This memory is dedicated with love to Sister (Dr.) Linda Kulzer, Benedictine nun, who invited me to present at the Western Michigan University medieval conference at American Benedictine Association sessions. She lived to be 92, dying in 2022. Her humility and kindness made her a good friend to all who knew her. I’m grateful for her hospitality. Father Tom Francis became my friend and email pen pal after we visited many times at the Conyers Monastery, including once with my family. He died aged 96 in 2024. He always talked of and lived from God as friend and had a sparkle in his eye and a light heart filled with kindness. Father William Meninger and I exchanged many emails and he also made and sent me a dried flower card. My life was enriched by his sharing his love of the Cloud of Unknowing. He died in 2021 aged 88.
I’m so grateful for these three. They offered me community. I was also fortunate to find community along the way in places like books, now in the joy of Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation collaborations, and in kind undergraduate and graduate school professors who made class truly communal. Some of my favorite memories are from the time spent with monks and nuns, who invited me in, often reaching out out of the blue. When I was in graduate school, I was living pretty much a nun’s life, studying the Bible with commentaries daily and taking notes, praying, doing lectio divina, or sacred reading, walking two hours daily, so I fit right in with my monastic friends because my heart has always been monastic. I did all this while teaching full time as a TA, first-year composition students, and while being a full-time student.
One reason I walk is because I have dyslexia, undiagnosed until my late 40s, and walking has always helped me learn and digest what I’ve studied in school. It helps me have room and calm to think. I also often carried and still often do carry Bible verses with me. I started, because I was doing what my mom taught me, which is to memorize Bible verses, starting with, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” which she gave me and all of us kids in VBS. I’d write them on 3×5 cards, and take them with me on walks, but the memorizing became lectio divina, even before I’d heard of it. Which reminds me always, that God or Love always has a workaround, seriously.
Here’s one memory made possible because Sister Linda Kulzer of blessed memory invited me to give talks for the American Benedictine Association. I was asked about it at a recent workshop, so that kind new friend sent me down memory lane. It’s from my book God of Mercy, which is on the tenth-century Benedictine scholar, translator, monk, and abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, whose emphasis on writing accessible sermons in the vernacular and on communicating that God is Love and Mercy were significant antidotes and healing for me who had been brought up as a child on an unhealthy diet of hellfire and damnation sermons.
One May, I entered Western Michigan University’s teeming Valley III cafeteria holding a tray of barbequed chicken leg, institution-white rice, and asparagus, and scanned the dining room for a friendly face. Remembering my monastic friends’ habit of sitting on the right side of this boisterous room, I shifted my gaze and spotted them at once. Then I noticed with disappointment their circular table was crowded with seven sisters and no empty chairs.
No room for me, I thought, and began looking elsewhere, but I had been spotted. When elderly Sister Teresa Wolking raised an arm in welcome, I shuffled towards their table, still uncertain. Sister Deborah Harmeling rose to meet me with a smile, then disappeared behind my back, and as she left—in one motion—the others took their plates off cement-dull cafeteria trays and stowed these trays under their seats. All this fuss made me ask, “You sure there’s room?” and Sister Deborah answered my question by returning with a chair and placing it firmly under me: “There’s always room at a round table.”
There’s always room at a round table echoed in my head as I unloaded my own plates and stowed the tray under the gift of my chair, and joined the community. This is the world of the tenth-century Benedictine monk and abbot Ælfric, whose sermons I translated from Old English, and it’s the Benedictine idea of Christian community and the blessing of the ordinary (in this case, a chair), which is the foundation too of the teaching of Jesus.
Father Greg Boyle reminds us in Cherished Belonging: “Everyone belongs and everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions.” Having experienced how painful exclusion and bullying are, I deeply remember and cherish the sisters’ act of kindness, which still blesses me in my heart today.
This blog is also read here: https://youtu.be/I24O214OLn0. The story of the kind nuns is from God of Mercy: Ælfric’s Sermons and Theology (Mercer University Press), p. 12.