IF ALL ELSE FAILS, I’LL JUST BECOME A NUN
ALM No.91, July 2026
ESSAYS
I step through the wooden door, unsure of exactly where to go. A short, creaking staircase leads me into a large sanctuary. It has high, sloping, white ceilings and the stations of the cross between each window. I thought the church would be dark, moody, and empty, but it’s not. It’s bright, welcoming, and much fuller than I expected. Despite the fact that it’s drizzling outside, light pours through the stained glass windows. I sit in the second row to the back. In front of me, there’s a little bench to pull out and kneel on. I feel…ready. I hope this will live up to everything I imagined a Catholic church to be like. Maybe I’ll feel God here. I’ve been thinking about Catholicism a lot lately, so I thought I might as well see what a Catholic service is like. I found a list of local Catholic churches online, and, admittedly, picked the prettiest one. I don’t know if the service will really be that different from the Protestant services I’ve been to, or if I’ve just built Catholicism up in my head. When the service begins, I feel a bit out of my depth. Everyone knows when to chant, when to kneel, when to sing. I wait to feel something.
Anything.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.
Nothing.
I don’t have a huge eye-opening moment. Sure, the service is different from what I’m used to, but I’m not going to become Catholic. I thought that maybe this service would be a big moment. Some sort of turning point. It’s not.
Why does any of this matter? Why did I even go to a Catholic service? Well, about a year ago, I started daydreaming about becoming a nun. It was a strange time. The school year was almost over, exams were near, and with my final year in high school on the horizon, the pressure to decide what to do with my life was high. I wanted a way out of all of the pressures of modern life. Of my life. Being a nun would mean leading a peaceful life in a beautiful place. I would repeat centuries-old rituals and never worry again. It seemed ideal. Maybe not the average fantasy of a teenage girl, but what is? And even though I’m not Catholic and I don’t think I would ever actually take the veil, I used to think about it all the time.
***
The thing was, my idea of nunhood and Catholicism itself was a far cry from the reality. In my mind, nuns walk in their habits through well-kept gardens with high, ivy-covered stone walls. They clasp their cross necklaces in their hands as they look to the sky at God. But every time I actually investigated becoming a nun, the reality was deeply unappealing. They take a vow of poverty, which means that they no longer own anything. Instead, they share everything with their church. I would have a lot of trouble with that. They also do Daily Mass and the Divine Office, which means gathering for prayer five to seven times a day. I would not enjoy having to go to church that much. They also wear their habits all day, and I could never commit to a uniform for life. I had an idea in my head of what life as a nun would be like. None of what I imagined is accurate. All of it was heavily romanticized.
One nun who lived up to my idealized version of nunhood is St. Hildegard of Bingen. I became obsessed with her during that time. Hildegard of Bingen was a German abbess who lived in the 12th century. She was born in 1098 and became a nun at 15. She was educated by an anchoress named Jutta, later succeeding her as prioress of the convent when she was 38. Hildegard was a polymath, focusing on many different areas of study. From childhood, she experienced visions from God, and when the Archbishop of Mainz assembled a group of theologians to review the visions and confirmed their validity, she began recording them. She also wrote about medicine and history, and she went on tours around Germany to preach to the masses. She wrote music that you can still listen to, calling music the highest form of praise to God. She was amazing. She went beyond the typical mould of a nun, pursuing everything that interested her even from her convent. She’s what I would want to be if I were a nun. The thing is, Hildegard wasn’t a typical nun. She wasn’t even a nun for the most interesting parts of her life; she was an abbess. She also opened her own convent at 52, bringing some of the nuns from her old convent with her. She ran her own nunnery. Of course she could pursue anything that interested her! My romanticization of her life isn’t accurate to the reality of nun life at all.
***
Embarrassingly, one of the main things that drew me to life as a nun is the fact that Catholic churches are gorgeous. There are stained glass windows with light streaming through, ornate golden relics in every corner, ancient paintings covering the ceilings; it’s all beautiful. Catholic churches also drip with history. They ooze with the past. They radiate with the centuries of worship. In contrast, I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), and the churches I’ve attended are oppressively beige, excessively ugly, and dismally modern. I do think there’s a reason for this, though. During the Reformation, the Protestant Reformers separated from the Catholic church partly on the basis that the Catholic church’s excessive use of ornate images and statues was perceived as idolatry. So I understand why Protestants don’t make their churches beautiful, but walking into a Protestant church just doesn’t have the same awe-inspiring impact as walking into a Catholic church[1] . In artistic media, Catholicism is nearly always portrayed in a beautiful way. Even when the depiction is critical, Catholicism is still somehow glamorous and alluring. Aesthetics matter. A beautiful space is always more appealing, whether it be in a home or a store or a church, so a religion is more likely to draw someone in if the building itself conveys the majesty and authority of the religion. Catholic churches have this sense of majesty. They feel eternal[2] .
Another part of this deep history of the Catholic church that drew me to life as a nun is the ritual element. When I went to that Catholic church, I was impressed by the ceremony of everything. Everyone knew when to stand, when to chant, when to kneel. I was glad I sat in the back since all of my responses were a bit delayed. The only thing I could recite was the Lord’s Prayer. The priest did specific rituals that I didn’t understand but watched in fascination. What’s behind all this? Every Sunday these people gather in this beautiful space to worship a far off God who can only be accessed through a priest or a saint, and every Sunday they go through the exact same motions and rituals in their pursuit of eternal life. Isn’t that sort of beautiful?
There’s also the ritual of communion in the Catholic church. When you take communion, you eat the actual body and blood of Christ. There’s no symbolism; it’s completely literal. Isn’t there something poetic about the carnality of that? Am I insane? And sure, Protestants share the ritual of going to church on Sunday and taking communion, but it doesn’t have the same allure. Since I grew up in the CRC, I know the nitty gritty of the youth group, the fundraisers, the mission trips, the praise team, all of it. I’ve seen the disorder, the monotony, the ugly up close and personal. There’s no veil of beauty over it. There’s no shroud of mysticism. There’s no dramatic prayer framed by glowing stained glass. It’s dull. I want something fresh, something new, something novel, something that will dazzle me. I want this ancient religion to be the shiny new thing that gives me a greater purpose.
Adding on to the beauty of the ritual, there’s also the beauty of confession. You tell your deepest darkest secrets and sins to someone, and then you’re absolved? All you have to do are some rituals? Sounds great. In Protestantism you ask for forgiveness and have no concrete guarantee of absolution. In Catholicism you attain absolution by putting in the work. It’s easier in the Protestant tradition to obscure your sins. You may confess them to God, but there’s no tangible, physical person holding you accountable. The path to redemption feels less definite. In Catholicism, it seems easier to be forgiven because confessing to a physical person holds you more accountable. Shame also plays a role in confession. In both Catholic and Protestant traditions (especially in my Calvinist upbringing), guilt and shame are built in. In Calvinism, you’re basically born evil and you have to work as hard as you can to be as good as possible, and even that isn’t a guarantee! You’re saved by grace alone! Predestination, bitch! There’s really no way, for me at least, to make this beautiful. There’s no tormented wrestling with guilt and shame in a white Victorian night gown. It’s modern and ugly, and yes, I know that faith isn’t about aesthetics. But I’m a product of the 21st century, an era that is obsessed with aesthetics. So to me, aesthetics matter. We’re talking about why I wanted to be a nun in the first place, not whether the reasons were good, and my primary reason was the aesthetics. And the aesthetics of guilt in Catholicism are so much better than the aesthetics of guilt in Calvinism. If I'm going to feel guilty either way, why not do it surrounded by glowing candles and gilded statues? [3]
***
Becoming a nun feels like a way to escape from my life. Everything about the 21st century is stressful, fast-paced, and overwhelming. While yes, I appreciate indoor plumbing, modern medicine, AC, and all the other amenities of the 21st century, I also yearn for a different time. I’m a nostalgic person to my core. I see everything from my past with rose-tinted glasses, even though I know that I was actually miserable during most of the times I remember so fondly. I know I’ll look back on right now as a golden era, but living through it in the moment isn’t too great. The point is that I yearn for another time, even if I probably wouldn’t actually like it. The modern age requires responsibility, planning, technology. It’s too much pressure, and becoming a nun takes off all that pressure. I wouldn’t have to decide what to do with my life or how to exist in this world. All of the worry that comes with decision-making would be taken away.
I know for a fact that my yearning for a simpler time is not exclusive to me. Plenty of other women wish they could live a life away from the chaos of our modern world. I think my wish to be a nun might be my version of the tradwife fantasy. If you don’t know (but you probably do), the tradwife (short for “traditional wife”) is an internet trend (sorry to bring up an internet trend) that has been gaining popularity for a couple of years. Tradwives are women who embrace “traditional” ideals, often specifically romanticizing the 1950s. Women’s roles within tradwifedom are to cook, clean, and raise children (and lots of them) while the primary role of men is to make money. The dark side of these videos is their implication that “life is better when women adhere to ‘traditional’ gender roles and perfect at-home domesticity and nurturing,” as Carter Shermann writes in her 2024 article about tradwives for The Guardian. The regressive ideas are framed with aesthetic scenes of beautiful women in tasteful kitchens. The women speak in soft voices while making elaborate meals for their hoards of children. Of course, all of this is a highly manufactured lifestyle. What the online content of tradwives does is inconspicuously package regressive ideals in a beautiful, alluring lifestyle. While I would never personally want to be a tradwife, I can see the appeal. These lives look beautiful and call back to an era that seems simpler to us. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and trad wives encourage women to long for a time where all they had to worry about was their kids and making sure dinner was on time. The women who romanticize the lifestyle view it as an escape from depressing modernity.
I think that the past is an almost mythical thing. Even when I know a time period was terrible, I still romanticize it. I view the current age as the worst yet, even though in most ways it is vastly superior to everything that has come before. I think of the minor character Nicholas Greene in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. When Orlando first meets Greene in the 17th century, Greene laments that none of the modern poets, like Marlowe and Shakespeare, live up to classical poets from ancient Greece. When Orlando meets Greene again in the 19th century, Green reminisces about the greats like Shakespeare and Marlowe and scorns the modern poets like Tennyson and Browning. We all idealize the “good old days” and wish to return, even when the “good old days” weren’t so good.
The tradwife fantasy offers a simple fix to our modern woes: reject modernity, embrace tradition. The tradwife doesn’t have to get a job or worry about finances. All she has to do is live in her beautiful home creating her beautiful meals and nurturing her beautiful children while her husband takes care of “real world” problems. All the responsibility and pressure is off her shoulders. But in reality, the tradwife isn’t worry free. She has to clean her home, cook the meals, and do all of the work that it takes to raise children. Tradwives present all this in a heavily glossed over way that becomes an escape fantasy for women, and I think that becoming a nun offers the same sort of escape from modern life. The tradwife retreats into the small world of the home, though, while the nun retreats into the sisterhood of a convent. In my mind, life as a nun has a fantastical veneer of beauty and peace that is nowhere near reality, just as the tradwife has a veneer of happiness and serenity. In my nun fantasy I could leave the ugliness and uncertainty of the real world and escape into the beauty of a bygone era.
***
Becoming a nun also feels like a way to “find myself.” I know, I know, that’s so obnoxious, but I feel like it’s a genuine way to find out who I am more fully without doing all of the finding yourself stuff. I could become a nun, figure out who I am without doing cliché soul-searching, and then leave the nunnery. That’s a hell of a lot easier than following contemporary means of self-actualization. There’s a whole industry built on the concept of self-discovery. The advice is surface level and the results require money. In our culture, self expression is impossible without consumption. What you wear, what you put in your home, what food you buy—everything you purchase is an indicator of who you are as a person. You have to know exactly who you want to be and how you want to show that to the world. Modern Protestant Christianity is also tied to the self-actualization movement. Your relationship with God is meant to be a hyper-personal, hyper-individualized relationship. Talk to God like a friend, pray, read devotions, go to church, read your Bible, strengthen your relationship with God, it goes on and on. It feels to me like there’s a lot of superficiality in modern Protestantism. Too much of the focus is taken away from God and put on the individual. How do I become the best version of myself through God?
Becoming a nun, on the other hand, offers an alternative way to “find myself.” There are just a few steps to follow to self-actualize by taking up the veil. First, you give up your current identity for the identity of a nun. Then you learn and grow in your time in the convent. Finally, you become a better and more fully formed person through the guidance of older mentors and the Lord. Looks like you’ve self-actualized! Now go forth into the world!
Except that nuns don’t go forth into the world. They find who they are through God and stay put. But for me, part of the nun fantasy is that I could always leave. A convent is a community. You're bound to make friends and form a new family. So maybe I would just become a fully formed person and not even recognize it until I realize it’s time to move on. I could join, passively self-actualize, and leave a better person who’s satisfied with her life and with others and is actually ready to face the big bad world.
Maybe I just want to be Maria from The Sound of Music.
My family and I watch it every year at Christmas, and my most recent viewing was especially illuminating. From the beginning, Maria isn’t a great nun. The other nuns sing a song with the chorus, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” When Maria goes to work for the Von Trapp family, she finds a greater purpose in caring for the children. She and the captain get married and live happily ever after (aside from fleeing Austria because of the Nazis). Part of my idea of nunhood would follow the same pattern: leave when I’ve realized what I’m meant to do with my life.
Maria’s story is appealing. It’s easy to romanticize the beautiful Salzburg: the rolling green hills, the charming convent, and the Captain’s magnificent house. The Sound of Music’s main selling point for me, though, is that Maria's time at the abbey is temporary. She finds herself, and she finds a greater calling. The abbey is a bridge from her old life, where she never quite fit in as a nun, to a wonderful new life where she has a purpose.
My nun fantasy is really just a disguise for my dislike of self-actualization. I don’t want to put in the work to become a fully formed person on my own. Instead I want to join a convent, befriend some nuns, find myself, and then set off into the real world. I would be prepared to live life as a competent, confident person ready to face challenges and make friends. None of it is realistic, sure, but it all sounds ideal. Maria never wants to leave the abbey, but she thrives in her new environment, becoming a beloved figure in the Von Trapp family. Without working for it, she becomes the person she was meant to be all along. I want the same to happen to me. I want to be unaware of the changes happening until one day I realize I don’t need the convent anymore and I leave (sadly, of course) to pursue my true calling, whatever it may be.
***
And so I sat in the wooden back pew of the majestic church. Light still streamed in, statues still glittered, and organ music still played, but I felt sort of empty. I had hoped for something big to happen, but nothing did. All I’d wanted was to escape from the melancholic modernity and mediocrity of my life into a more beautiful environment. I wanted to be free from expectations and decisions, and nunhood offered the means to do so. And the thing about becoming a nun was that I didn’t want to leave my life forever. I actually really love this awful, difficult, beautiful world I get to live in. At the end of the day, maybe no one gets to escape. Maybe you have to put in the work to find yourself and enjoy the life you have.
[1]I remember feeling this way when I was in Ireland. I loved touring the Catholic churches
[2]Love this description
[3]I love this part
Works Cited
“St. Hildegard.” Britannica, May 14, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Hildegard.
Sherman, Carter. “Sundresses and Rugged Self-Sufficiency.” The Guardian, https://www.the guardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2024/jul/24/tradwives-tiktok-women-gender-roles. Accessed 9 June, 2026.
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