage inside the enclosure and my interviews with the nuns.
I am now working on post-production of a feature-length film that will be released theatrically. This project in-progress embeds the negotiations of a para-ethnographic, collaborative documentary:
How do we pursue our inquiry when our subjects are themselves engaged in intellectual labors that resemble approximately or are entirely indistinguishable from our own methodological practices?
Para-ethnography answers this question by proposing an analytical relationship in which we and our subjects — keenly reflexive subjects — can experiment collaboratively with the conventions of ethnographic enquiry. This methodological stance demands that we treat our subjects as epistemic partners who are not merely informing our research but who participate in shaping its theoretical agendas and its methodological exigencies. (Holmes, Douglas R. and George E. Marcus. “Para-Ethnography.” Ed. Lisa M. Given. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2008. Page 595.)
Film-making addresses some of the questions and interests that drive my practice. In giving Sister Amata and the other nuns the video cameras, they selected and composed what was recorded, essentially the same dynamic in my other interactions with them. Enunciating our “visual dialogue,” video cameras are seen crossing the threshold into the “Jesus cage,” passing between slats in the metal grille separating the monastery from our world. Through this exchange, the viewer will be granted Sister Amata’s vantage point — her painterly eye and the risks she has taken.
Once, a documentary film professor at the University of Chicago described her own work with a tribe in Alaska; she said that just as she chose to work with the tribe, they chose her. This professor said the same was true of my work — just as I chose to work with the nuns, they chose me. The title, Chosen, also reflects the nuns’ belief that God has chosen them for this ancient rule and demanding life.
Featured image: Poor Clare Colettine nuns return to the monastery after a funeral service on the premises, in 2010, for a cloistered nun who served in WWII. Courtesy of Abbie Reese.
Over the summer of 1582 a group of English Catholic gentlemen met to hammer out their plans for a colony in North America — not Roanoke Island, Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement of 1585, but Norumbega in present-day New England.
The scheme was promoted by two knights of the realm, Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerard, and it attracted several wealthy backers, including a gentleman from the midlands called Sir William Catesby. In the list of articles drafted in June 1582, Catesby agreed to be an Associate. In return for putting up £100 and ten men for the first voyage (forty for the next), he was promised a seignory of 10,000 acres and election to one of “the chief offices in government”. Special privileges would be extended to “encourage women to go on the voyage” and according to Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, the settlers would “live in those parts with freedom of conscience.”
Religious liberty was important for these English Catholics because they didn’t have it at home. The Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed and, since 1571, even the possession of personal devotional items, like rosaries, was considered suspect. In November 1581, Catesby was fined 1,000 marks (£666) and imprisoned in the Fleet for allegedly harboring the Jesuit missionary priest, Edmund Campion, who was executed in December.
Campion’s mission had been controversial. He had challenged the state to a public debate and he had told the English Catholics that those who had been obeying the law and attending official church services every week — perhaps crossing their fingers, or blocking their ears, or keeping their hats on, to show that they didn’t really believe in Protestantism — had been living in sin. Church papistry, as it was known pejoratively, was against the law of God. The English government responded by raising the fine for non-attendance from 12 pence to £20 a month. It was a crippling sum and it prompted Catesby and his friends to go in search of a promised land.
The American venture was undeniably risky — “wild people, wild beasts, unexperienced air, unprovided land” did not inspire investor confidence — but it had some momentum in the summer of 1582. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, was behind it, but the Spanish scuppered it. Ambassador Mendoza argued that the emigration would drain “the small remnant of good blood” from the “sick body” of England. He was also concerned for Spain’s interests in the New World. The English could not be allowed a foothold in the Americas. It mattered not a jot that they were Catholic, “they would immediately have their throats cut as happened to the French.” Mendoza conveyed this threat to the would-be settlers via their priests with the further warning that “they were imperilling their consciences by engaging in an enterprise prejudicial to His Holiness” the Pope.
Revellers commemorate the failed 1605 assasination attempt against King James I each year on November 5. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
So Sir William Catesby did not sail the seas or have a role in the plantation of what — had it succeeded — would have been the first English colony in North America. He remained in England and continued to strive for a peaceful solution. “Suffer us not to be the only outcasts and refuse of the world,” he and his friends begged Elizabeth I in 1585, just before an act was passed making it a capital offense to be, or even to harbor, a seminary priest in England. Three years later, as the Spanish Armada beat menacingly towards England’s shore, Sir William and other prominent Catholics were clapped up as suspected fifth columnists. In 1593 those Catholics who refused to go to church were forbidden by law from traveling beyond five miles of their homes without a license. And so it went on until William’s death in 1598.
Seven years later, in the reign of the next monarch James I (James VI of Scotland), William’s son Robert became what we would today call a terrorist. Frustrated, angry and “beside himself with mindless fanaticism,” he contrived to blow up the king and the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. “The nature of the disease,” he told his recruits, “required so sharp a remedy.” The plot was discovered and anti-popery became ever more entrenched in English culture. Only in 2013 was the constitution weeded of a clause that insisted that royal heirs who married Catholics were excluded from the line of succession.
Every 5 November, we English and Scottish set off our fireworks and let our children foam with marshmallow, and we enjoy “bonfire night” as a bit of harmless fun, without really thinking about why the plotters sought their “sharp remedy” or, indeed, about the tragedy of the father’s failed American Dream, a dream for religious freedom that was twisted out of all recognition by the son.
Featured image: North East America, by Abraham Ortelius 1570. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
