Chapter 1: Choosing Practices
My friend Kelly wnt through a phase when she was about seven years old when she wanted quite desperately to be a nun. In the flush of religiousity attending her first Communion, she pictured herself in a sweeping black habit like the sisters who taught her strict elementary school. Actually, I just made the last part up. Kelly was a kid after VaticanII, so the nuns probably wore jeans with holes at the knees and chain-smoked in the teacher's lounge. I'll have to ask her sometime. But the "Sound of Music" image makes for a better story.
I didn't grow up Catholic, or any other religion for that matter. My dad was an angry atheist who considered religion a crutch for people who were too stupid to know any better. My mom was considerably more charitable but no more interested in organized religion than she was in volunteering for a Stalinist gulag. So it's hard to explain why I was always drawn inexorably toward religion and religious people... (Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and still Loving My Neighbor, Jana Riess pg 1)