Book Review: Cloistered

Title: Cloistered

 Author: Catherine Coldstream

Date: 2024

Publisher: St Martin's

ISBN: 978-1-250-32352-1

Quote: "Safe, safe, safe--I am safe, I keep repeating to myself."

Catherine Coldstream was a nun for a few years. Then she wasn't one. Having "married Christ" in the ceremony of "clothing" in the Carmelite convent, Sister Catherine discovered that she wasn't really cut out for a really cloistered life. In an order where nuns had regular jobs, teaching or nursing, I suspect she might have done as well as Kathleen Norris. Among the Carmelites, where sensitive emotional women paid for the freedom to put their emotional energy into contemplative prayer by mortifying and repressing their emotions, she was bored.

So, is this one of the new genre of ex-Christian books? Coldstream doesn't say. Sister Catherine didn't run away from faith; she ran away from a dead-end job. However, her description of a communal life that was not working out to the glory of God can be usefully contrasted with Norris's description of a communal life that apparently is. Norris's monk and nun friends live in an intentional community with the intention of making a place where they can retire when unfit to work, but they work, use their education, and continue to learn, and by and large they seem to get along well with one another and their monastic life. Coldstream's sisters live in an intentional community that seems designed only to care for people who are unfit to work, feel "infantilized," and seem faced with a choice between leaving, having psychotic breakdowns, or becoming neurotic and repulsive. It's hard to question that, for Coldstream and others who were capable of doing something productive, leaving the convent was the sanest of the choices. It's also possible to read her story with attention to what intentional communities (religious or otherwise) need to avoid. 

I suspect some will want to use this book as a basis for bashing Christianity. It will not serve that purpose well. It's a Sunday Book, at this web site, because it describes vividly and objectively what is not working for Coldstream's Carmelites, and thus helps people who want to live in communities (or in families) think about what might work for them.

(Fair disclosure: I received copies of this book--copies, plural--in exchange for an honest review. They were all e-books; I can't even sell them. They were supposed to be formatted for Kindle, but first there were months when none of them got through into my Kindle, and then, after it was too late to write Advance Reviews for the publisher, three of them got into my Kindle. I've tried deleting the extras; Amazon staff have tried deleting the extras; they don't stay deleted. A suggestion for improving this situation is that publishers and authors may overestimate the interest people have in stealing manuscripts, and Net Galley may feed that overestimation in order to market their own peculiar "app."  Someone somewhere will steal anything, but there can't be very many people who want to steal a book about nuns. Ordinary formatting would have served everyone involved much better than "secure" formatting did.)