Fun, poignant memories of Church
days gone by
“Forever
and Ever, Amen: Becoming a Nun in the Sixties,” by Sister Karol Jackowski. Riverhead Books (
Reviewed by Peggy Weber
Catholic News Service
For
many readers it will be a walk down memory lane as they open the pages of two
recent releases.
In
“Forever and Ever, Amen: Becoming a Nun in the Sixties,” Sister Karol Jackowski chronicles the first seven years of her life as a
Holy Cross nun, beginning in 1964. In this poignant and witty memoir, she
describes how she left her fun-filled days of high school for a rigid schedule
that began with prayer at 5 a.m. and ended with silence at 8 p.m. and lights
out at 9 p.m.
It
was a life that Sister Jackowksi acknowledges was one
of “total self-denial” and very different from that of her fellow college
students on the campus of St. Mary’s in
When
she entered religious life, she did so with 49 other young women. When she
professed her final vows in 1972 there were seven. Today, that number is down
to three.
Her
book details what it was like for her community to experience all of the
upheaval of the Second Vatican Council. “These were revolutionary times in the
sisterhood,” she writes. “Voices wrapped for years in silence suddenly began to
speak; sisters wanted freedom to make personal choices and decisions about
where to live, who to live with and what work to do.”
She
adds that some sisters formed new communities such as the Sisters for Christian
Community, to which she now belongs.
She
portrays it with a sense of humor as she describes one postulant using up all
the cream at the table and another, after enduring it for four days, calling
her, loudly, a “cow.” The sisters had to maintain
silence for the rest of the day.
However,
this isn’t just a diary of misdeeds and mess-ups. She writes about the joy of
sisterhood, noting “Even those who drove me crazy felt like sisters, and when
the first ones decided to leave, or were sent home, we mourned the loss.”
“Don’t
Chew Jesus! A Collection of Memorable Nun Stories” is a fun book with a clever
cover. It is made to look like a black, marbled composition book. And it is
filled, like a child’s diary, with tales of Catholic schoolchildren.
Danielle Schaaf and Michael
Prendergast were classmates in a Catholic grammar school in
Their
book is organized into 10 chapters with such clever titles as “Knuckle Cracks
and Group Slaps” and “Eyes in the Back of Their Habits.”
The
stories themselves delight and hearken back to a day that anyone who ever sat
in a desk in a Catholic school in that era will recall vividly.
For
example, they write about school fundraisers and that “teaching children how to
sell World’s Finest Chocolates was as natural to sisters as explaining how to
diagram a sentence.”
This
book certainly shows some of the lowlights of that era when students were
mocked as “babies” and humiliated in front of their classmates. However, the
book mixes in several fond memories of teachers who made a difference in the
lives of their students.
The authors describe this book as a “link to our heritage”
and a way of preserving “the dedication, passion and influence” of the sisters
who taught them and thousands of other children.