The Calling
A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns

Catherine Whitney
272 pages
Three Rivers Press, 2000
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Review
It isn't a novel, but The Calling really does begin on "a dark and stormy night," a true and terrifying one. Rosary Heights, the Seattle motherhouse of the Sisters of Saint Dominic, offers a breathtaking view of Puget Sound from its hilltop perch.
Or rather, it did, until a catastrophic mudslide shifted the ground beneath the grand old home and threatened to hurtle it into the waters below. Forced to abandon their beloved motherhouse--their vegetable garden, simple possessions and priceless archives--the sisters must also rethink the future of their community.

Author Catherine Whitney was taught by these sisters and once entertained ideas of taking vows herself. Now a married mother and journalist, Whitney returns to what's left of Rosary Heights, to tell the sisters' story, and her own. Not a best-selling author for nothing, Whitney sees Rosary Heights--literally teetering on the brink of destruction--as a metaphor for religious life in the Church and the world today.

Born into a large post-war Catholic family, Whitney entered Holy Angels Academy on the cusp of Vatican II. Her lucid, detailed descriptions of that era's upheavals should evoke sympathetic nods from anyone who survived them. If Whitney shared with many cradle Catholics a childhood dream of becoming a nun, she also isn't alone in her "grown-up" decision to leave the Church behind. In The Calling, Whitney returns to her Catholic roots and sees the nuns who taught her in a new light.

Whitney still feels strangely drawn to the sisters and their "mysterious," radically different life. Throughout the book, she tackles (not always successfully) plenty of big, deep questions about vocation and faith and women and choices. She's at her best when telling the stories of individual sisters: their callings, struggles, joys, and quite often, their decisions to leave the order.

Whitney also describes the women who stay: their energy, dedication and humor in the face of uncertainty. For all their boundless hope, their stories have a melancholy air. At least as Whitney describes it, many religious communities are merely treading water.

The Calling isn't as lyrical or profound as Virgin Time or The Cloister Walk, the classics that clearly inspired it. Whitney's Reader's Digest prose style can be cloying. Yet these sisters and their struggles are vividly evoked, without resorting to cheap voyeurism. As a microcosm of Catholic life before and after the Second Vatican Council, The Calling succeeds admirably.

Author Kathy Shaidle resides at www.kathyshaidle.com. She is the author of God Rides a Yamaha: Musings on Pain, Poetry, and Pop Culture.

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