Behind Convent Walls portrays the life and events associated with Charlotte de Bourbon, girl-abbess of Jouarre and later devoted wife of William the Silent, Prince of Orange. Building on the historical framework of her early years during the French Huguenots-Roman Catholic struggle, Beth J. Coombe Harris develops Charlottes lively story. Readers will be confronted with the marvelous way in which God graciously works out His purposes while also gaining a glimpse into an era of Reformation history. Charlottes story displays the incalculable value and importance of godly, devoted childrearing and how the gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation.
I am not the first member of my family to leap over a wall. Nearly four hundred years ago, my ancestor, Thomas Baldwin of Diddlebury, leaped to freedom from behind the walls of the Tower of London, where he had been imprisoned for taking part in a plot for the escape of Mary Queen of Scots. His name, with an inscription and the date ‘July 1585’ can still be seen where he carved it on the wall of his cell in the Beauchamp Tower. Later, he added a motto to his coat-of-arms, Per Deum meum transilio murum— ‘By the help of my God I leap over the wall’. It has been the family motto of the Baldwins ever since; but the wall that I leapt over was a spiritual and not a material obstacle. In 1914, my cousin, William Sparrow, who disapproved of my entering the convent, wrote to me: “ Knowing you as I do, I can safely predict that it will be with you as with another fair and foolish female, whose unwisdom caused her to languish long behind prison walls. Your End will be your Beginning. I commend these words, with those of the family motto, to your meditations. Taken together, they may suggest a course of action in years to come.” In the following pages I have tried to describe what happened when my cousin’s rather ambiguous prophecy was fulfilled. It is a rash and foolhardy undertaking, in the circumstances, for I really know nothing about anything, except, perhaps, what goes on behind ‘high convent walls’. My only excuse is that so many, and such different kinds of people, have urged me to attempt it. Some of them said to me, ‘Because of your past environment, your angle is unusual. It should interest people. You ought to write about it.’ Others simply bombarded me with questions. It is chiefly on their account that I have embarked upon this book. Some of the remarks made to me revealed such fantastically wrong ideas about nuns and convents that I began to feel something ought to be done to put the monastic ideal in a truer perspective for those who know little’ or nothing about it. So I have tried to write accurately and fairly about life in a strictly enclosed convent, as I myself experienced it. To do this it was necessary to describe not only the wonderful and exalted spiritual ideal which inspires that life, but also certain aspects of it which, for various reasons, may perhaps leave something to be desired. I do not feel that I have done my subject justice. If, however, these pages help to straighten out even a few of the curiously crooked notions which so many people still appear to retain about convents, I shall be well satisfied.
THE INSPIRING, REVEALING STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S YEARS BEHIND CONVENT WALLS AND HER RETURN TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE In 1925 Mary McCarran joined her sister Margaret in the Convent of the Holy Names. Here is the story of the black-garbed postulant, hopeful and homesick. Here is the nun, tried and proven, exchanging vows for a gold wedding ring. Sister Mary Mercy made her greatest sacrifice in a small convent room where, after thirty-two years, she exchanged her beloved habit for a new pink dress—and returned to the secular world. This is Mary McCarran’s unforgettable and inspiring story of those three decades as a member of a religious community. “An apparently faithful view of some inner workings of the Catholic Church seldom revealed dispassionately to the public at large...an altogether extraordinary story told in an extraordinary manner.”—NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN
