Why I Don't Trust Nuns

I spent the better part of Saturday at a choir retreat with my church. I figured going in that it would be a relaxing sort of thing spent talking about music and getting to know everyone a little better. (My first mistake: assuming something at my church would happen the way I wanted it to.) I'm usually the type that can find the silver lining in everything, but when I walked in and the first thing I realized was that the retreat facilitator was a 60-something nun, my brain just sort of stalled out. She was, as many nuns her age are, a crazy hippie liberal, so most of the retreat was New-Agey bullshit. WHOOPEE.

I've always been a little skeptical of nuns, which I thought was due to the predictable New Age stuff. But upon reflecting on it (said reflecting happened during the retreat when we were supposed to be meditating on the femininity and masculinity of God... or maybe it was while we were "blessing" the "holy water" with our retreat experiences... retch...), I discovered that that wasn't all of it. Many women-religious set themselves up as authorities on matters religious, but they've never been to seminary. I have little patience for people who pretend they know what they're talking about, and that patience whittles down to absolute zero when people pretend they know what they're talking about in the religious sphere. If I wanted to spend my time talking about my PERSONAL FEELINGS about a particular passage of Scripture, you had better believe I would, but I would do it with people who I felt had an understanding on par with or better than mine.

I'm not counting ALL nuns in this negative context, of course; I just look at nuns more skeptically and critically than I do priests (which is saying something). The priest at my favorite parish told me once that he was surprised and disappointed when he found out I had a boyfriend, because he thought I should be a nun. I'm pretty sure I don't have the temperament to be a nun (can you just imagine??), but I'd like to think I'd be the kind of nun that most other nuns would directly avoid because I was so conservative that they wouldn't know what to do with me. Sad when that's my vocational ambition, huh? ;)