Religion: The Failure

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As the young Belgian girl was about to begin her novitiate in an order of nuns whose motto is "Pray and Work," the Superior General gravely warned her: "It is not easy to be a nun. It is a life of sacrifice and self-abnegation. It is a life against nature." Mistaking a will to do good for a vocation to serve God in the cloister, Gabrielle Van der Mal took 17 years to realize that she was not cut out for it. Renunciation of the world did not bring presence of the spirit, and the quest for selflessness became an unwitting discovery of self.

Gabrielle, or Sister Luke, as she was known in religion, resolved her inner conflict not by denying her faith but by requesting and receiving a papal release from her vows in 1944. As told by Author Kathryn Hulme, herself a Roman Catholic convert, Sister Luke's ordeal has the characterization, pace and dramatic intensity of a good novel. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice to be published next week, The Nun's Story (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $4) looks into a world most readers could scarcely enter in any other way.

World Without Mirrors. The first reaction of Gabrielle to the life of a nun was shock—the electric buzzer shrilled at 4:30 a.m. Another shock was the lack of privacy; each of 200 cells was semi-partitioned with thin cotton hangings, contained only a chair, a table and a straw pallet on wooden planks. It was a world without mirrors. There was sign language at meals to preserve silence. Down-hooked middle and index fingers said, "Fork, please"; two humble taps on the breast said, "Excuse me." One of the strange episodes was the shearing of the lambs: "Postulants from a previous group were seated on wood benches over which presided three nuns with clippers and shears. The heads were already clipped bare as a kneecap and the stone floor adrift with chestnut and blonde locks, some of which clung to the shoes of the barber nuns. More interesting than the barbering was the sight of the nuns talking with the postulants—a special permission, she supposed, to ease the nervousness of the shorn ones who had a tendency to giggle when they saw how the others looked."

Like any new recruit in any army, Gabrielle felt that some of the discipline bordered on tyranny, and that some of the orders were indignities. When the bronze bell in the chapel campanile tolled, each nun was supposed to stop in her tracks, even to swallowing the syllable of an incomplete word, and move on to perform the appropriate devotion. Lapses of all kinds were confessed in a weekly culpa, and penances assigned, ranging from begging one's bowl of soup to kissing the feet of the ten oldest nuns. "Gaby" often found herself asking: "Am I truly called?"