Nuns are in the television schedules. Not perhaps for the best reasons. You may remember reading ‘I leap over the wall’ by Monica Baldwin. She made her leap during WW2. After 28 years as a nun she realised she had made a mistake. The Vatican released her and she made a return to everyday life. It was an adventure. The world had moved on and she had much to learn. It helped that she was a great-niece of prime minister Stanley Baldwin. It may also have helped her that the Baldwin family motto was ‘By the help of my God I leap over the wall’. Four hundred years before, a Baldwin had gone over the wall from the Tower of London and he was responsible for the family motto (in Latin, of course).
For Monica it was a monstrous decision. Habits of a lifetime were, at a stroke, discarded. She had to come to terms with the everyday things the rest of us take for granted. We can only compare it with the experience of the Irishman or the central European forsaking his homeland and striking out afresh in the New World. Or we may be reminded of the days when the Berlin wall was being constructed and it was possible for East Berliners to jump from an upper window to the pavement below in West Berlin. Wreaths marked the places where the escapers had paid with their lives the price of seeking freedom.
Monica was not bitter or resentful. There was a procedure and she went through with it. But it was a profound change and a heroic endeavour. Look up the word ‘wall’’ in a concordance and you will find endless references. Cities had walls. They served as protection for the city-dwellers. We find in the New Testament that Paul was lowered over the city wall of Damascus to escape his enemies (Acts 9 25). He had upset his Jewish compatriots by claiming that Jesus was the Messiah. They had been keeping watch at the city-gates to catch him and silence him.
Walls are made of bricks or stone. They can also be made of received conventions and limits enforced by community solidarity. To resist peer pressure, to see one’s reputation being destroyed, as Monica Baldwin puts it, can be difficult. It is difficult for one switching his or her faith-allegiance. It is difficult changing one’s nationality. It is not only difficult; it is costly. It should evoke understanding from the rest of us.
If you have a comment on this post please send an email to Revd John King at johnc.king@talktalk.net Edited extracts may be published. To forward this to a friend click on the chain icon below.
Comments