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A carregar... And Then There Were Nuns: Adventures in a Cloistered Life (2013)por Jane Christmas
   Books Read in 2017 (580) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |   When Colin finally asks Jane to marry him, she happily accepts on one condition, that he give her 18 months to spend in a convent in oder to answer her calling to become a nun. During her 18 months, Jane stays in several different religious houses in both Canada and England, including two on the Isle of Wight and settling finally in North Yorkshire. Jane learn not only about herself, but the quirks & proclivities of her co-inhabitants and sadly the many hypocrisies of both the Catholic & Anglican hierarchies. There is quite a bit of history in this book, which gave me pause to search the internet in order to find out more. Definitely an interesting read highlighting that spirituality is a highly personal practice and not all who take holy vows are saintly. (  ) Auntie-Nanuuq | Apr 30, 2019 | Jane is born and raised in Canada to a Roman Catholic mother and Anglican father. She is raised with a foot in both faiths. Her father, light years ahead of his generation, exposes her to many different faiths and teaches her to respect all people’s beliefs. As she grows up she chooses the Anglican Church as her home and raises her children Anglican. There is a very interesting discussion about the weakness of the Anglican Church. It was started as the Church of England by Henry VIII when he broke away from Rome in his quest to marry Anne Boleyn. In England and its former territories it is known as the Anglican Church. In the United States it is the Episcopal Church. The weakness that the author points out is it is a religion governed by committee. There is not one central figure. The church’s beliefs have evolved to different principles in different areas. She also talks about how decisions are debated for decades before a vague statement is released which in turn is debated further. I found this peek into the Anglican world fascinating. Jane visits several different groups, both Roman Catholic and Anglican, to try to discern whether she is being called to be a nun. I found it interested that she did not feel called to the priesthood since the Anglican Church does ordain women. Her discernment process involves cloistered groups and groups that work directly with the public. All this would be a very straight forward story of “will she or will she not” become a nun except her life has anything but straightforward. She has been divorced twice, has grown children and accepted a marriage proposal shortly before embarking on her spiritual journey. The main challenge Jane deals with is not the obedience or poverty or even chastity expected of a nun. It is that the discernment process sheds light on a long buried traumatic event and Jane must deal with it in order to move forward. Elizabeth Wiley does a fantastic job narrating. Her voice is clear and pleasant to listen to. She does a wonderful job of conveying Jane’s fear, uncertainty and curiosity. She also does a great job with the many accents involved, men and women both. The best part of Ms. Wiley’s narrating is that I really got a sense of who Jane is as a person. She seemed to have a little bit of mischievousness to her. I think I would enjoy having coffee and chocolate biscuits with her. The production quality was very good. I received a copy of the audiobook from https://audiobookreviewer.com in exchange for an honest review. (  ) nhalliwell | Nov 13, 2016 | Discernment is a different animal than decision. Decision is to make a choice. Discernment is the process of making that choice. Sometimes the process is quick and simple; others it is protracted and painful. Jane Christmas’ takes the reader on the road with her when at age 57 she tries to discern if she is called to a religious life. Jane is born and raised in Canada to a Roman Catholic mother and Anglican father. She is raised with a foot in both faiths. Her father, light years ahead of his generation, exposes her to many different faiths and teaches her to respect all people’s beliefs. As she grows up she chooses the Anglican Church as her home and raises her children Anglican. There is a very interesting discussion about the weakness of the Anglican Church. It was started as the Church of England by Henry VIII when he broke away from Rome in his quest to marry Anne Boleyn. In England and its former territories it is known as the Anglican Church. In the United States it is the Episcopal Church. The weakness that the author points out is it is a religion governed by committee. There is not one central figure. The church’s beliefs have evolved to different principles in different areas. She also talks about how decisions are debated for decades before a vague statement is released which in turn is debated further. I found this peek into the Anglican world fascinating. Jane visits several different groups, both Roman Catholic and Anglican, to try to discern whether she is being called to be a nun. I found it interested that she did not feel called to the priesthood since the Anglican Church does ordain women. Her discernment process involves cloistered groups and groups that work directly with the public. All this would be a very straight forward story of “will she or will she not” become a nun except her life has anything but straightforward. She has been divorced twice, has grown children and accepted a marriage proposal shortly before embarking on her spiritual journey. The main challenge Jane deals with is not the obedience or poverty or even chastity expected of a nun. It is that the discernment process sheds light on a long buried traumatic event and Jane must deal with it in order to move forward. Elizabeth Wiley does a fantastic job narrating. Her voice is clear and pleasant to listen to. She does a wonderful job of conveying Jane’s fear, uncertainty and curiosity. She also does a great job with the many accents involved, men and women both. The best part of Ms. Wiley’s narrating is that I really got a sense of who Jane is as a person. She seemed to have a little bit of mischievousness to her. I think I would enjoy having coffee and chocolate biscuits with her. The production quality was very good. Audiobook was provided for review by the publisher. (  ) audiobibliophile | Jul 5, 2016 | ) JoStARs | Jul 14, 2014 |
Christmas always wondered if she was “nun material.” As a student at Toronto’s Loretto Abbey in the early ’70s, she admired the “secret-agent cool” of the sisters at the school, the way their “floor-length black habits swooshed and billowed like approaching storm clouds.” She found beauty in the opportunity for contemplation and compassion that convent life seemed to offer. Still, it would be 40 years before Christmas finally explored the calling. By then, she’d married and divorced twice, had three children, written three books, and had recently become engaged. Her fiancé waited almost a year and a half as Christmas did stints in four cloistered communities, two Catholic and two Anglican. In fluid and often playful prose, she introduces women and men (she spent a week at a monastery on the Isle of Wight) who have devoted their lives to prayer, including a skydiving 90-year-old nun. She revels in the Gregorian chanting, which she discovers is as good for the body as it is for the soul, its 7,000-9,000 hertz of frequency giving the brains of chanters and listeners a boost. And she gleefully relates the awkward moments, such as being utterly flabbergasted when a fellow guest at the monastery asked her: “So, no sex today? None.” (In fact, he was referring to “Sext” and “None,” two communal worship sessions.) What drives Christmas’s quest remains somewhat obscure. She raises the matter of a “midlife crisis.” She copes with an unresolved trauma that comes home to roost during the meditative silences. But there is also something about the way the nuns pray that she strives for. “Every day the sisters descended into the Pit of the Soul, picked at the seam of despair, sadness, tragedy, death, sickness, grief, destruction, and poverty, loaded it all onto a cart marked ‘For God,’ and hauled it up from the depths of concern to the surface of mercy, where they cleaned and polished it,” she writes. “It was heavy, laborious work.” But someone, Christmas concludes, has to do it. “It is hard to imagine what would happen to the world if people stopped praying.”
Christian Nonfiction.
Religion & Spirituality.
Travel.
Nonfiction.
HTML: "The best kind of memoir, revealing, refreshing, and reflective enough to make readers turn many of the questions on themselves." ??Booklist (starred review) Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — A carregar...GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.67)
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Jane Christmas is a Canadian whose mother is Roman Catholic, and father was Anglican. She has been a journalist and communications manager in the business and non-profit sectors. She has a different background than I was expecting when reading about nuns, as she has been twice married and is a mother with grown children. I had always thought of nuns as part of the Catholic religion and was unaware that they are also part of the Anglican religion. Since her early years, she had envisioned herself becoming a nun, but had never pursued it. After a marriage proposal from her then-boyfriend, she needed to decide which path to take.
I liked that this book comes right out and says it is about the religious life. It does not masquerade as something other than what it is. Her views can be considered progressive, and she takes the church to task on the treatment of women and the gay community. However, to me it reads more like a memoir, a documentation of her journey in faith toward personal insight, than social commentary. I liked that she shows the power of silence, patience, listening, and contemplation in our increasingly distracted, noise-filled society, and how it can help in gaining internal perspective. Recommended to those interested in spiritual journeys or understanding how a modern convent operates. (