A former nun on why she ran away from her 'Cloistered' life

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**David Bianculli** (0:14)
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli.
Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life Catherine Coldstream had lived before that. She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris, where she studied composition, worked on experimental music, and performed on viola. At the age of 24, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God.
Entering the monastery meant starting a new life cut off from the outside world. Monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work, and obedience. To her, this new life seemed transcendent. But eventually she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism, and her persistent questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality were rejected. After 12 years, she left the monastery. She went on to study theology at Oxford University, and she got married. Today, Catherine Coldstream. She spoke to Terry Gross in 2024 when her memoir, Cloistered, first was published. It's now out in paperback.

**Terry Gross** (1:29)
Catherine Coldstream, welcome to Fresh Air. Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken words for 10 years. I know you had a half hour each day where you're allowed to speak, but what was it like for you to not speak?

**Catherine Coldstream** (1:45)
Well, it's a really strange thing because we, when I say we, the Carmelite order, it's often described as a silent order.
And of course, there's a huge amount of silence in the daily life. But if you look at it another way, words are absolutely woven through the texture of your life because you are either chanting or reading or meditating on the Psalms, for example, for hours every day and other theological books. So there are a lot of words that go through your head. And in fact, a lot of prayer bounces off words or has resource or recourse to words. So yes, we were very silent, but in another way internally, words were very important.

**Terry Gross** (2:26)
But it's like a dialogue with God and a dialogue within yourself. It's not direct interaction with people.

**Catherine Coldstream** (2:33)
Yes.

**Terry Gross** (2:34)
Why is talking considered taboo except for small amounts during the day?

**Catherine Coldstream** (2:40)
Oh gosh, that's a very good question.
It wasn't speech itself that was taboo. I think I mentioned that certain subjects were taboo. When we did talk, say in community meetings or recreations.
So speech itself wasn't taboo, but there were loads of things that you weren't supposed to talk about. But there was a very strong culture of silence, which could feel like it was anti-speech because the Carmelite order originated in the Hermit ideal. So this goes right back to St. Anthony of Egypt, and in the Alexandrian desert, people went out and lived in caves. And then a few centuries later, you find people living in caves on Mount Carmel. And these were people who wanted to dedicate themselves to seeking God in solitude. It's called the desert monasticism or desert spirituality, which is like a sort of a subgroup within Catholic spirituality that's very much dedicated to seeking God through silence.

**Terry Gross** (3:41)
What drew you to that? I mean, just to fill in your background, you're from an artist's background. Your father was a painter, an art professor. Your mother, an actor, an opera singer, who was often on the road. And there was a 28-year difference between them. Your father was considerably older. It was a second marriage. You've called it a midlife crisis when you got married. The marriage didn't work out well, but you grew up in the arts. And you're a viola player. You were then, you are now. You've done it professionally as well as just for the pleasure of it.
So, why did you feel called to live this life of isolation and silence?

**Catherine Coldstream** (4:24)
Wow, that's the million-dollar question. I mean, I did grow up in what we call a sort of arty household. It was quite bohemian. And yeah, there was a big age gap between my parents. So I'd grown up in a very sort of expressive kind of family. I loved ballet, I loved art, I loved poetry, I loved music. I was very emotional. Yeah, I mean, people couldn't understand it when I suddenly went really kind of pious and kind of quite penitential after my father's death. I think what it was was that when my dad died, I was 24 and he'd been going downhill in a really kind of very, a very, very painful decline that lasted four years. So from the age of about 20, I'd been going through an awful lot of sort of angst and the word trauma is overused. But I'd been going through a very unhappy time, my family more or less disintegrated. I think I needed something radical. I was looking for something radical.