Behold the Women by Dan Paulos

BOOK REVIEW by Sister Mary Thomas Noble, OP

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Fling the pages wide open, and let out the fresh air! Here is a new view of nuns to overturn the stereotypes we have been fed for too long. The nuns of the persecution complex, those of the psychological suffocation, the ones with a political agenda in the world of woman's rights and feminism - with these we are sated.

In "Behold the Women," Dan Paulos gives us not "nuns," but the nun, that unique irreplaceable woman that he, or you, or I, once knew, were touched by, and can never forget.

They are all here: the martial second grade teacher we dreaded and adored, the novice who slipped us a cookie when we were desperate, the gentle fourth grade teacher who saw deeper than anyone else and knew we would learn to read and write some day. These and hundreds more come to life in this coffee-table type book with photographs on every left page and texts opposite.

It is a collection piece. The 217 photographs were selected from the more than 400 submitted; the 153 written testimonies represent writers from a broad spectrum of life styles and levels of society. Through them all runs the feel of genuineness. These nuns are real people.

Some of the photographs have the quality of portraits; others were probably snapped by a Brownie. Some of the tributes come from professional writers; others are totally simple in style. There are snippets from Mother Mary Francis, PCC, of "Right to be Merry" renown, Will Durant, Sr. Mary Jean Dorcy, OP, John Michael Talbot, Fr. Benedict Groeschel, and a superb Foreword by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, OSB, of England's Stanbrook Abbey, to mention a few. You meander along in a leisurely, reflective mood, but turn amused and moved almost to tears.

I challenge you to read this book straight through without stopping to look up the identifications of the photographs that keep catching the corner of your left eye.

I challenge you not to chuckle at photograph Number 75, showing a Sister of Charity with legendary headdress flaring high and wide, reading to three assorted children while a dog leans over her lap with literary absorption, nose pressing on the page.

I challenge you to speed-read Janda's contemplative poem, "Marie of the Incarnation," which intuits the stricken feelings of the French Sister of Charity on the Canadian missions, after the martyrdom of Lalemant and his Jesuit companions and the burning of her convent. Janda depicts her sitting in the dank fog on a rock cushioned with moss, remembering:

 
         "glowing axe 
          necklaces 
          they were made 
          to wear... 
          their tongues 
          pierced 
          their flesh 
          cut and eaten... 
          their blood 
          drunk... 
          Lalemant's head 
          cleft by a hatchet 
          his brain seen." 

I challenge you to linger over photographs when you come to Fr. Daniel Berrigan's salty four-page piece, "My Aunt," or to refrain from laughing out loud with Dan Paulos as he recalls his bewildered conjectures about nuns at the age of seven, in the vignette, "Do Nuns Have Legs?"

Nuns have always been a mystery to the throngs of the uninitiated - the luckless ones - in our contemporary world. For those in this category, "Behold the Women" opens up a new dimension of American history and American life, a whole new world of women who were pioneers in the fields of healthcare, education, and equal human rights, forthright women of compassion and energy, their eyes on the heavens and their feet planted firmly on the earth.

For those who have been fortunate enough to know nuns "in the flesh," the book is an affirmation. In the face of the current discussion in the media about nuns and their relevance, in the face, even, of the self-questioning that nuns can sometimes be driven to by modern pressures, in the face of our own aching nostalgia for the values nuns stood for when we were very young,' the book is a message of life and hope for the future.

Abraham Lincoln had words for this, at the close of the Civil War, words with the familiar ring of truth: "Of all the forms of charity and benevolence seen in the crowded wards of the hospitals, those of some Catholic Sisters were the most efficient. I never knew whence they came, or what was the name of the Orders. More lovely than anything I have ever seen in art are the pictures that remain of these Sisters going on their errands of mercy among the suffering and dying. Gentle and womanly, yet with the courage of soldiers having but a forlorn hope to sustain them in contact with such horrors, they were veritable angels of mercy."

It takes an artist to see things whole. He needs the eyes of a child, because children see things in the round, and the eyes of an artist, because artists pursue the details of things relentlessly. In this book, Dan Paulos has achieved the perfect blend. He portrays nuns with the huge simplicity and the keen attention to detail that mark the true artist.

In his own right, the compiler is well known for his silhouettes in black and white, having been introduced to the art of paper-cutting by the celebrated American scissorist, Sr. Mary Jean Dorcy, OP. It is tempting to see a connection between his mastery of the silhouette, with its delicate tracery and filigree finesse, and the effect he has succeeded in bringing off in this book.

"It is a simple book," he admits. "It is a reminder that once upon a time' there were silent women who were, in reality, heroines without even knowing it. It is to all of these unsung activists that we owe our eternal gratitude."

It is indeed a simple book, with the all-inclusive simplicity of truth.