I remembered how much I hated Catholic School, but how much I had enjoyed entertaining my classmates when the sisters were gone from the room. I had endured Catholic School, and I knew what it could and should be like, so I convinced myself that if I could put up with the convent for a year or so, I could spend the rest of my life, or at least a few years, reforming Catholic School from within its very bowels. I knew every trick in the book the terrorists in training, as the sisters referred to us in junior high, could think of, and if my students even thought about misbehaving, I could stop them before they converted their plans into reality.
Of course, my first choice for a Catholic career would have been to become an exorcist. I had seen The Exorcist when it first came out in 1973, and let me tell you, if I had been in that house with Linda Blair, she would have known that she had met her match. If she had thrown up on me, I would have slapped that little bitch so hard, her head would have spun around like a top until it levitated off her torso. I knew I had more balls than either Jason Miller or Max Von Sydow, and after I was done with her, she would have been begging for mercy. Fortunately for the possessed of the world, the Catholic Church doesn’t allow nuns to become exorcists, and a movie version of Coito the Exorcist was never made. This was just another example of how equal opportunity would have helped the Catholic Church to fight evil in the world.
I told a priest I had gotten “the calling” to become a nun, and he sent me to some nuns. I met with the sisters, and being the inquisitive type that I am, I asked them what was expected of a postulant. The sisters told me they expected a nun to have the seven cardinal virtues: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. A nun should be between sixteen and forty with a spirit of heroic generosity and common sense; be in reasonable health; have stability and a desire to give oneself utterly and unconditionally to God; be able to get along with others; be distinguished by Christ-like charity; have a limpid simplicity of the soul, selflessness, unquestioning loyalty, prudent zeal, an orderly mind, gracious courtesy, an adaptable disposition, solid piety, and the saving grace of a good sense of humor. It was Academy Award time. Feigning repentance from my wicked past and throwing in a few lies, I told them that was me all over, and a month later I was accepted into their order.
To be honest, I was of two minds about going into the convent. The optimistic side of me, the part that was full of youthful determination and ambition said I could succeed. After all, Vatican II had been introduced ten years before, and we were living in the modern age, the 1970s, when the Church might actually replace a medieval church with a modern church. Then there was the pessimistic side of me which was convinced of the futility of my Icarian ambitions. If I went into the convent, I would be fighting two thousand years of established hierarchy, and this was certain to be a lost cause.
I felt like I was in one of those cartoons where the angel and devil whispered in the character’s ears trying to convince their alter ego of their point of view. I wavered back and forth until the week before I entered, and finally decided to go through with it. Even if it didn’t work out, I figured, I could always leave. I was still young, and if my worst fears were realized, I could always leave and change the world in some other way. Everything else in the world was changing, so why couldn’t the Catholic Church?
Nuns just want to have fun! But when three former Catholic nuns have too much fun and get in trouble with the law, they become nuns on the run.
Driving back to Washington D.C. where they work at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Parts, the three sisters are arrested in Tennessee. After defeating the local deputy in strip poker, they escape from jail, and are pursued by the zealous Detective Schmuck Hole, who has personally offered a $10,000 reward for their capture on The 700 Club. Little do they know that when the three sisters visit the Washington Monument, their lives will change forever.
Set in 1979, The Three Sisters is a sacrilegious satire that skewers not only organized religion, but the government, the media, intellectuals, corporate greed and every other part of the establishment. Maybe not the greatest story ever told, but possibly the funniest.
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Genre – Humor, Satire, Catholicism, Politics
Rating – R
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Website www.threesistersnovel.com
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