Seeking Susan: A Sister of the Cross and Passion

After decades of monastic life, Susan Irwin finally feels fully herself at the Briery Retreat Centre, with the Sisters of the Cross and Passion.  “Susan got lost because I wanted to be someone else. I can’t go back to that: I’m fully Susan now.”

I used to live around the corner from ‘Bethany House’, a simple end-of-terrace building that housed a community of nuns; from what Order, I never found out. How many of us have lived nearby to a religious community (knowingly or unknowingly), but never spoken at length to its inhabitants? I imagine to some it feels faintly mystical—why would somebody adopt the religious life, or join a monastery? Unsurprisingly, as I chat with real-life nun Susan Irwin, the perfect monolithic ‘reason’ eludes me; but I do get a picture into why ‘apostolic religious life’ exists, and what it offers the community around it.

As we sit down together, I joke that my impressions of monastic life as a kid were probably a mixture of Maria von Trapp and Monty Python. Did she grow up around it? “I never thought of religious life at all,” Susan smiles. Her parents? “Good Christian people—they just didn’t go to church,” she says, although for a time, her Dad would take her to an Anglican Sunday school as a way of giving her Mum the day off. 

“I liked the social side of church, the community—though I wouldn’t have thought of it that way at the time. There were always things going on.” But no nuns, I venture. “I have a distant memory of going to a youth club with a Catholic friend, and there were nuns there all dressed in their big black habits, but it never really made an impression.”

What did make some impression, though, was the church’s screening of a film based on the life of a Christian missionary. British-born Gladys Aylward trained with the China Inland Mission in the 1920s, but was rejected for her lack of progress in the Chinese language. Seemingly undeterred, she beat her own path to China—a “perilous journey,” as Susan puts it: “this was before the Second World War, times when women didn’t go travelling on their own.” The story of the strong-minded Aylward, and the power of her internal calling, struck a chord with a ten-year-old Susan. “At this point all I wanted to do was be a missionary and go to China,” Susan laughs. “It was a romantic, idealist dream—it honestly wasn’t religious.”

She mentions, too, a Methodist deaconess who was known amongst her local friends; a woman who lived alone on a housing estate and worked with the poor. “You take these things for granted,” she says. “Just— ‘oh, she’s a nice lady!’. She must have been a strong woman to live there on her own. It’s the same when you think now of the women who started religious orders, and how strong they were; all of them faced male opposition. These must have been strong-willed women, and that calling must have been very great.”

It’s only lately, she tells me, that she’s become aware of the strength of these women in her past, and has been processing her own journey through that lens. As well as these figureheads of faith, she had a mother at home who was the “leader” of the house, and two strong Grandmothers. She is still piecing together the subconscious effect that these women had on her decision-making. But I begin to feel that it’s crucial to understanding the most potentially obvious question: why become a nun?

“I just thought: there are women out there doing good in the world, with this spiritual and religious dimension to it. If I find the right people, then I’ll do the work they’re doing.”

Susan is characteristically understated about that stage of her life; perhaps it’s just too hard to boil the decision down to one thing — or unrealistic to expect a clear-cut narrative. First of all, after a spiritually wandering decade, she’d wanted to rediscover some form of faith in her life; a Catholic friend invited Susan to the local parish church, and despite her Anglican background, it felt like home. Somewhere along the line, some visiting nuns planted the thought: “Oh — there are still nuns!” as she puts it, and she began exploring the idea with her priest.

I’m minded to think that Susan’s own willpower came into play here; that having rediscovered her faith, she needed to dive in with both feet and a whole heart, the way she’d subconsciously learned from the women around her. In that context, it looked like the ‘religious’ life was the option. “I didn’t know much about the life, either apostolic or monastic,” she tells me. “I just thought: there are women out there who are doing good in the world, with this spiritual and religious dimension to it. If I find the right people, then I’ll do the work they’re doing.”

Joining the Bernardine Cistercians, as a ‘postulant’, meant moving at first to Slough, and working in the Sisters’ school. As well as the change in location, the one-time librarian took on a wholly new line of work as a teaching assistant, which felt like a “trial” at first — “but I learned to love it,” Susan adds. Once she had ‘professed’ her vows and joined the monastery, she took on a new name: Mary Johanna.

Susan is thoughtful and diplomatic in her reflection on ‘then’ and ‘now’. “This is how monastics live—it’s a very structured life. You get up at ‘this time’; your day is regulated by church and work and prayer.” She adds matter-of-factly: “There was a lot of conforming in the monastery. No place for individualism, really. You couldn’t leave the grounds for a walk, without permission.” 

I suppose it would be stating the obvious to say that monastic life sounds a bit austere (and compared to some historical accounts, this is lightweight). “Some people thrive in that. The monastery does fantastic work, and if you’re suited to it, that’s fine,” she says. She’s still friends with the sisters there, she adds, and is adamant not to criticise them. She’s quick to mention, too, that there are strong women in the monastery, giving credit in particular to the missionaries who still upend their lives to take leaps into another unknown culture, much like Gladys Aylward did. Nonetheless, I’m trying to reconcile the image of the affable “Yorkshire lass” from a matriarchal home, and the hard-line conformist lifestyle of the monastery. It’s hard not to conclude that for a while she was channelling her will-power into the project of changing herself—that her own determination worked against her, in a sense.

“I wanted to fit in there,” she says thoughtfully. “It just took me a long time to hear what God was saying to me. I know, now, I wasn’t really me. I wasn’t being me in the monastery. I was burying my talents. For many of those years, subconsciously, I was trying to be someone else; trying to live up to ‘Joanna’. I put the habit on, and I put Johanna on. Towards the end, I used to look at the other Sisters and think ‘Why can they do it, and I’m resisting it?’”

Did her family and friends see it the same way? “When I said I was leaving work and going into a monastery, it took people a while to even take it in. They were a bit dismissive at first—my family thought I would grow out of it. My Dad, certainly, couldn’t understand.” The fact that Susan couldn’t leave the monastery to see them, I imagine, didn’t help their perceptions (although family members could visit the monastery themselves).

Some of her experiences in this time strike me as awfully commonplace and mundane to the ears of anyone who’s worked in the charitable sector: stories of underused potential, managerial missteps and conflict avoidance to a fault. There are flashes of deeper hurts, too; decisions that, to my mind, seem rather dehumanising. Again, Susan skirts my attempts to generalise her experiences into some kind of treatise: “I think they were shocked when I told them how I felt about these decisions. I hadn’t told them. They hadn’t wanted to upset people, or tread on others’ toes.”

Either way, we fast forward twenty-something years in the monastery—and Susan, or Joanna, was leaving the order. “And I never, ever, thought I would join another order after that,” Susan laughs. “Been there, done that.”

Yet here we are—Susan is happily part of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion, helping to run the Briery Retreat centre in Ilkley, and as she puts it, “fully Susan now”. As she tells it, she came to the retreat house looking for time out, to reflect; and as fortune—or rather, God—would have it, the Centre themselves were looking and praying for someone who could help to run the place. “They didn’t know I was coming; I didn’t know I was coming. But it’s God who provides,” she smiles.

Throughout our conversation, we talk a little about the hiddenness of religious life. There’s good reason people use the word ‘cloistered’ to mean sheltered, unworldly. It comes with its advantages and drawbacks, but it is also construed as a costly thing, even for those who thrive in it more than Susan had. Yet the idea of a ‘retreat’ place, one that is open to outsiders, flips those same values from being costly to being a gift that the religious can give to others.

The Briery Retreat Centre is not cut off from the place around it by any means, but it retains that ‘hiddenness’ and distance that becomes a value in itself. “Monasteries are always in beautiful places,” Susan explains. “The Stroud monastery was on a hill, overlooking a beautiful valley. The monks of yesteryear chose these magnificent places for a reason!” 

I ask Susan what people find at the Briery. “They find a homely space, a prayerful space. I think they find a safe space to find God, or find some peace within themselves; time away from the busyness of their lives. People come in and say ‘you can feel the prayer in here’ – it’s nice when people say that, because you can. I think that’s what people come looking for; the busyness is the greatest challenge in people’s lives.” The Briery offers counselling, of a sort—conversations on spiritual direction with people who’ve invested a lot of time in it. “But people come with a variety of other needs too. People come from Leeds, Manchester, Bradford, all over.” What about the locals, who I refer to as the affluent people of Ilkley? “They don’t come!” she laughs.

“Here, you’re always aware of God’s creation around you,” Susan muses. “And I always take time to stop and look. If I want to, I can just go and walk on the moor; in other monasteries, you’re restricted to your own enclosure. On retreats we often invite people to simply go to the garden, and look. Oftentimes, they don’t have the time—or don’t take the time—to stop and look.”

And that has to happen in this environment? “Well, even in the middle of a city, you can stop and look at beautiful architecture. You can see plants growing up in between paving slabs, for example—plants that have pushed their way up through the concrete, which is amazing if you take the time to consider it. You can take that mindset with you.”

Meeting people, and working with those looking for ‘retreat’ seems to be a rewarding, and somewhat healing thing for Susan herself, as much as it is for the people in question. I ask how her experience of God has changed. “It’s wholly different now. It’s better because I’m ‘me’. So I feel as though that relationship with God is there. In the monastery the relationship was a bit hit-and-miss; in a way, I never knew how to speak to God. I suppose I’d suppressed ‘me’ for such a long while, and I wasn’t aware how much of a struggle it really was—until I look back now. It feels like coming out of a spiritual straitjacket.”

“I know now, I wasn’t really me. I wasn’t being me at the monastery. For many of those years, subconsciously, I was trying to be someone else.”

I’m reminded a little of Paul Francis Spencer’s words: “In the past, religious life was spoken of in terms of flight from the world; today we talk about ‘flight into the world’. Our emphasis is on involvement, accompaniment, being with the other person; this colours our notion of ‘solitude’… maybe, if we are dreadfully honest, we think of our days of strict observance and long hours of meditation as ‘all that time we wasted sitting up there in the dark…’”. I can’t help but think, too, of Passionist Austin Smith’s journey of ‘losing the institutional mind’ to rediscover humanity itself. Not to say that there’s one correct way to do religious life; but I feel like I recognise the flavour of Passionist spirituality in what Susan is saying.

She now works in a local food bank, too, where she’s able again to make greater connection with the people around her. I imagine that it’s significant to be back in Yorkshire, as well, where she grew up; just as important as the Centre’s relationship with the environment around it. “Yes! You’re always drawn back to where you’ve come from, I think. I’m not sorry that I moved—moving was quite exciting in its way. I wasn’t aware of a great desire to come back to Yorkshire; but I was very happy to do it.”

It’s clear to see that the women Susan now works alongside, and the Passionist spirituality that surrounds them, has given her a great deal of life—life in abundance, you might say. And that, Susan wants to say, is the story: the importance of finding the right community, and the right use of your talents, and how that, in turn, gives life to others. As we talk, the image of ‘seeds’ comes up continually; how a simple conversation can plant an idea that then grows into a major change in your life. It happened repeatedly in Susan’s life, and I don’t doubt that she, along with others at the Centre, plant many seeds for their visitors too. Uncredited, and in the quiet surroundings, they offer unhurried wisdom that has the potential to crack through the paving slabs in people’s lives.

“The world would be a poorer place without us, I believe that,” she says. “I’d just like to see the Briery continue as it is—even if it’s not the Cross and Passion sisters maintaining it. I think it’s an important ministry.” In the future, she thinks monastic life will stay the same; “but apostolic religious life, like this, will change. It always has to; we’ve had to change and adapt in the past, and it will evolve into something different.” Doubtless it will, but you can’t help but hope that it will keep that otherness, the time out of place, that might help people to become more fully themselves, just like Susan has.