The Surprising Alliance of Nuns & Nones
The week I moved into the convent was the week that the sky turned dark with smoke. California was burning at a record-breaking scale, the city of Paradise decimated with untold numbers of lives lost, and here I was, driving in the direction of the fire all the way from New Mexico, in a car loaded with my belongings and two of my dearest friends. It’s always an odd time to move into a convent as a young Jewish man. Doing so under an apocalyptic sky thick with ash made it especially so.
I was here for an unusual experiment in co-living. For six months, along with four other 30-something activists and educators, coming from an array of religious and non-religious backgrounds, I was going to live alongside the Sisters of Mercy.
Like many of the 400 orders of Catholic “women religious” in the US, the story of the Sisters of Mercy is one of courageous women, profound humility and commitment, and outsized impact. And, like most communities of women religious, the Sisters of Mercy have fewer and fewer women (“novices”) entering the order. Across the US, the average age of a Catholic nun is 80.
Sisters are used to surprise guests. Many communities started orphanages after babies were left on convent doorsteps. This one declared sanctuary in the mid-80s and took in refugees and asylees in times of crisis. But a group of “millennials”? This was certainly new, and unexpected. As
