A DAY IN A SECRET GARDEN

BEFORE DAWN: The Dream

MY ROAD is like a potter's wheel, on which I myself am clay that changes shape constantly as the journey develops. At points the potter takes rest and lets me be for a little while in a certain form with a certain function. Then the wheel begins to turn again and everything changes.

In other times it is like a song with various verses which can never be repeated as new ones are created, yet the chorus remains. It speaks of a nomad walking an endless road.

In the current verse I am a nun - missionary of charity of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, covered from head to toe with a white sari. Although it is invisible, many still see it - that is how I could enter.

In current shape I am a white jug with blue lining. Chastity, poverty, obedience and whole-hearted free service are the four sacred vows it holds. Yet if you asked a regular by-passer, he'd say the jug has no colour or that the colour is of the earth. Whose is it? Where does it come from? He does not know. It is not from here and that it does not belong to him, is all he can say for sure. Perhaps it belongs to a pilgrim, he guesses. Fair, yet if he'd just look inside, he would not have to guess.

DAWN: Arrival

Two years, one month, two weeks and three days since the beginning of my journey David and I arrived to a small town San Felipe, in Venezuela's province Yaracuy. The mass had already started when we entered the church. When everyone had left, I approached the priest to introduce myself and my journey, to introduce David and his mission. At that time it was already clear that we would have to stay in San Felipe for about a month, waiting for David's papers.

"I rarely stop", I said, "yet if I do, I work in free service for a good cause. Would you happen to know of any place that could use volunteer help?

"I do," answered the priest.

The following day David seeked and found a job in one pharmaceutical company where he promised to work until his new passport was released. I left him my tent for a home. A kind family who had allowed us to camp in their yard the first night of our arrival was to become his host for that month.

MORNING: The Border-Crossing

To enter another country one needs to present a passport, with a visa when required. Such things do not help when crossing into another world.

I saw a room full of beautiful women wearing white saris sitting barefoot on the ground - all catholic nuns, followers of their honoured saint, Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

We had arrived.

I learned a little later that most of them came from India, but there were also nuns from other countries - Kenya, Costa Rica, Italy, Guatemala, Guyana... When becoming a nun they had given up any free will to take any decision concerning their lives. Wherever they were sent, whatever work they did, was the decision of the Church. Obedience was one of their vows.

So there they were praying and singing like one. Would I be allowed to stay?

At first I received a "No", but then for some reason sister Jasna changed her mind. Sister Maria guided me through a garage into one more world where I was to remain to work and live for a month. Sisters, and there were seven of them, lived worked and prayed on the other side of the wall - no-one except for them could enter their half. One day sister Maria broke that rule and walked me through the "forbidden" yard, yet to do that she had to tie my eyes with a cloth.

MIDDAY: The Mission

So this was their mission - the poorest of the poor: mentally or physically disabled people whom no-one wanted. I saw old and young, also children, standing, sitting or moving around. Their gaze was unfocused, their movements chaotic, many had to be fed from a spoon, washed dressed. Most could not use the bathroom. A blind girl Adriana was their watchman - she had keys to all the rooms. Lydia in a wheelchair, was their guide. After we would finish washing and dressing one girl, Lydia would take her by the hand an lead her to the seat where a mute lady Miriam would feed her. How ironic... in this world a mute, a lame and a blind were the ones most capable, for they were the only ones with a sane mind.

After a week I realised that the "Secret Garden" was actually a desert. The sisters were caring for seeds of flowers that would never bloom nor grow. Yet someone had carelessly planted them, or dropped them there - thus they needed care.

Sister Jasmin came from another house for people with AIDS. She told me of one man - an educated fellow, who spoke fluent English and before his illness used to be a very successful businessman. "When I was dusting the old piano, he asked me if he could play it", she told me, "He sings, beautifully!" The illness has taken his memory and paralysed him, his physical condition only becomes worse with time, until he dies.

So imagine all people as potential gardeners first seeking then cultivating their fields. Whom would choose it to be a field of dying flowers? Or a garden where all flowers would have such severe defects that a common man turns his head away with shame upon seeing one of them...

I grew to have a lot of respect for their mission. How much strength and how big a heart should one have to devote a life to such an idea of being and then actually practice it - live it with a smile, work seven days a week all days in a year, never get payed with money, free of possessions apart from two saris and a pair of sandals, yet most important one is the quiet joy that faith brings.


EVENING: I Belong

I always was here, I always will be here. This is the only world that exists for me in this moment, and these are it's ways to be followed without scepticism or judgement or reason. Only when I empty myself of the past, I can fill myself with the Present. For the nun there is only this Way and no other. What is holy to them should be holy to me. What they believe I should believe, only in this manner I can try to contemplate what everything means.

As I am travelling in a bus full of nuns to Caracas, I suddenly realise IT. I see my invisible sari and get my reward: one day I get to live a Life of a Nun. Our house in Caracas is small, the chapel is not behind "the wall", but just beside my room. I wake up to do what they do, many times not understanding, yet happy to belong.

4.30 AM I hear a bell ring - time to get up. The sky above Caracas is pit-dark, yet the city is full of lights.

5.00 AM shoes lined up behind the entrance, four pairs, mine is the fifth. One kneels as she enters, a pause of thought: "you are big, I am small, I am weak, you are strong". We stand, then sit, then kneel, then stand, then sit again to sing, read and pray what the book tells us to for this morning. A half an hour meditation follows.

6.00 AM Breakfast

until 7.15 AM we clean the building and get ready to go to church.
Only four sisters share this house, so the priest does not come here to celebrate mass. A walk to church takes about half an hour. We recite "Hail Marys" and "Glory Be-s" and other prayers on our way. The sisters manage to greet all by-passers without any visible sign of being disturbed from their holy ritual.

8.00 AM The mass lasts for half an hour, then we walk back with a similar prayer routine. Sister Maria once explained to me that prayers keep their minds occupied and hence sinful thoughts do not have space to enter.

9.00 AM We start to prepare bread to give out to the poor people. These sisters do not have a separate house for the sick or disabled. Their duty is to work with the people in the streets, visit homes of the poor and help with all that is needed there - from housework to caring for the ill.

9.30 AM The mini-bus which takes the sisters to their post of duty drops me off at the Brazilian embassy where I am to fix some papers.

11.30 AM I am home, just in time for the midday prayer. This one is shorter than the one we did in the morning, though the routine is similar.

12.10 PM Lunchtime

12. 30 PM Rest. I fall asleep, tired.

14.00 - 16. 00 PM I take time to study the books given to me, rewrite some of the old prayers, trying to perceive what they are about. Here is one example:

Litany to Humility

By: Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val (1865-1930),
Secretary of State for Pope Saint Pius X

Deliver me

From the desire of being esteemed
From the desire of being loved
From the desire of being extolled
From the desire of being honored
From the desire of being praised
From the desire of being preferred to others
From the desire of being consulted
From the desire of being approved

From the fear of being humiliated
From the fear of being despised
From the fear of suffering rebukes
From the fear of being calumniated
From the fear of being forgotten
From the fear of being ridiculed
From the fear of being wronged
From the fear of being suspected

That others may be loved more than I,
grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may be esteemed more than I
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease
That others may be chosen and I set aside
That others may be praised and I unnoticed
That others may be preferred to me in everything
That others may become holier than I,
provided that I may become as holy as I should

16.30 PM I am given tea and cookie

17.00 PM sister Angela gives me a task to organise all files with her workshop materials for children's religion classes

18.00 PM Holy Hour where five mysteries of the Holy Rosary are recited. Rosary consists of 60 beeds - each one a prayer. One "Our Father who art in Heaven..." is followed by 10 "Hail Marys" and finished with a group of prayers and sometimes a song. This cycle is repeated five times, each time a different event on Jesus' life should be meditated upon. There are altogether twenty, what they call Mysteries, from the angel's coming to Mary till the Resurrection of Christ, but also two from the book of Revelation (Rev. 12) about the Queen of Heaven. These twenty are divided to different days of the week so that each day got five.

19.30 PM Dinner, then I continue organising the papers

21.00 PM The Night Prayer

21.30 PM Bedtime

MIDNIGHT: The Closing of the Gate

"The bird breaks the shell. The egg is the world.
To be born one needs to break a world" H. Hesse

"I am married to Jesus, "said 26-year old sister Lucy, "Who are you married to?"
"I am married to the Road," I replied.

"Which religion do you practice?" asked me sister Maria on the day I arrived.
"None and every," I replied, "as a Buddhist I could not have entered here, as a protestant, probably neither. it is only because I do not belong, I can belong here."

"What about your home and your family?" asked me sister Jasna.
"Here and now, this is my home and you are my family," I replied.

My country of birth sometimes seems further than the moon, as people here know where the moon is, but most have no idea that Estonia exists.
One night I spoke to Rut, a girl (21) who wanted to become a nun. I told her about a land where the seasons are changing, a land with wide horizons as there are no horizons, since it has no mountains, a land that knows no night in the summertime and lacks light in the winter.It all sounded like a fairytale, even to myself.

My yesterday is gone, it only exists in a tale, my tomorrow has not come yet. The only real place and time is here and now.

It was long day. Counted in your time, it lasted one month and six days. I put away my invisible robe of a nun to sleep and wake up again into a new day, a new robe and a new way of being.

It is hard to leave the familiar: I grew attached to its rhythms, its people, its things, they brought me sense of security and comfort. Yet just as it is natural for a bird to break a shell and leave the egg, it is natural for me to leave one context, only to gain another. Each brings forth a new me. Perhaps this is what they call Growth.

As the gates of the Secret Garden close behind me, the potter sits behind his wheel and I start humming a familiar chorus of my song.