Patricia found her vocation on an oil spattered motorway verge one blistering Bank Holiday Monday. Her father had loaded them all into his decrepit Vauxhall Vectra which expired some four hours later with at least fifty miles still to go to the sea.
As the Vectra boiled up on the hard shoulder, Patricia’s father harangued the Recovery services on his mobile phone, her brother Bobby vomited into some diesel sodden shrub, her mother, suffering from menstrual cramps, squatted in the coarse grass like a cornered puff adder and Patricia found God.
The traffic churned past unheeding. The smell of its exhaust mixed with Bobby’s bilious evacuations. Her father boiled like the Vectra as her mother spat invective at him. But Patricia had transcended it all. Somehow through the fuel haze, the opalescent glory of the presence of a Higher Power enfolded her and lifted her beyond the toxic imprecations of her family.
She had found her place on earth and her role in this life. She had no more need to see her careers teacher at the end of term. She would dedicate herself to The Lamb. Even though her nose was peeling in the harsh sunlight, she felt his soft and caring eyes upon her, and the warm certainty of having come to some eternal home.
Patricia started her novitiate in a small Carmelite establishment in Northumberland, two hundred miles from home and well away from the nearest motorway. Her family, although outwardly supportive of her vocation, privately had no idea what had possessed her to become a nun. Patricia had everything going for her after all.
They concluded, sadly, that there had to be something wrong with her deep down. But kept it to themselves. Not wishing to offend.
As the Vectra boiled up on the hard shoulder, Patricia’s father harangued the Recovery services on his mobile phone, her brother Bobby vomited into some diesel sodden shrub, her mother, suffering from menstrual cramps, squatted in the coarse grass like a cornered puff adder and Patricia found God.
The traffic churned past unheeding. The smell of its exhaust mixed with Bobby’s bilious evacuations. Her father boiled like the Vectra as her mother spat invective at him. But Patricia had transcended it all. Somehow through the fuel haze, the opalescent glory of the presence of a Higher Power enfolded her and lifted her beyond the toxic imprecations of her family.
She had found her place on earth and her role in this life. She had no more need to see her careers teacher at the end of term. She would dedicate herself to The Lamb. Even though her nose was peeling in the harsh sunlight, she felt his soft and caring eyes upon her, and the warm certainty of having come to some eternal home.
Patricia started her novitiate in a small Carmelite establishment in Northumberland, two hundred miles from home and well away from the nearest motorway. Her family, although outwardly supportive of her vocation, privately had no idea what had possessed her to become a nun. Patricia had everything going for her after all.
They concluded, sadly, that there had to be something wrong with her deep down. But kept it to themselves. Not wishing to offend.
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1 comment:
To think that could have been my destiny if my father had owned a Vauxall Vectra! As it was, we used to go to Mar del Plata by coach...
Lucky escape!
Lovely blog, by the way.
Patricia
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