Those PR-friendly, pot-puffing Sisters of the Valley are back. I’m sure that this is shocking news (#NOT) to readers who know anything about the history of this group.
Here’s a GetReligion flashback. Some reporters struggled, in early happy talk features about this group, to make it clear these “sisters” were not, in fact, some progressive Catholic order. One classic piece inspired a blog post by Catholic Deacon Greg Kandra — a CBS News professional in his career before moving to the altar — with this classic headline: “Newsweek, Go Home. You’re Drunk. Those Aren’t Nuns.”
Now we have an update about the Sisters of the Valley in, logically enough, Rolling Stone. Here’s the double-decker headline on that:
Our Ladies of the Perpetual High
How a New Age order of feminist nuns is reimagining spiritual devotion and trying to heal the world — one joint at a time
Yes, some headline writers cannot resist “Our Lady” jokes, which is unfortunate. However, the second part of that headline is clear about the contents of this feature, which helps readers know what is what and who is who. This clarity is what makes this story worth reading.
Before we get to that, let me remind readers of a key point in that “thinker” that ran here at GetReligion last weekend: “Two think pieces on changes in American religious life, with a few political twists.” One of the pieces that I recommended was a Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher post pointing to a new blast of information from the Pew Research Center team.
Forget politics for a moment. The headline on Rod’s post — “Christianity Declines — But Not ‘Spirituality’ “ — is what connects that Pew data to this new Rolling Stone feature. Dreher wants to note a renewed surge in a tend that has been around for decades (think “Sheilaism”). Here is a key passage:
America continues to transition to its post-Christian reality. … One of the most interesting, and unexpected, developments is that in the US, relatively few of these people who are falling away from Christianity are becoming atheists. Rather, they are cobbling together a bespoke bricolage religion, one designed just for them.
This brings us to the Sisters of the Valley. Here is the colorful opening anecdote:
In the middle of California’s Central Valley, in a modest milky-blue home on one acre of farmland, lives a small group of nuns. They wear habits and abide by a set of vows, but as the door opens, it’s clear that the Sisters of the Valley, as they’re known, aren’t living in a traditional convent. Because as the scent wafts out, it’s unambiguous: It’s the earthy, pungent smell of weed.
When we visit, five women live in the home: Sister Kate, 62; Sister Sophia, 49; Sister Quinn, 25; and at the moment, Sister Luna and Sister Camilla, both 34, who are visiting from Mexico. Sister Kass, 29, lives off the property with her two children and her partner, Brother Rudy, the collective’s crop manager. On this sunny day, the Sisters of the Valley home is flooded with golden beams of light; a cream-colored piano stands against the wall with an ashtray and joint placed on top. Sister Kate picks it up, lights it, and thoughtfully inhales as she sits down to play “America the Beautiful.” She’s using a piano-learning app filled with Christian songs and national anthems — the two genres of music she dislikes the most. But there is an underlying motive: “The Christian kids nearby have contests, so if I do a lot of practicing in a month, then I can beat them,” she says with a raspy laugh. “There is some gratification in beating the Christian kids.”
If you doubt me on the connection between this emerging faith and the Pew numbers, as interpreted by Dreher, consider the summary paragraph immediately after that introduction:
The Sisters of the Valley are not a religious organization, but an enclave of self-proclaimed sisters who are in the business of spreading spirituality and selling healing cannabidiol products. “Look, the average age of a new Catholic nun in America is 78,” says Sister Kate, founder of the sect, which has 22 sisters and eight brothers worldwide. “Christianity is dying all around us. What are people going to do? They need spirituality in their life; we need it for meaning. We are very spiritual beings walking a physical path, and so for that reason we will find ways to connect. And we are just one example of that.”
Correction: The Sisters of the Valley ARE a “religious organization,” but they are explicitly not a Catholic or even Christian order. This is a new faith, but one openly claiming old roots.
So what is going on here? Let’s look at two other paragraphs that — to the credit of the Rolling Stone team — are way clearer than earlier news reports on this group (at least the ones that I have seen):
According to Sister Kate, her fall into nunhood began in 2011, when the Obama administration lost a fight to have the Department of Agriculture declassify pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables in school lunches. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, if pizza is a vegetable, then I am a nun,’” she explains. Soon after, when she was planning to go to an Occupy protest, her nephew reminded her of a nun costume she had in her closet, and suggested she wear it. “When I protested with the Occupy movement dressed as a nun, people wanted me to organize myself into a religion and I kept saying, ‘No, this is meant to be crazy. This is meant to be a thumb at the establishment, that everything is broken in this country.’”
There are some links in this story to an unorthodox (it would appear, in this context) stream of Christianity called the Beguines. Then again, there are explicit ties to earlier streams of paganism.
You put that together and you get something new that can also claim that it is something old. Sound familiar?
Let’s end with this passage, which is long, but essential. It connects all the dots.
A now-defunct religious order, the Beguines date back to the Middle Ages. Due to a multitude of unmarried women and a desire for spirituality, all-female groups found a way to live in devotion without officially joining a religious order. These women, who lived communally and supported themselves by making cloth or caring for the sick, stressed living like Christ; they were spiritual, and some even delved into mysticism. “We are not trying to romanticize the past, but there are things we like about it,” says Sister Kate. “It’s the way that these women worked in harmony with nature that we are trying to emulate.”
Part of the Sisters of the Valley business plan involves devoting their work and life to the cycles of the moon, which they believe is what their ancient ancestors did. Their harvest ceremony, which takes place during a full moon, begins with a reading from the “Book of the Beguines,” a pamphlet written by the enclave. “There’s no such thing as a ‘Book of the Beguines,’” Sister Kate confesses. “They were all burned. We make our own readings. We have to imagine what our ancestors would have said, what they would’ve done, and how they would have reacted to local political forces. Our closing prayer is from Season Four of Game of Thrones,” she says, laughing.
That’s the ticket.
Read it all, then read the Dreher piece again and follow the links to the Pew Research numbers. ‘Tis the spirit of the age.
FIRST IMAGE: Promotional picture featured at the Sisters of the Valley website.