The Failure

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?"

"This I Cannot Do, O Lord." Labeled an "intellectual snob" by a fellow nun at the School of Tropical Medicines, Gabrielle was asked by her Mother Superior: "Would you, Sister Luke, be big enough, tall enough, to fail your examinations to show humility?" Gabrielle prayed for guidance, but concluded with her own answer: "This I cannot do, O Lord." She graduated fourth in a class of 80. The daughter of a doctor, Gabrielle had fervently hoped to be sent to the Belgian Congo as a missionary nurse. She was assigned instead to an insane asylum where 100 overworked nuns cared for 1,000 female patients. There she tended a countess who thought she was a dog and ate from a plate in the center of the floor, a onetime abbess whose chief quirk was to wear a brown-paper bag on her head night and day, and a dementia praecox case who thought she was the Archangel Gabriel and nearly succeeded in strangling Gabrielle to death.

After taking her final vows in 1932, Gabrielle's wish was answered at last; she was sent to the Congo. The next seven years of selfless, 16-hour-a-day dedication to the health of the natives gives The Nun's Story the warm glow of Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life," and probably brought Gabrielle close to peace of mind. But once, when she learned that three men were caught in quicksand and rushed out of the convent in a vain at tempt at rescue, she was rewarded with a dressing-down that probed deep into the difference between religious vocation and mere doing good. "Not only did you leave the convent without permission," said Mother Mathilde, "but . . . you failed also in charity . . . I might have wished . . . to assign Sister Aurelie to that emergency, or another of those devoted nuns serving under you, who have not been outside the grounds for weeks. You, Sister Luke, saw risk and excitement arid preempted this for yourself. You never thought how a sister might later enjoy clipping a little item from the newspaper (which has already telephoned me for your name) to send home to Belgium for the family scrapbook . . . Charity in action is easy to give. It has witnesses. Everyone sees it. Everyone is touched by it. Even in the world, a visible act of charity singularizes the doer, often even brings fame of a sort. But charity in thought. Sister, that silent, invisible, unremitting love that always places others first and the self last . . . that is what you lacked today."

Feel No Sorrow. Sent back to Belgium just before World War II, Gabrielle chafed even more against the restraints of the cloistered life. After her father was machine-gunned to death, she began helping the underground, finally made her successful pleas for release from her vows on the grounds that "obedience without question, obedience without inner murmuring, obedience blind, instantaneous, perfect in its acceptance as Christ practiced it . . . I can no longer do."

Thus The Nun's Story is the story of a failure. As such it tells--far more convincingly than many a spiritual success story--the tremendous, unsuspected battles of the soul that are fought behind cloister walls. As for Gabrielle Van der Mal (a pseudonym), she came to the U.S. in 1951 with Author Hulme, under whom she had served in a U.N. refugee mission. The ex-nun has since become nursing supervisor of a large Los Angeles hospital and last month she became an American citizen. If she has any more to say it is probably what she says in The Nun's Story: "I'm not leaving the Church--only you, my sisters, and our Holy Rule that I am not strong enough to conform to . . remember this and feel no slight or sorrow."

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