Guest Post ~ Dee Ready

Prayer Wasn’t Enough: Guest Posting

Recently I published Prayer Wasn’t Enough, a memoir about the eight-and-a-half years I spent in a Benedictine convent in the 1960s. Rick has graciously invited me to do a guest posting today about that memoir. So “Thank you” to Rick, and “Hello” to all of you reading this post. 

After leaving the convent in 1966, fifty years passed before I began to write this memoir.

During that time, a question haunted me: “Why had so many women whom I admired been able to live the life and I hadn’t?” I left the convent feeling a failure. That feeling never left me.

Then, in 2016, a friend said, “Dee, you love to write. Write about the convent. Maybe that’ll bring an answer to your question.” 

Prayer Wasn’t Enough did become an answer. Writing the memoir helped me get in touch with that twenty-two-year-old, idealistic, young Dee Ready who joyously donned the Benedictine habit as well as the thirty-year-old who left the convent almost catatonic. 

As I sat at the computer for eighteen months, sometimes crying, often laughing, I remembered it all: the prayer, the obediences, the teaching, the clothing, the silence, the rules, the traditions, and my own mistaken notion that I had to be perfect to be a nun. That, I discovered, had been my stumbling block. My own emotional and spiritual immature had sent me over the edge.

Writing the memoir finally freed me from the guilt I’d felt for walking away from a vowed life of prayer and teaching. 

If only during those years of feeling a failure, I’d remembered that in 1989 writing helped me with the grief of losing Dulcy, the cat with whom I lived for seventeen-and-a-half years. Dulcy helped me through that grief by giving me two books: A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story and A Cat’s Legacy: Dulcy’s Companion Book. 

I’m busy now polishing a novel that takes place in first century Palestine. It has two main characters: a Pharisee and Yeshua—the Hebrew name for Jesus. Without the convent experience I don’t think I ever would have conceived the idea for this book, which will be published this September. The memoir has given me the confidence to share the crisis of faith that is the thread running through that novel.

One last thing: Please consider writing when you want to work through a past trauma or when you fear that the road ahead will be daunting. Writing may help you, too, embrace the thoughts, fears, and feelings that lie deep at the center of your being. In that center all of us find our true selves. Trust me on this—we all have a story to tell. I encourage you to tell your own unique story. Telling mine brought liberation.

NOTE: Dee's book is available HERE.

Rick