When Joan Morrissey decided to join her best friend and become a nun at the age of 16, she could not imagine her life would become a labyrinth of unexpected twists and turns. She left her native Ireland for a Novitiate 7,000 miles away in Tacoma, Washington. Joan and her fellow postulants had no idea that they were the last generation of Catholic nuns to enter a traditional religious life of Medieval habits, silence, and retreat from the world. When Vatican 11 opened the doors and windows of the Catholic Church to modernity, Joan was among those who found their moorings ripped away and left the religious life. She secured a dispensation from her vows, married a widower with four children, had two children of her own, taught and ran schools, and found joy in the most surprising path she followed. In the end, in the winter of her life, she found her vocation may have changed but her faith in God and the decency of her fellow man, her sense of humor, and her fundamental Irish nature remained the same. This compelling memoir carried the reader from impoverished mid-Century rural Ireland to post- War America, to Vatican 11 and the turbulent 60's and beyond.

https://rapidgator.net/file/459232456bfd689d62f3ae4cf17a2f80/