Catherine Coldstream’s ‘Cloistered’
A reading guide and exclusive excerpt
Hello,
The next True Stories Book Club is on:
Tuesday 30 April
7pm UK/3pm ET/12pm PT.
This month, Katherine’s guest is Catherine Coldstream, author of the extraordinary memoir Cloistered: My Years as a Nun. There’s an extract from the book below, as well as a reading guide to give you some background.
Just in case this is your first book club, here’s what you need to know:
Free subscribers get a reading guide and an audio recording of the live event.
Paid subscribers can join us live online for the discussion - a link and password will be posted in the Chat - and you can send in questions for Maggie by posting them in the comments.
If you can’t make it, a full replay will be available straight afterwards from the same link (or a little later in your podcast feed).
You don’t have to read the book to attend the event - but however you use it, hopefully the book club will inspire you to find some brilliant new books and authors!
About the book
In 1989, a young woman who’d grown up in London loving books, music and words chose to join a an order of nuns characterised by their silence and seclusion. Catherine Coldstream was mourning the loss of her father, the distinguished painter Sir William Coldstream, and still reeling from the fracturing of her family that had begun some time before. In her grief, she started looking for meaning, searching for the afterlife where surely her dad would still exist. She drifted from life as a student and musician in Paris to returning to England and coverting to Catholicism. Books of philosophy and theology came to offer the security she couldn’t find in people. Spiritual retreats and time spent worshipping intensified her wish for conscious contact with God and so, eventually, she becomes one of two new postulants at a priory in Northumberland.
Cloistered charts this extraordinary journey to, and within, faith. We learn about the sanctity of the cell but also what the nuns call going to the loo (‘humble office’ is the lavatory, H.O. for short). Coldstream details the intricacies of Carmelite history and teachings, while also painting artful pen portraits of the women with whom she lives. Discovering the inner workings of such a closed community is, for the reader, fascinating, although imagining the rigours of monastic life seems to me best done from one’s own sofa. It’s hard to believe that the routines described took place in the 1990s.
As the years pass, things are far from heavenly for Coldstream, who struggles not so much with the pious life but instead the personalities of those who are also following it. The chasm between belief and behavior widens, with violent results. It’s hard to know what’s more shocking - that a 27-year-old woman should seek to escape the modern world so entirely, or that in doing so, she finds that there are vicious power struggles and poisonous resentment in the most sacred of places. Yet even so, Coldstream says that being a nun was the great love story of her life.
I was utterly gripped by Cloistered, and I can’t wait to hear more from Catherine (and Katherine) at the Book Club later this month.
Catherine Coldstream talking about her book on NPR
Catherine interviewed by The Observer
About Catherine Coldstream
Catherine Coldstream grew up in London and converted to Catholicism in her early twenties. She spent 12 years in a Carmelite monastery where she lived the life of a silent contemplative nun. Since leaving the monastery, she has studied at the University of Oxford, and taught theology, philosophy and ethics for 10 years.
I now thrilled to share with you this excerpt from the prologue of Cloistered: My Years as a Nun.
CLOISTERED
In my mind I am still running. Running towards the road. Running. Running. Running. The darkness is fresh around me, the air slicing across my face in wild, clean shafts. The rush of oxygen is fizzing, moonlit, completely unexpected. I’d forgotten what night tasted like, the great dome of it, just as I’d forgotten what it was – after ten years cloistered – to run cold and wild and wet, beyond enclosure. I’d forgotten what it was to stand under the sky and feel the far stretching of infinity. I’d forgotten what it was to stand and look up and turn and twizzle my head this way and that, amazed, engulfed in stars. I’d forgotten what it was to move and breathe and spread wide my arms and feel . . . no walls!
Now I am running fast and newly free, my feet sunk in wet greenery on the grass verge. My socks are damp. My ankles brushed by foliage. The first shock, after the careful terror of the locks and keys, the infinitesimal turning of the handle, had been the floodlighting that rose up before me, sweeping the gravel forecourt like a great white whale as I stepped out. For a moment I had thought that was it – the game was up. There would be an alarm. There would be footsteps rushing, voices, torches. My mind spooled. I just stood very still and looked, took in the frightening, glorious wide space in front of me, the beam of the lights over gravel, and decided there was nothing for it but to go on. Beyond the lights were dark trees. Beyond that there were fields, black carpets of freedom only bumpily illuminated in places by the moon.
Halfway down the long drive I stop and look back for a moment, expecting to see lights popping on in the windows, faces looking out, but there is nothing. No change, no movement about the sleeping house. The monastery slumbers. The low moon hangs vigilant over the hushed, teeming landscape. Cells are shuttered, slices of corridor seen from a distance static, deadly quiet. And then, only then – at a hundred yards – do I begin to breathe. To stop and note the startling feelings that are welling up inside me. I am astonished at the freshness of the night. Amazed to find myself feeling safe. Surprised at the sense of boundless space. Surprised, especially, to hear my voice saying out loud, quite clearly and confidently to God or whatever guardian spirit may be listening: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
And then I am moving on again, breathless under the stars. I’ve taken virtually nothing with me, just my viola and a plastic bag containing a few necessities. When I next look back at the vast, towering house that rises like a fortress against the sky, I see it for what I now think it is, a place of danger and of dishonest murmurings. I look at it with relief and incredulity.
Incredulity that this place held me for so long. Incredulity that I am safe. Incredulity at the beauty of the surrounding natural world. It is so good! Safe, safe, safe – I am safe, I keep repeating to myself, as though I cannot quite grasp or get used to the idea. My voice peters out. I halt again near the Lodge, close to where the gravel drive meets the country road, and look back one last time at the now toy-sized gothic spectacle. How small and powerless the house looks at two hundred yards. How foolish and flimsy, like a cut-out against the beauty of the infinite moonlit sky. Relief surges through me, and I breathe and turn finally – finally – towards the road.
***
I had come to Akenside Priory a decade earlier, in 1989, young for my twenty-seven years.
The Life of Carmel was everything I thought I wanted. It gave me answers and it gave me a new kind of home. It gave me skies and trees and lofty ceilings, and a cell with a view. The Life gave me community – an unfamiliar one at first and something I had to put my own self aside to learn – and a resilient purpose. It came with a Mother, universally regarded as being Reverend (and Superior), one voted in every three years by the mature majority, and a bevy of sisters known collectively as The Brethren. Over and above all of this, it gave me a central and defining relationship, one with an invisible being we thought of as our spouse. An immanent embodiment of the afterlife, the unseen spouse was the reason for everything we did, and for why we were there, cloistered religious sisters hidden within the four walls of our cells, and of a closed community.
For the first few years, the monastic life nourished and reorientated me. It alone, thanks to the unseen Presence, had power to lift the mourning veil of my early twenties, and to instil a new set of values and embed a new source of hope. But the helplessness of grief, like clouds, and other fluctuations, does not last unchangingly forever. Faith, too, matures and presents us with more solid challenges as we go on. An active faith sometimes entails an active questioning. It was inevitable that, one day, I would have to face not only the light but the dark that my new vocation housed. It was perhaps also inevitable that complexity and decay, and even human cruelty lurked not far off, this world being what it tends to be when you are impressionable. The Life was not, and never could be, perfect in reality.
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This is a wonderful book and so looking forward to seeing the interview. Catherine came with the idea for this book to a writing workshop I was running near Conwy in North Wales more than a decade ago and I've seen it through incarantions along the way, including helping to edit the prologue in the final stages. Feel really invested in this amazing work :)
Ooo, looks wonderful, thank you! I can't make this as in the air so I'll look forward to the recording.