From The New York Times (gift article):
I arrived at the mountaintop monastery after dark in a Mustang convertible. It was a stupendously dumb choice. A big winter storm was coming, and the car could not handle snow and ice. But it was all the rental desk at LAX had.
The engine roared, announcing my arrival, and the nuns peered around curtains at the spectacle. I was embarrassed — and then embarrassed to be embarrassed, thinking only about myself as I entered a world where the whole point was to think about others.
The Norbertine Canonesses, an order of Roman Catholic nuns in the Tehachapi Mountains of California, are famous for their selflessness. They sleep for an hour or two before their alarm goes off at 11:45 p.m. every night. They climb out of bed, pull habits over their hair and walk to a cold chapel for the first of their seven daily prayers. They wait in the pews, quiet, for midnight to arrive. When it comes, they begin to chant and pray for anyone who may need help — with insomnia, addiction or a crying newborn.
“Just as the mother rises in the middle of the night, so we rise,” the leader, Mother Mary Oda, told me.
That night, I rose with them. I’d come to visit the nuns because they had gone viral. New mothers online had been moved that someone, somewhere, would get up each night to feel their pain.
The nuns do this even as empathy has become politicized. Prominent conservatives have called it toxic and a threat to Christian values. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Elon Musk told Joe Rogan. Some progressives, in turn, have said empathy breeds complacency — too much feeling, not enough action.
Despite that, these nuns were practicing empathy in the extreme…
…The women are canonesses, a type of nun devoted to keeping an ancient cycle of prayers called the Liturgy of the Hours. They rise at midnight to give the first minutes of the day to worship. They go back to sleep and get up again around 5 a.m. for the next prayer. When they are not praying, they tend gardens, make cheese and raise Anatolian shepherds and English Labradors to sell as puppies. They keep some of the dogs to guard against bears and mountain lions.
The women almost never leave their enclosure. Visitors like me — and their own families — speak to them from behind a grate.
Through the metal lattice, I watched the nuns file into the chapel and meditate, eyes closed in the sterile fluorescent light. Some sniffled. A young woman held a gloved hand to her mouth as she yawned. “The field is the world,” one sister read. “Let us work in it and dig up wisdom.”
Tired, I struggled to focus and take notes. As they bowed and sang, I wondered what wisdom they were digging up.
