Sister Act appeared in Islands Magazine, 2001.
I have connected deeply with my Sicilian roots through many visits to the old country over the past 24 years and it remains one of my abiding spiritual quests. For one trip to the island, I considered the novelty of sleeping in monasteries and convents—Italy’s monastic bed-and-board tradition harking back to medieval times. As a devoutly lapsed Catholic, I still relish pealing bells, glowing candles, and incense. In fact, perverse as it sounds, I was, for the year, living in a monastery—the San Francisco Zen Center.
When my sister Grace heard I was going, she piped up, “Ooohhh, can I go?” My first thought was, “Just like old times, younger sister wants to tag along.” Until about 30 years ago, we were two peas in a pod. Then she went the mortgage-marriage-kids route and I went off in search of the metaphysical.
“Of course,” I answered, remembering how we were once arrested for trespassing on an old freighter in Secaucus. Miraculously, our parents never found out.
We had invitations from two other siblings, Terry and her family and Tom and his family, to stay in their rented beach-side villas in the relatively modern resort, San Vito Lo Capo, west of Palermo.
“Too predictable,” I told Grace. “We need places with curiosities—like Grandma’s attic—with mystery and magic.”
“I’m with you,” she said, entrusting me, her senior by a year, to plan her first-ever journey abroad. Buono. With that I faxed off reservations, looking forward to worldly days of touring, reverent evenings in the quietude of hermitages.
On our first morning in Palermo’s bright hilltop refuge of the Sisters of Bell’amore, the sun blazed through our bedroom like a shaft of grace from heaven above. Grace, the sister, remained sound asleep, just as she used to back when I would get up and go to mass before school. Alone, I joined the Sisters of Beautiful Love in the subterranean chapel and did something I hadn’t done in years.
“I received Holy Communion,” I confessed to Grace over carafes of steamed milk and espresso.
“We’re going to Hell anyway,” she said, still shaking sleep.
“So are the clergy here,” I told her. “The priest and nuns giggled during the Mass.”
“So? How do you know it’s not part of the liturgy now? For all you know there’s been another Ecumenical Council updating the service.”
“You mean like those high fives, back slaps, and peace signs people give each other now?”
“So you have been to church lately.”
“Not since the 20th century. They giggled ’cause Father fumbled the liturgy. Is nothing sacred?” I postured.
“My morning sleep…and our next cappuccino,” she yawned.
And so we inaugurated our routine as each monastery reinforced the established rhythm of our lives. I’d be up early each morning (the universal hour of mysticism) holding a figurative magnifying glass up to anything in the monastic setting—a Renaissance fresco, an old white-bearded man who never left the church pew; a marble altar with a huge wooden choir and 500-year-old pipe organ; the archetypal friar who strolled the halls with a ring of skeleton keys hanging from his triple-knotted cord. In a Benedictine abbey that dated back to the 6th century, I crouched unseen, and dis-invited by a clergyman; at a chapel wall where the monks chanted vespers. I was the wrong sex to set foot inside—just like old times.
Grace invariably slept late and during her waking hours industriously kept score—of our food and espresso stops, shopping, and beach sitting. She wanted a balance of the profane and sacred, she said.
She seemed to enjoy the solitude at each sanctuary until the Franciscan one in Gibilmanna, which is pitched quietly against a dark forest at 2,500 feet above the Mediterranean. A reserved padre had shown us to our room and then we never saw him again, not even at 9:30 p.m. when, upon our return from dinner in Cefalú, it took an unsettling 10 minutes of banging before a shadowy figure unbolted a door.
“This one is too laid back,” she stated. “You sure this isn’t some retro form of penance?”
“Oh, it’s only a minor disturbance,” I cajoled.
“Easy for you to say,” she said.
“O.K,” I conceded, “Shopping tomorrow and to the beach in Cefalú.” Actually, shopping is a form of penance for me, so I sat on the beach while Grace made the medieval village merchants happy.
However, once my sister had a prolonged taste of Sicily’s convivial lay world, she was in no hurry to go back to the men and women of the cloth. But I had yet to quell my curiosity, so we compromised. Between our final convent stays, we would sandwich a night in the lavish San Domenico in Taormina.
“Can you get us in there?” she asked.
“Hey, I’m the Pope,” I told my younger sister.” But you’ll have to put on a dress,” I said, proffering the absurd notion that this would be a hardship for her. She couldn’t wait to wear the $300 red summer dress that was unsuitable for the eyes of celibacy. Grace took to the decadent five-star hotel like an acetic to a hair shirt. She proceeded to help the jewelers of Taormina toward an early retirement, stocking up on 18-karat gold.
All of which did nothing to prepare her for our return to a clergy-run lodging. At Noto’s Benedictine convent, we were in the midst of the nun’s attire we had been raised with—only face and hands exposed from beneath layers of form-blunting habit.
“Sister Celeste has a sweet, beatific countenance,” I pointed out.
“Most unusual for a mother superior,” said Grace.
By and by, several sisters came to our room to make sure, “Tutt’é bene.” Each knock was preceded by the dark penguin form visible through our frosted glass door.
“Si, all’s well,” I assured each, even as the next morning I instigated a comedy of errors. I pushed a switch I thought would light up a Madonna and Child painting over my bed. Not knowing I’d rung an emergency bell, I went for a walk. Grace, whose Italian is sketchy, awoke from her deep sleep to frantic banging on the door, which she opened wondering aloud through puffy eyes, “Dové sta mia sorella (where’s my sister)?” Sister proceeded to search my bed sheets, then the bathroom with a bewildered Grace in tow. They were engaged in energetic hand language when I strolled back in the room.
Resigned to not stumbling upon anything magical or otherwise mystical, I told Grace, “We better pay a quick visit to their sister Benedictine house.”
Grace agreed. And there, n Modica, in the ocher-stone nunnery of a sun-steeped countryside woven with Sicily’s ancient vines, olive trees, and citrus orchards, we learned a secret.
Fellow Sicilian American Laura, a novitiate from Cincinnati, led us through sunlit courtyards and dark chapels, then said, “Let me show you what I was doing when you arrived.” She unlocked the door to a room dominated by a large hospital-green contraption that looked like an X-ray machine fitted with turntables. Marina, a fledgling nun from Poland, would not let us photograph her as she fed the machine water and flour, mundane ingredients that came out as large disks of Holy Communion host. Embossed with the crucifix, they were placed into the jaws of another apparatus that cut them into bite-size wafers, falling by the hundreds into buckets, to feed the faithful masses.
Laura beamed proudly. Nothing short of demystifying the Blessed Trinity could have stunned us more than “robo-host.”
When we left, I asked Grace, “Did you have any idea?”
“No,” she said as we drifted down a winding, sun-gilded road. “I thought they came down from heaven.”