Sister Cordelia’s Supernatural Christmas
By: V. Plut
Tags: Short Story, Christmas, Fiction, Mystery, Lit

Sister Cordelia joined the order of the Poor Clares not so much to escape the world, as to find a quiet corner to reach a state of enlightenment, or what the Buddhists termed, Nirvana. She would be able to eliminate the day to day distractions of desire for the material world and all that it encompassed. She came from a wealthy family and had everything her heart desired, except for the thing that would fill the void in a world full of humans seeking love and enlightenment in internet and smartphones. What she was seeking could not be found through social media, sex, or success in career or family.

She saw the increasing number of young people who call themselves creatives on the internet as an indication of the natural human tendency to search for meaning and usefulness in a world in which humans have become physically isolated from nature, contained within heated or air conditioned capsules where flowers could not unfold and bloom. She felt that, along with God, who was the act of creation itself, artists of every kind, even scientists who thought abstractly and created mathematics to describe their ideas, were co-creators of reality and the universe.

St. Clare and Her Sisters, San Damiano Church, Assisi, Italy, 12th Century, Public Domain

She sought the very essence and purpose of human existence, the thing that can only be known by a being outside of the human sphere of existence, some called it God. The closer she could come to that God, the closer she would come to the bottom line of the universe. In short, she was filled with a kind of curiosity that would take her beyond science for the answers. She had been there and done that, as they say, with science. Her parents financed the best education, sending her down the path to her Ph.D., and a successful career as an astrophysicist. Her only desire was to go back further than the Big Bang — she wanted to look beyond the wall, to bypass all of the optical, mathematical and technological ways of seeing the beyond and clear a new path to discovery with a faculty that only human creatures possessed, that of pure inner contemplation, abstract thinking and spiritual meditation, through sound.

She tried various methods of scientific thinking, and meditative and religious practices of one kind or another, but she found the material, secular world to be a hindrance to her efforts. The only way to shut out the world and eliminate the background noise of human action and interaction in a modern world was to enter a convent.

The Order of the Poor Clares, founded by St. Clare, a 12th Century nun who renounced her wealthy Italian family for a life of bare feet, poverty and prayer, seemed a perfect choice. Modeled on the Franciscan tradition, the order attracted Sister Cordelia because of the simple poverty and love of animals and nature that Francis of Assisi espoused and practiced.

A fictional portrait of Hypatia by Jules Maurice Gaspard, Public Domain

Sister Cordelia went through the six years of preparatory steps leading to her official entry into the order with a determination to continue the line of NeoPlatonic thinking that Hypatia of Alexandria was pursuing in 415 CE, that is, what Plotinus professed as the higher and lower parts of the soul forming a union in order to experience the divine. She was well aware of the irony of joining a religious order that allegedly shared the same religious deity as the mob who dealt Hypatia a cruel and painful death. She saw them as the ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ who used a male religious deity as an excuse to suppress and destroy true thinking and enlightenment that came from one of the ancient world’s most creative philosophers, mathematicians and teachers. Cordelia considered them coward. They feared and misunderstood the coming of the light of human knowledge, and felt comfortable in the dark blanket of suppression and control. But she also suspected that Hypatia’s death was more the result of political intrigue in Alexandria, rather than as strictly Christian intolerance of knowledge. Hypatia’s death is considered by some to mark the end of an ancient world once headed for enlightenment, but in Sister Cordelia’s mind, her death only delayed the coming of a new age of light.

During her period of secular work in astrophysics, Sister Cordelia became an admirer of Hildegard of Bingen as well. Born in 1098 in a Celtic monastery in Germany, Hildegard was a visionary, and brilliant, politically savvy woman who worked within the framework of the male world — she very boldly wrote church officials, taking them to task for their inadequate approach to spirituality. She attracted scores of women to the mixed-gender monastery where she lived and worked, after the pope recommended her first book, Scivias, (Know the Ways). She eventually founded her own monastery of women, financed by the dowries of her female followers.

Hildegard von Bingen receives an inspirational vision, From Scivias, Public Domain

Influenced by Hindu, Buddhist and Christian Tradition as well as stories of Native Americans brought to Europe by the Celts, Hildegard depicted God in her paintings as a red man, painted mandalas, and saw music and sound as the source of the universe. She sought inspiration and revelation in creation and the unfolding of nature, rather than in the Bible. She said that music was God and that we speak to Him and find transcendence through singing. She believed that science came from God and could be studied as a spiritual discipline, as could music, painting, and writing.

Sister Cordelia felt compelled to experience what Hildegard tuned into through creativity, and what Hypatia tapped, into, through pure abstract thinking, but she wanted to go even further than Hildegard and Hypatia — she was sure that God was complete understanding of the universe itself and that she was the one who would find it in her quiet little corner of a Midwestern convent.