The Pink Sisters Part 1

Note: This series of essays first appeared on Thunderstruck in 2003, recounting my experiences of 2001.


Johnny Rabbitt's office at radio station WRTH is filled with bunny-related objects. Actually, the studio itself features a giant stuffed Bugs Bunny, a rabbit in a vest and top hat, toy rabbits in toy cars, plastic carrots, and the like. His office is almost subdued in comparison, with more emphasis on his books on local trivia and mementos of his decades-long radio career, but still rabbits abound. There is a soft cuddly example of the taxidermist's art perched atop a file cabinet. I have stopped by the station to pick up my paycheck and have found Rabbitt's office open. I decide to sneak in and surf the web on his computer--Hotmail has been threatening dire consequences if I don't dump a couple hundred K's worth of messages from my inbox. Surely Rabbitt isn't around on a weekend, I think. All the offices were open; the cleaning crew is at work. But as I confront the agony of deleting precious email, a thick-spectacled shadow looms in the doorway.

"Angela! Hey, listen, fate may have brought you here. Are you a good writer?"

"I'm a great writer, Johnny." 

"Oh good, oh good. Would you like to help me write something?"

"Sure! What about?"

"The Pink Sisters."

My heart honestly leaps at the thought. I know very little about the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters except that they wear eye-catching pink habits--not subtle pink, mind you; vivid pink like cotton candy, like the last color anyone who doesn't really know nuns would expect them to wear. I say "doesn't really know nuns" because pink would be perfect on some of the nuns of my acquaintance--the giddy young Vietnamese sisters at my church, my high school math teacher who cursed like a sailor--but I know the stereotype calls for a more sober hue. I know why these nuns are called "Pink Sisters" and I know they are cloistered. I know they prayed for good weather when the Pope visited St. Louis in January of '99, and that the temperature jumped up to 68 degrees during his visit. I know a woman who visited their convent and described to me the hospitality and the wise eyes of the Superior. I know and feel their mystique, the curiosity anyone feels about women who go in through a certain door and make a promise they will never leave. But I have never gone to their convent myself. I've always meant to but never have. I suppose I'm afraid they'll bite.

Still, things happen. Rather a lot of things have been happening to me lately. They are strange things. It feels as though words are being spoken to me just at the threshold of hearing, so I hear one phrase and then another one a little while later and then I must piece together the whole meaning. Not long ago I heard a bit of a psalm in an unexpected place-a U2 concert. It was Psalm 116, and the verses were "How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me? The cup of salvation I will take up, and I will call upon the name of the Lord; my vows to the Lord I will pay in the presence of all his people." And then the same psalm, the same verses, I heard again in the expected place, at Mass. It felt as if a point were being made and underlined. And yesterday--yesterday I read a prayer telling me to visualize mercy as an ocean. I marked the page with my fingers and closed my eyes, but I couldn't do it. My mind shrank from the image. Is mercy something to drown in? What sounds less life-threatening? Ah, I thought. Sunlight. Mercy I'll picture as radiant warmth. I went back to the book and discovered the rest of the prayer used no ocean imagery at all, but spoke only of "rays" and "light," and as I read the sun broke free of cloud--yes, it really did, and if it had happened in a movie the audience would shake their heads in disgust at the melodrama, but that's just the way things happen sometimes. Or quite a lot, lately, as I said.

So Johnny Rabbitt asks me to write about the Pink Sisters, an order whose official title is Sister-Servants of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration, and I've been intrigued by the Holy Spirit lately and wear a dove round my neck in His honor but chiefly because it is a symbol of a song I love called "Grace" and now I discover the sisters' place in St. Louis is called Mount Grace Convent. Little things. They can either be understood to be pointing toward a deeper meaning or not. They are clues that I am on the right path or they are meaningless coincidences. They are words spoken at the threshold of hearing, able to be heeded or ignored. I don't ignore them; it suits me to think the coincidences pile up for a reason. Next I suppose I must decide--is whatever's causing this malevolent or benevolent? If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd start shaking but as I'm just me I shrug and call Him melodramatic.

Oh--and there's a radio show I want to do--that's also called "Grace," as in "Amazing." My radio work is my connection to Johnny Rabbitt, but I'm not pursuing radio as a career single-mindedly. At the moment I have a music biography soon to be published, and as I work on that anything that might take me out of town (such as a job as a DJ in some small market, say, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico) is on hold. And yet the work I'm doing on the bio at present is of the thumb-twiddling variety, waiting for others to proof the book and print it. Thus it so happens that when Rabbitt needs someone to help him write about the Pink Sisters, I have both great curiosity about the subject and nothing but time to work on it. Meaningless coincidence, of course.

In a few days The Rabbitt and I take the highway to North St. Louis to interview the Superior at the convent. Some of the streets here have names I know from a lifetime spent on the South Side--Grand, 14th--but others are entirely unfamiliar. We pass a park much like any park I've driven past before. The houses are brick, and of a similar style to houses in my neighborhood. It gives me a strange sense of displacement. This is landscape I know and do not know, a mystery; I feel as if any moment we'll turn a corner and come to a well-known landmark. Then I will know where we are. But this never happens. I have been to the North Side before--but not often. It looks shell-shocked, bombed-- Belfast or Sarajevo in miniature. We'll pass five intact buildings and one that is boarded up, yet it's the boarded-up buildings that define the mood here. I realize this is what my neighborhood must look like to outsiders. There, too, there are nice houses and burned-out ones, but because I live there I think of life as the prevalent mood, not death. Here it is different. 

When we arrive at Mount Grace, Rabbitt first points out a high stone wall. "Behind that is the Sisters' garden," he says. The wall encloses a space as large as a downtown city block. We turn a corner and across the street we see the house of the benefactress of the convent, a still noble mansion. We arrive then at the chapel and the front gate of the convent. The building itself seems familiar--tall, red brick--not as sprawling as stately old City Hospital (another old St. Louis landmark though sadly one that has been crumbling for years), but I think City Hospital in its prime must have been kin. I am reminded too of my sturdy grade school, St. Thomas of Aquinas. Later I find out this convent and that school were built at about the same time--1935. This, in my unlearned opinion, was one of architecture's last great eras. I have compared the Pink Sisters' convent now to a hospital and to a school. It has the bulk and sober facade of an institution. Most modern schools and hospitals seem featureless; they slide out of memory. Older institutions have their noble purpose stamped in their masonry. All of the convent's bricks appear to have been perfectly placed. Its beauty is in the parts adding to a whole, like the cells of a beehive. The roof supports and the gutterspouts are not overly ornamented but their lines are graceful. All the windows are new. It is the survivor of a tradition, a sign that not all things pass away. I think at first it looks out of place amid the rubble and ruin of the North Side. Then I realize I've got it backward. The ruin is the interloper, this is the native inhabitant. In fact this sense of long history brought into the present is the mark of all the true beautiful places here.

I understand this better as Rabbitt talks of Crown Candy Kitchen and Mark's Hardware, two old businesses that have held on to the North Side while others fled. Stepping into Mark's, he says, is stepping into the past. "There are boxes of supplies in the storeroom stamped with dates from the 1800s," he says. "And the lightbulbs in there are the real old-fashioned kind, with the two long wires inside and no frosting on the glass."

I get the impression nothing in North St. Louis is new--there's so little infrastructure, no incentives for construction. But at Mount Grace, this appears to me virtue, not hardship. Newness is overrated. Here is elegant sturdiness, a red brick sanctuary for a way of life more than a thousand years old--for although the Congregation of the Sister Servants of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration has only been around a century or so, there have been cloistered contemplatives for much, much longer than that.

If you like, you may trace a path back from the North Side of St. Louis in the 20th century to the Egyptian desert in the 3rd. That was where a man named Anthony went to live as a hermit after hearing the gospel passage, "If you would be perfect, go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and follow me" (Matt. 19:21). He said, in essence, "all right," and went to live by himself. This made him a very popular person. Others went in to the desert to see what he was up to out there, he taught them his simple ways of work and prayer, and so from the desire to be alone came the whole Christian tradition of religious community life. (That is why words like "monk" and "nun" and "monastery" have a contradiction at their heart. Today they are used in the context of life lived always in the presence of others, but they all come from the same root as "mono"--something that stands alone). In the centuries afterward groups of people would come together to pray, work, and live together in varying degrees of separation from the world.

Cloistered contemplatives like the Pink Sisters have separated themselves about as far as you can get, which is illustrated to me when Rabbitt and I ring the bell at the convent entrance and are buzzed in to a small wood-paneled room. There is a door opposite us, and in the door is a window with a metal screen. The face behind it is hard to see. The voice belonging to the face directs us to open a door to our right into a parlor and to wait there for the superior, Sister Mary Gemma. The parlor is divided into two by a grille made of transparent plastic in an open weave, like a herringbone pattern. When Sister Mary Gemma comes and sits on her side she reaches through and shakes our hands, but that is all the closer we can get. It's not exactly like visiting someone in prison, but it's not unlike it either. My immediate sense of Sister is of an affable woman, prone to quiet laughter and gentle expression. She is the public face of the convent, the rest of the 24 sisters here are more or less anonymous, though they all take turns welcoming visitors at the door. She has email, reads the newspaper, takes phone calls through much of the day, and conducts tours (though "tours" is a misleading term, since most of the grounds are off-limits to the non-cloistered). Having to stand as she does between two realities that don't have much in common, she comes across as neither otherworldly nor worldly. She reminds me of nothing as much as the well-loved owner of a locally successful family business.

In the course of the interview I ask Sister, "Let's say a woman comes to the convent and says, 'I think I may have a calling to your way of life.' What do you do?"

She answers, "We'd meet with them a few times and then just talk about it and ask them questions and lead them to kind of open themselves. If they think that they very possibly could have a vocation to this way of life and we see that it also is a possibility we have them come and live two to three weeks with us. We call that the 'observer program.'"

 After the interview, when I'm back at home, I start to think about this. I could interview Sister Mary Gemma for days but no matter what she says I'd never get the sense of what it's really like behind that grille. And I want to know. Sitting in that parlor listening to her, I found myself getting obsessed with that barrier, the seeming arbitrariness of it, the way it is both flimsy and absolute.

Maybe writing about the Sisters will give me an excuse to break through the barrier myself.