The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns [Paperback]

Catherine Whitney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2000

In a bluff north of Seattle, overlooking the glorious vista of Puget Sound and the white-capped Olympics, stands Rosary Heights, the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Dominic of the Holy Cross. On a dark night in 1997, a catastrophic mudslide shifts the ground beneath the motherhouse and threatens to send it crashing into the water below. By this single act of nature, the sisters are forced to rethink their place in the world.

With Rosary Heights as a backdrop, best-selling author Catherine Whitney takes a personal journey inside the order that ran the school she attended as a child, the order that, for a short time, she contemplated joining herself. In this rare inside view of their lives of devotion, Whitney reveals how modern nuns are a study in contrast: worldly, yet removed; passionate, yet chaste; subservient, yet fiercely independent. She answers the questions that most fascinate the lay public: What would compel women today to join a religious order? How does faith unite so many women of wildly different backgrounds?  What is their relationship--and struggle--with the male Church establishment?  

Readers will meet these very human women, at work, at play, and at prayer--in times of crisis and harmony--and grow to enjoy their company. The Calling offers a luminous chronicle of a community that has existed for centuries yet is still evolving, and whose anxieties and joys are utterly relevant to us all, regardless of our beliefs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like many Catholic baby boomers, Catherine Whitney left the Church in her late teens, turned off by its dogma and apparent oppression of women. And like many wayward Catholics, she returned to the Church at midlife, yearning for a deeper spiritual understanding and meaning.

It was her father's funeral that brought Whitney back to her Seattle roots as an adult journalist, and back to the doors of the Sisters of Saint Dominic of the Holy Cross--the same order of nuns that ran her childhood school. As a Catholic rebel, Whitney had dismissed her childhood teachers as archaic and out of touch with reality. But now as a seeker and wiser soul, Whitney was "completely disarmed by the women I found there.... They were smart, engaged, spiritually grounded, visionary women, remarkably at ease with uncertainty and change." Through interviews with the nuns and yearlong observations, Whitney explains how women hear this unique calling, and why they answer it. She also examines why some women break their vows and leave, becoming "Rebel Brides." Nonetheless, Whitney's writing is at its best when she tenderly explores her own heartfelt reckoning with God and Catholicism. --Gail Hudson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Whitney grew up steeped in strict Roman Catholicism and was fascinated by the nuns who educated her. Estranged from the Church and a self-professed "radical feminist non-believer," she returns to the sisters of Saint Dominic of the Holy Cross to write an expos? of the "piety and pretense" of religious life. She traces the lives of several nuns from childhood to their entrance into the novitiate and, in some cases, their decisions to leave the order. She describes Sister Claire, who emulates Jesus' suffering on the cross by wearing a girdle of thorns under her clothes; Sister Carmen, who escaped abusive drunken parents to join a loving convent school; and Sister Elizabeth, torn between her vows to the Church and her love for a man whom she finally decides to marry. These women, her teachers at Holy Angels Academy during the 1960s, had inspired the adolescent Whitney to become a nun. But, when Mother Dominic told her to wait, go to university and make sure she was hearing God's call, the young girl was stunned, and thus she began a journey away from the Church toward disbelief and cynicism. To a great extent, this memoir is Whitney's attempt to unravel her feelings about Roman Catholicism, faith and the nuns who encouraged and challenged her creative spirit. As she rediscovers the nuns of her youth, she finds a group of women who, like her, struggle to live in community, to love one another and, committed to a single purpose, do the work they feel called to do.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (February 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609805827
• ISBN-13: 978-0609805824
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,853,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Cliche-ridden, disorganized, self-absorbed, June 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Calling : A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns (Hardcover)

Whitney's book is a real disappointment. Apart from factual errors about the history of the community she is writing about (who in the world edited this?), "The Calling" is less about "a year in the life of an order of nuns" than a self-absorbed, shallow "journey" toward....? Who knows? In any event, the account focuses more on the author than the sisters (not nuns)--most of whom are only superficially drawn, and many of whom get lost or forgotten in the course of the narrative. And the author's own "journey" is certainly not toward faith or anything deep but, it appears, toward some sort of ungrounded self-affirmation. As one who has spent a lot of time in convents and knows hundreds (thousands?) of sisters, this book leaves at best a limited, and at worst a misguidedly stereotyped, image of religious life in both the past and the present. If this is all you ever read about sisters, do not assume that you now "know" or "understand" anything--except, perhaps, about the author! Instead, read "Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Monroe, Michigan," "Poverty, Chastity, and Change," by Carole Garibaldi Rogers, "Cloister Walk," by Kathleen Norris, "Virgin Time," by Patricia Hampl, "Dead Man Walking," by Helen Prejean, or almost anything by Joan Chittister. For history, read Jo Ann McNamara's "Sisters in Arms." Do not waste your money on this one....

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Even the title is misleading; focus is on the author herself, August 6, 1999

By 

Anne E. Donnell (Lebanon, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Calling : A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns (Hardcover)

I was almost through the book when I realized the author really thought she was writing about calling (newfangled version of "vocation") in a general way. She or her editor just didn't get it done. Little cries about a "different" sort of book - just go where it leads you, etc., can't defend jumping around from anecdote to anecdote and then measuring EVERYTHING by herself and her shutdown life. All that glory and all she can do is go over and over how she was "rejected." I really enjoyed the stories of the nuns, though. Staying or leaving, they gave us glimpses of women of depth and wonder. I've never been a Roman Catholic but I'm a Christian. I'm glad I read this and in the words of people lots younger than old me, the author needs to "get a life."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Whence the subtitle?, September 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns (Paperback)

If you are expecting to be drawn into the liturgical rhythm, discipline and complex beauty of religious life, this book will disappoint. It is not, as its subtitle implies, an ethographic description of life behind convent walls. It is, instead, a telling of the personal and spiritual journeys taken by a cross-section of women. Most of these women were at some point "Called" and spent at least part of their lives in the convent at Rosary Heights. But others, including the author, are more loosely connected to the religious life. The fascination of this book, and it is fascinating, lies in the diversity of the women themselves and in the author's ability to set their thoughts and actions firmly in the cultural milieu in which they take place.

The author presents each woman's story with great respect and affection, and as you read, you too will come to appreciate those who have heard and responded to "The Call." Many books of this genre leave us feeling that to succeed in the religious life one must be or become meek, subservient and narrow. They led us to believe that the convent is not a place for the stong, the independent and the courageous. This book provides a broader perspective. Perhaps many a true feminist finds her freedom and nutures her strength within the convent walls.