This is a complete photo story, recently revised.

Sacred Hearts

A window on the life of a convent.

I was brought up High Church. I was called Maureen, the anglicised version of the Holy Mother’s name. My own mother’s maiden name was Mary Virgin. My grandmother was an Irish Catholic. What better qualifications could anyone have to be allowed inside a nunnery and then go one step further, join the Roman Catholic Church? 

I had asked if I could document the day to day life of a convent. Permission was granted to visit on Tuesday afternoons. Each time I went, a set routine had to be followed. I was ushered into a small room and left alone to contemplate a simple crucifix mounted against an empty wall. Eventually, a sister would come to sit and talk with me while I ate a hot meal which would have been discourteous to refuse. I longed to be let out and get to work with my camera, but had to sit quietly and squirm while the thorny subject of religious conversion was inevitably broached. 

You see, at the age of fourteen I had rebelled and refused to be confirmed, but the nuns did not know this. That meant that although I had been baptised into the High Church of England, I was not allowed to attend Mass and receive the Holy Sacrament. I was therefore something of an outcast. My goal had been to make my parents give up forcing me to go to Church every Sunday morning and that had been achieved. But going my own way had consequences. Exclusion. And deep inside despite my fierce denial, I did have a feeling of loss. 

Perhaps the nuns had a sixth sense and had sniffed my whiff of vulnerability. Progressively, Tuesday sessions in that little indoctrination room became more intense, with even the Mother Superior joining in on one occasion, before I was allowed to roam the convent with my camera. Each week it became harder for me to resist giving in to my guilt and confess that I had left the Church, but I hung on until at last I had the opportunity to photograph the sisters during Mass. It was a revelation, being submerged in all that chanting with the heady scent of incense. Then I stopped going.

The sisters were kind and caring and only wanted to help me share in the divine experience which being Catholic had given them. I knew that. I could feel their sincerity. But the arrogance of individuality stopped me. I could not conform.

Embarrassed, I shut the pictures away in a box and moved on to another project, but they lay dormant rather than discarded. Eventually I had an idea: to mount them symbolically under silver card, cut like stained glass panels in a chapel window. 

“Sacred Hearts’ can be viewed respectfully at a safe distance now.