A nun identified as Sister Mary Elizabeth has described how a fleeting brush across a monk’s sleeve in the convent’s parlor in Preston, Lancashire, caused her to yearn for marriage after twenty-four years of being in the monastery.
BBC News UK reported that a Prioress of the Order had brought her to see the Oxford-based Friar Robert, who was visiting from a priory there, to see if he would like anything to eat.
The two were left alone when Sister Mary Elizabeth’s superior had to leave for a phone call.
Sister Mary Elizabeth, who had led a pious, austere, and largely solitary life as a nun, spending most of her days in her “cell,” stated that as she let Robert, now husband, out of the door, she brushed his sleeve and felt a little jolt.
“It was our first time in a room together. We sat at a table as he ate, and the prioress didn’t come back so I had to let him out.
“I just felt a chemistry there, something, and I was a bit embarrassed. And I thought, gosh, did he feel that too. And as I let him out the door it was quite awkward.”
She recounted that approximately a week later, she got a message from Robert asking if she would go away to marry him.
“I was a little bit shocked. I wore a veil so he never even saw my hair colour. He knew nothing about me really, nothing about my upbringing. He didn’t even know my worldly name,” she said.
She further recalled how she felt her “interior world” expand as the outside world shrank for her.
There was a sense of being happy and contented, but that day in the convent parlor, everything changed with the touch of a sleeve and a message asking if she would leave the monastic life and get married.
Sister Mary Elizabeth was at a loss for what to say in response to Robert’s question.
As she put it; “I didn’t know what it feels like to be in love and I thought the sisters could see it in my face. So I became quite nervous. I could feel the change in me and that scared me.”
When Sister Mary Elizabeth finally worked up the confidence to confess to her Prioress that she might be feeling something for Robert, the reaction she received was bewilderment.
The Prioress said; “She couldn’t understand how it had happened because we were in there 24/7 under her watch all the time. The prioress asked how I could have fallen in love with so little contact,” she says.
Sister Mary Elizabeth had anticipated how her family or her bishop would respond if she departed. She agonized over the possibility that her connection with God would alter as well.
But she did something unusually impulsive as a result of the conversation with her superior.
Meanwhile, Robert had texted her to let her know that he would be returning to Preston that evening. This time, he went to a neighboring pub to meet a Carmelite acquaintance for advice—the first member of the order he had confided in to hear about his and Lisa’s situation.
“I was really struggling, I thought I should just stop this from happening and Robert could get on with his life. But I also wondered if he really meant what he said about getting married.”
It was challenging to make the shift, especially at first. Lisa recalls a specific incident that happened right before Christmas, not long after they both left their monastic lives.
Lisa’s husband, Robert said, “When I saw her, my heart stopped.
“But actually I was paralysed by fear not by joy, because I knew in that moment that I had to be entirely for Lisa, but I also knew we were not practically ready for that,” he added.
Robert, though, had been a Carmelite friar for thirteen years at this point. He was a theologian, academic, and thinker who entered the monastic life in quest of meaning during what he characterizes as a crisis of identity and religion.
“That touch of Lisa’s on my sleeve started a change, but while I felt something gradually growing in my heart, I don’t think I ever reached a point where I felt I was crazily falling in love, because in becoming a monk or a nun they teach you how to deal with emotions like love,” Robert said.
He admits that when he asked Lisa whether they could get married, it was actually more of an intellectual struggle with himself.
In his word; “When she appeared at the pub the little demon in me was terrified. But my fear was not religious or spiritual, it was purely about how I would start a new life at the age of 53.”
It was challenging to make the shift, especially at first. Lisa recalls a specific incident that happened right before Christmas, not long after they both left their monastic lives.
“I looked at Robert and he was distressed and crying. At that moment we both hit rock bottom and it felt like we should just take something like Romeo and Juliet and just end it, says Lisa.
“It was so hard because he both felt so alone and so isolated and didn’t know the way forward. But we just held hands and we got through it.”
