If Nuns Ruled the World Read Online Free PDF

think I snore,” she told me. “And I don’t take up very much room at all.”
    For dinner we visited a restaurant called King Tut’s for what was promised to be the best Middle Eastern food in all of Knoxville. Their specialty was a Greek salad the size of a watermelon.
    â€œWe take all of our criminals here,” Ralph Hutchinson joked as he passed me some couscous.
    I immersed myself in the OREPA community that night, driving for a late-night dumpster dive to retrieve a Thanksgiving meal from the bins behind Trader Joe’s and sleeping on the couch of Ralph’s ex-wife, Lisa, kept warm by three eight-week-old kittens nestled on my belly.
    Dawn hadn’t yet broken when we prepared to start the journey home. Sister Megan asked that we say the Prayer for the Traveler before we began the 487-mile road trip. We clasped hands and I moved my mouth along to words I had never heard:
    O Almighty and merciful God, who hast commissioned Thy angels to guide and protect us, command them to be our assiduous companions from our setting out until our return; to clothe us with their invisible protection; to keep from us all danger of collision, of fire, of explosion, of fall and bruises, and finally, having preserved us from all evil, and especially from sin, to guide us to our heavenly home. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
    Sister Megan knows how to pack lightly, and she’d brought one outfit with many layers for the four-day trip. For our car ride, she wore the same sweater and lavender hoodie from the day before, topped off with a bright-red woolen cap and gray poncho, as she offered to sit in the middle of the backseat of the rented PT Cruiser. “You take the window, sweetie. You’ll want to look at the scenery,” she said to me through a brief cough. Sister Megan was en route to DC to spend the weekend at the Dorothy Day Worker House, while I would be in the city to say good-bye to my best friend, Matt, a Foreign Service Officer about to ship off to China for two years. As we drove through the suburban neighborhoods on the outskirts of Knoxville, Sister Megan asked me dozens of questions about what my friend would be doing in China. She told me she would pray for him.
    â€œI’ve been lucky that I have been able to travel the world,” she told me, raising her eyebrows above the silver rim of her lightly tinted oval glasses with the energy that comes only from the anticipation of a story about to be told.
    Born on January 31, 1930, the nuclear nun, as the newspapers would eventually call her, spent her first few years in Connecticut before her family moved to a wealthy block on Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City. She was the youngest of three girls, two of whom would become Catholic sisters. Her mother used to joke that she was becoming a nursery for the Holy Child order. Her father was an obstetrician who taught at New York University and treated patients at Belle­vue Hospital. Her mother had gone to college at Barnard with the anthropologist Margaret Mead, got a master’s from Columbia in history, and then received her doctorate there. She wrote her dissertation on Catholic views about slavery, one of the first studies that could rightly be called African American history. Good Upper West Side liberals, her parents were both heavily involved in the Catholic Worker movement from its early days and were close friends with its founder, Dorothy Day. Sister Megan remembers copies of the Catholic Worker newspaper scattered around her house like bits of carpet. It was on its pages that she first learned about concepts like pacifism and voluntary poverty, ideas that rattled about in her young brain and made her acutely aware of the extreme poverty and unspeakable suffering taking place right outside her door.
    As a Depression baby, she said, “I had a desire to try to make the world a more fair place.” The