THE MONK WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH A NUN AND MARRIED HER

24 years after becoming a nun, Sister Mary Elizabeth’s life was completely transformed by a slight touch of a monk’s sleeve in the convent’s parlour in Preston, Lancashire.

She was taken to see the friar Robert, who was visiting from a priory in Oxford, by the order’s prioress to see if he would like anything to eat. The two were left alone when Sister Mary Elizabeth’s superior had to leave for a phone call.

“It was our first time in a room together. We sat at a table as he ate, and the prioress didn’t come back so I had to let him out.”

Sister Mary Elizabeth spent the majority of her days in her “cell” and led a pious, ascetic life as a nun. She brushed Robert’s arm as she opened the door and claims to have felt a jolt.

“I just felt a chemistry there, something, and I was a bit embarrassed. And I thought, gosh, did he feel that too. And as I let him out the door it was quite awkward.”

She remembers that about a week after that, she got a message from Robert asking if she would go away to wed him.

“I was a little bit shocked. I wore a veil so he never even saw my hair colour. He knew nothing about me really, nothing about my upbringing. He didn’t even know my worldly name,” she recalls.

Lisa Tinkler, a Middlesbrough native, had been Sister Mary Elizabeth’s name until she joined the Carmelite order at the age of 19, a historic order of the Roman Catholic church.

Despite the fact that her parents had no religious beliefs, Lisa, then six years old, asked her father to create an altar in her room after learning about her aunt’s Lourdes visit.

“I had a little statue of Our Lady on it and a little Lourdes water bottle. Actually, I thought it was the bottle that was holy and not the water – so I was just filling it from the tap and drinking the water,” she says.

Lisa would go to a Roman Catholic church in her hometown on her own and sit by herself in the second row, where she claims she developed an intense devotion to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and ultimately a sense of calling.

She discovered her vocation during a weekend retreat at a monastery when she was still a teenager. She concluded it was exactly the life she wanted to live, even though the monastery was administered by Carmelite nuns from an order with roots in the 12th century and where the way of life was exceptionally austere, seclusion, and severe.

Lisa had intended to join right away, but her mother, worried by her daughter’s choice, wrote a letter in secret to the monastery asking them to postpone her departure for a few months so Lisa could spend one more Christmas with her family. The new year saw her join.

“From then I lived like a hermit. We had two recreation times a day, about half an hour, when we could speak, otherwise you were on your own in your cell. You never worked with anybody, always on your own,” she says.

Sister Mary Elizabeth noticed a decline in her vocabulary over time because she had little else to discuss with the other nuns—all of whom were decades older than her—than the weather and the wildlife in the garden. Through a grille, she saw her mother four times per year.

“When I had my 21st birthday, my cake and my cards were all passed through the drawer. And when my nephew was born he was passed through a kind of turntable,” she chuckles, looking back on it all quite fondly.

She talks about how the outside world began to close to her as her “inner world” began to open. There was a sense of fulfillment and contentment. But on that day in the convent parlor, everything changed when she was asked to leave the monastic life and get married with the touch of a sleeve.

Sister Mary Elizabeth was at a loss for what to say in response to Robert’s question.

Despite the fact that he didn’t know anything about her, she did.

He occasionally came to say mass at the adjacent monastery on his trips from Oxford to the Carmelite retreat center in Preston, and Lisa had observed his sermons from behind a grille.

She learned about his upbringing in Silesia, a region of Poland close to the German border, through his anecdotes while he spoke. She also learned about his passion for mountains. She claims that at the time, it did not seem to have a significant effect on her.

Now, all of a sudden, that had altered.

“I didn’t know what it feels like to be in love and I thought the sisters could see it in my face. So I became quite nervous. I could feel the change in me and that scared me,” she says.

When Sister Mary Elizabeth finally worked up the confidence to confess to her prioress that she might be feeling something for Robert, the reaction she received was surprising.

“She couldn’t understand how it had happened because we were in there 24/7 under her watch all the time. The prioress asked how I could have fallen in love with so little contact,” she says.

Sister Mary Elizabeth had anticipated how her family or her bishop would respond if she departed. She agonized over the possibility that her connection with God would alter as well.

But she did something unusually impulsive as a result of the conversation with her superior.

“The prioress was little bit snappy with me, so I put my pants and a toothbrush in a bag and I walked out, and I never went back as Sister Mary Elizabeth,” Lisa tells me now.

She received a message from Robert informing her that he would be returning to Preston that evening. This time, he went to a neighboring pub to meet a Carmelite acquaintance for advice—the first member of the order he had confided in to hear about his and Lisa’s situation.

Lisa made the decision to travel to the Black Bull, which was approximately a mile up the road, where she believed they would be meeting.

But on that November night in 2015, instead of experiencing delight, Lisa was plunged into a state of intense turmoil.

“The rain was lashing down as I was walking along the Garstang road. The traffic was coming towards me with bright headlights and I just thought ‘I could just finish this,’” she says, referring to a momentary suicidal thought.

“I was really struggling, I thought I should just stop this from happening and Robert could get on with his life. But I also wondered if he really meant what he said about getting married.”

However, Lisa persisted in her route until she eventually found herself outside the Black Bull on a Friday night in the rain without a coat. She didn’t have the guts to enter until she noticed a monk inside through an open door.

“When I saw her, my heart stopped,” says Robert.

“But actually I was paralysed by fear not by joy, because I knew in that moment that I had to be entirely for Lisa, but I also knew we were not practically ready for that,” he says.

By this time, Robert had been a Carmelite monk for 13 years. He was a theologian, academic, and thinker who entered the monastic life in quest of meaning during what he characterizes as a crisis of identity and religion.

Looking back, he believes that growing up in an area that had recently seen the transition from Germany to Poland, with a Lutheran father and a Catholic mother, made that confusion nearly inevitable.

However, it was a difficult time following a failed love that prompted him to continue his quest for happiness in England, where, despite the Lutheran Protestant theology he had chosen, he found comfort in a Carmelite Roman Catholic monastery.

“I didn’t know much about Carmelites before and had not considered being a monk. In fact, I was always very suspicious of this kind of expression of faith,” Robert says

However, he claims that the order taught him how to accept adversity to the point that he felt at ease. But the chance meeting with Lisa—then known only as Sister Mary Elizabeth—completely altered the course of his life.

“That touch of Lisa’s on my sleeve started a change, but while I felt something gradually growing in my heart, I don’t think I ever reached a point where I felt I was crazily falling in love, because in becoming a monk or a nun they teach you how to deal with emotions like love,” says Robert.

He admits that when he asked Lisa whether they could get married, it was actually more of an intellectual struggle with himself.

“When she appeared at the pub the little demon in me was terrified. But my fear was not religious or spiritual, it was purely about how I would start a new life at the age of 53,” he says.

Particularly at first, the shift was challenging. Before Christmas, not long after they had left their monastery lives, Lisa recalls a specific incident.

“I looked at Robert and he was distressed and crying. At that moment we both hit rock bottom and it felt like we should just take something like Romeo and Juliet and just end it,” says Lisa.

“It was so hard because he both felt so alone and so isolated and didn’t know the way forward. But we just held hands and we got through it,” she says.

When asked about their transferrable skills at the recruitment center, they both started crying. They also talk about another incident that happened as they were driving from Preston to Yorkshire.

“I had ordered a book in Polish about nuns who had left their orders for various reasons. I read and translated it for Lisa in the car, but she had to pull over on the M62. We both needed to cry because their stories were so emotional and we could relate to them,” says Robert.

Connecting with their personal faith, which was what first led them to their monasticism, was what provided them serenity.

“Throughout your religious life, you have been told that your heart should remain unbroken and given to God. I suddenly felt like my heart was growing to accommodate Robert, but I soon realized that it was also accommodating everything else I had. And I felt the same way about God; it was comforting to me, adds Lisa.

Prior to working as a hospital chaplain, Lisa originally found employment at a funeral home. Robert was disappointed to receive a letter from Rome informing him that he was no longer a Carmelite, but he was soon received into the Church of England.

They got married, and they currently reside together in the North Yorkshire village of Hutton Rudby, where Robert has been appointed the local church’s vicar. They are still trying to get used to life away from the monastery.

Particularly Lisa, who had lived alone for 24 years and had not previously had the academic life Robert did, spoke of feeling like an outsider. After living a life of habit, she is only now figuring out what hairstyles and outfits suit her the best.

They both still aspire for aspects of monastic life; Lisa even claims that, absent Robert, she would resume her Carmelite nunhood the very next day.

“We became so used to the silence and the solitude, that’s hard to find in the business of the world, you get pulled in so many different directions, so it’s a constant struggle for me and Robert to remain centred and grounded,” says Lisa.

But they have come up with a workable answer.

“I frequently imagine Robert and I as two Carmelites living in a monastery here, where everything we do is dedicated to God. We firmly root ourselves in prayer, but love can elevate everything you do, and I’ve come to the realization that nothing has actually changed for me,” she says.

They both concur that there are three of them in the marriage, according to Lisa.

“Christ is the center and comes first of everything. It wouldn’t have actually survived if we had taken him out of the picture.

Source: BBC