Sister Gemma Simmonds was being interviewed on radio about her life with the Congregation of Jesus when she was asked, in rather solemn tones, if she and her fellow nuns ever laughed. “Laugh? We never stop laughing in this house,” hoots the order’s director of vocation in the UK. “The night before, we’d had a particularly hysterical supper. There’s obviously this image of us sitting looking terribly serious.”
“Drinking our gruel,” adds 29-year-old Theodora Hawksley, the convent’s newest recuit, to more guffaws.
The unusual level of interest in the sisters’ existence has been prompted by news that communities of Catholic nuns in England and Wales are expanding. The number of women entering convents in 2014 reached a 25-year high. At 45, it was a significant increase from 30 the year before. In 2004, only seven took up religious life.
Hawksley, who left academia to join the Congregation of Jesus as a postulant in January, attributes this increased commitment to godliness among women to a snowball effect. “God always calls people to religious life, but various things can make it harder to hear that, and one of the things that makes it easier is lots of people openly talking and thinking about it, and giving it a go,” she says.
It must help, too, that life as nun, while still requiring women to make a far from inconsequential lifelong vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, is no longer always the controlled, cloistered and silent experience of lore.
Of last year’s recruits, 27 joined as “active” or apostolic nuns such as those of the Congregation of Jesus – “out and about, as opposed to indoor penguins,” explains Hawksley. Younger women made up significant proportion of those recruits: 11 were aged 19-30, six were 31-40 and 10 were 41 or over. But 18 chose to be “enclosed” recruits: four in the 30 and under age group, seven aged between 31 and 40 and another seven over 41.
Some apostolic nuns wear habits, but members of the Congregation of Jesus dress simply and casually. A cross around their neck is the only outward sign of their vocation.
In the kitchen of the calm, comfortably furnished Victorian villa that the London branch occupies near Willesden Green, Hawksley and 54-year-old Sister Naomi Hamilton, a former archaeologist and self-professed feminist who became a nun four years ago, wear jeans and plain tops.
Life here is not particularly institutionalised. The seven members of the community – technically it is a convent, but the sisters tend not to refer to it as such – do much of their praying alone, and they work apart during the day.
Hawksley, who prays in her light and airy attic room between 6am and 7am, is finishing a book on peacebuilding and Catholic social teaching. Simmonds is a theology lecturer, and another sister is a part-time child and adolescent psychotherapist working for the NHS. (Her colleagues know she is also a nun, but her patients don’t.) They also volunteer, helping all kinds of people in need. They don’t watch a lot of TV, but they loved Call the Midwife.
Hawksley came to the convent after three years of post-doctorate study. “It wasn’t a decision that I made so much as one that was made in me that I discovered,” she says. “It’s like any other relationship, in that you suddenly realise you’ve rearranged your life around someone else, that you’ve encountered this life-shaping love.”
On the subject of relationships, yes, she says, she has had some. “I’ve dated. I had one pretty big relationship just after my undergraduate degree, for about a year. I was hugely happy and thought that we might get married in the end.” Though they didn’t, the relationship was “immensely important”. “Maybe I wouldn’t have entered religious life without that. It’s not that it broke my heart, but it showed me how great my heart is and therefore how great my capacity for God is.”
Was it difficult to know that she wouldn’t have that kind of relationship with another human being again? “Of course you’re aware of what you’re giving up,” Hawksley says. “But, in the same way, as when you’re getting married, you’re not dwelling on the fact that you’re giving up all the men or women in the world apart from this one. When you walk towards religious life, what it is you’re giving up isn’t the first thing on your mind.”
Community life does bring sacrifices, she admits. “I live with three people roughly the age of my mother, and three people the age of my grandmother,” she says. (The community’s oldest member is 89.) “One of the things I love doing is cooking for myself, and quite adventurously. I miss chilli. I cracked last week and made a jar of what I’ve labelled ‘nuclear hot sauce’.”
The nuns take it in turn to cook, sharing a meal at 7pm each evening. Older members tend to cook “the kind of food my grandparents eat”, Hawksley says (without complaint), while the younger women serve up more pasta dishes. The kitchen shelves reveal a mix of styles that includes “slow cooking for yourself” and Delia Smith’s 1976 classic Frugal Food, plus a Nigella Lawson and a Nigel Slater. Hawksley, who has cooked rabbit pie, enchiladas and falafel for the group (“I’m kind of experimenting on them – they’re tremendously game”), keeps her Marcella Hazan, Thomasina Miers and Allegra McEvedy upstairs.
There are signs elsewhere of young people’s desire to try out a religious life. In September, 16 men and women aged 20-35 will begin a year living the lives of monks and nuns at Lambeth Palace, as part of the newly formed Community of St Anselm. Another 40 who live and work in the capital will join part-time. Since applications opened in February, 420 have registered an interest, with more than 20 applicants per residential place. “We’ve been overwhelmed,” says tthe Rev Anders Litzell, the community’s prior. Hopefuls give the same reason over and over again: ‘They want to be all out for Jesus.’”
The journey towards becoming a nun is lengthy. If you have a congregation in mind, you can approach it directly, explains Sister Cathy Jones, religious life promoter at the Catholic Church in England and Wales’ national office for vocation. Otherwise, her office can help. You would start spending time with a congregation, perhaps building to periods of several months. After that, you live there as a postulant for a year or two, then spend another two years as a novice. Only after that will you take your vows and, even then, they are only for three years at first.
Jones attributes the increase in new nuns to the growth in opportunities for young people to consider their call to religious life over the past decade – from weekend groups to festivals. “Things like that raise the profile of different ways of living out vocations and help normalise what it is to be a nun or religious sister in the Catholic church. It’s not something extreme or bizarre, it’s something that always has been and always will be. Particularly in the last five years or so, religious congregations have grown in confidence in making their way of life known.”
Misconceptions about nuns abound, say Hawksley and Hamilton: you have to have short hair, you’re not allowed to see your friends. Yet despite lingering negative views of nuns, people often express pleasure on hearing what they do. “Quite often they say, ‘Oh gosh, that’s so nice to know people like you still exist,’” says Hamilton. “There’s a sense that we’re doing something which they recognise is good, but maybe they think is beyond their capabilities.”