The Book: Stalking the Divine, by Kristen Ohlson
The Story: One Christmas, Kristen Ohlson wondered into a Catholic church in Cleveland. She had wondered away from any type of religion for years and just wanted to go to church on Christmas. It turns out that this Catholic church has a cloister of nuns called the Poor Clares.
The Poor Clares are a small group of elderly nuns and they absolutely capture the author’s heart and attention. She goes on to research their past and their present to write a newspaper article and decides to expand that into a book. As she gets to know the nuns better and hear their stories, she finds part of herself awakening too. She makes attending mass a priority although she doesn’t really believe most of what they say. She becomes part of the “regulars” at church, has regular meetings with the priest and even attends and all-night prayer meeting. She is sort of doing all of these things for the book that she’s writing, but she talks a lot about the effect that these relationships and meetings effect her life.
What I Thought: I know it’s a weird thing, but I’ve always kind of liked nuns. I was not raised Catholic, and although my step-dad comes from a Catholic family, have had very little exposure to the Catholic faith. What attracts me to nuns is just that level of devotion. To leave their families and their lives as they know it to live a totally different lifestyle is something that I cannot entirely wrap my head around. It is just this beautiful and selfless thing. I also love the pictures of, say, nuns ice skating or riding bikes or whatever. Pretty cute.
Anyway, I got this book from a thrift store and it had a sticker on it that it originally came from a bargain bin. My expectations were pretty much nil.
I was pleasantly surprised.
I really loved “meeting” all the nuns. Kristen got to sit down and chat with a lot of the nuns and hear their life stories. The variety here and just the sweetness of it all blew me away. One of the nuns had been cloistered since the 50’s. Literally had not left or talked to anyone “outside” in over 50 years. She loved, loved, loved Indians baseball though and was so happy that the stadium was close enough that she could hear the fireworks and cheering when they won. She always nabbed the sports section from the newspaper first. I just love that. There were a lot of stories of living full, rewarding lives then feeling like their next step was a nunnery, then how they followed through with that. Seriously, fascinating.
The part about the author’s journey was kind of second-rate for me. I’ve been a Christian for as long as I can remember and have had my fair share of faith struggles. I still could not relate to her in any way. I felt like she just tried to be logical and reason everything out, ignoring a lot of the faith-related issues that come with any religion. I feel like even though she was trying to ACT super spiritual, that she never really let anything go any further than skin deep. This made her whole struggle seem shallow and meaningless.
I know that this sounds weird, but I think that this would have been better had the author decided to write it as a novel. I think that that separation- leaving herself out of the equation or creating a character to represent her- would have went a long way towards making this book more relatable.
Conclusion: An interesting history of a cloister of nuns written from a semi-secular point of view. That is a pretty unique case and something worth taking a look at.