Everyone Knows It's Wendy
By Stephan Hopkins

She's popping up all over the place. Sister Wendy Beckett, a kindly, diminutive nun with a rapier wit and keen eye for art, is evangelizing popular culture with her various television series on art history, her best-selling books, and her high profile TV interviews. Best of all, secular audiences haven't yet caught on to the fact that she's teaching them about Christ and Christianity! Here's an inside look at the art of apologetics used by this most unlikely Catholic evangelist.

Sister Wendy Beckett is not the likeliest of pop stars. When you first stumble across her, in a rapture over the Mona Lisa's grin, you're liable to think she's some bizarre caricature. With her self-professed "stick-out teeth," she looks like a rabbit in a habit, and her inability to pronounce the letter "R" makes her sound something like Elmer Fudd's British aunt. Then you listen some more. You begin to see. You become engrossed.

Who is PBS' new fair-haired art critic? (That's "fair-haired" figuratively speaking. After all, she wears a veil and shaves her head, so nobody knows for sure.) Some wonder if she is really a nun at all. Others fear she is "on a crusade to Catholicize the world."

"If so," says the New York Times, "she is running the grubbiest and most devious little con that Rome ever schemed up."

Either way, people are watching. In England she's become one of the most beloved television personalities in decades. She's certainly the first popular art critic since Kenneth Clark brought us Civilization in the late 1960s. She's even inspired a host of impressionists (ˆ la Rich Little, not Claude Monet) parodying her on Saturday morning kiddie shows.

PBS anointed her in the States by scheduling her lavishly-produced 10-part series, Sister Wendy's Story of Painting, in their most coveted time slot, the august "Masterpiece Theatre" on Sunday evenings.

As she stands in front of, say, Degas' The Dance Class, we are taken beyond the pretty picture. Coyly, Sister Wendy reveals the inside scoop, and the details come alive. That dancer "scratching her back, it's something we don't do when we're being looked at . . . but animals do. And we suddenly realize with terror that the Parisian name for these little dancers was 'rats' . . . And there's Monsieur Parot, the only male. And isn't he standing there rather like an animal trainer?"

You look and you think, "well I'll be darned if he isn't." With Degas' chauvinism exposed, Sister Wendy looks into the camera and whispers, " . . . and I say to myself, 'I don't know if I really like you, Degas, you have a cold heart, Degas.' " This shocking audacity trills the general public, but it enrages some of the art elite. Robert Hughes, art critic for Time Magazine, calls her a "relentlessly chatty pseudo-hermit with her signature teeth."

Yet the lower-brow Entertainment Weekly finds her an intriguing cultural venue for the starved masses. In fact, they've dubbed her "the only known antidote to Baywatch."

Meanwhile, some Catholics are taking pause. Why is a hermit acting like a globe-trotting celebrity? In fact, her last project took her not only out of her cloister, but some 30,000 miles through a dozen countries. And what's a nun doing with a name like Sister Wendy anyway?

A Sister Wendy history.
The one irrefutable fact in Sister Wendy's childhood was the desire to belong to God totally as a nun. At 16 she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame and became Sister Michael of Saint Peter. After Vatican II, she was asked to change her name back to Wendy. "I did it as a humiliation, and it pleased my dear mother. It's a silly name and I don't like it. But I am silly! I am a Wendy."

Silly? Maybe, but she's nobody's fool. After her novitiate, she earned an honorary first (the only one given that year) from Oxford in English literature. She then moved to South Africa and became a teacher, university lecturer and finally Reverend Mother.

Yet the pressures became overwhelming. "I just kind of higgledy-piggledy joined the nearest nuns, and then realized with a shock that I was going to have to teach." When epilepsy became life-threatening in 1970, the order finally granted her wish to live in seclusion.

She obtained a small trailer for approximately $75 U.S. and moved into the wooded enclosure of a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, England. Well, okay, the trailer leaked and was drafty, but she wore chunky sweaters and multiple layers of socks to bed, and somehow survived the brutal East Angian winters. For Sister Wendy, it was all worth it because she got to spend seven hours every day in rapturous prayer. She says it was living "in the sunshine of God's presence . . . absolute bliss."

Up at three a.m., she consumes a pint and a half of skim milk, a few Ryvita crackers and precisely two potato chips every day. As you can imagine, those grocery bills can add up, so she works for two hours every day.

Her first project was translating medieval Latin sermons of King John's counselor, John of Ford.

When she finished the lot, 150 sermons filling five volumes, she asked if she could just look at some art for a while. But feeling a prick of conscience to carry her economic weight, she found herself adding a fateful qualification, " . . . with a view to eventually writing a book about it." With books from the library and postcards that several museums were courteous enough to send, she began her study. Then one day she thought, "What about that wretched book?" She wrote the book and from there on, it was "downhill all the way."

A BBC producer, Nicholas Rossiter, stumbled across her writing and somehow thought she might do well on TV. She was invited to be the art critic for a documentary on the National Gallery. Rossiter's instincts were good. Sister Wendy's bizarre wit and contemplative insights proved to be the right mix of accessibility and depth. The immediate success led to Sister Wendy's Odyssey, which followed her first journey out of the cloister to view England's art treasures firsthand. Then came a wider journey through Europe with Sister Wendy's Grand Tour. Finally, her magnum opus, Sister Wendy's Story of Painting and its companion art book.

She has now written more than 15 books on art, including Art and the Sacred; Meditations on Joy, Peace, Love and Silence; A Child's Book of Prayer in Art for DK Publishing and The Mystery of Love, a survey of saints in painting for Harper Collins. She is currently working on a new TV series, Sister Wendy's Story of Sculpture. Not bad for someone who never even saw a television set before she was on one.

Benefactors now provide the art books which she could never buy for herself. So many, in fact, that Sister Maryrose, who brings the day's milk and crackers, had to dig her out one morning after a looming stack had fallen upon poor Sister Wendy. She now has an enormous scholar's library which was built next door for her.

She even has a new trailer. "I do miss my old caravan," she pines, "so romantic it was. But in the new one there is a small bath I can kneel in. Which means I can go to sleep with warm feet!"

The iconoclasm of Sister Wendy.
Viewing the portrait of Rubens' unclad young wife Helena, Sister Wendy is struck by how affectionately and respectfully Rubens paints her. "It always reminds me of those lines from the marriage service, 'with my body, I thee worship' . . . and if we are to look at this without being intrusive and vulgar, we have to look at its beauty with that same sense of reverence with which Rubens painted it."

Yet some feel it is inappropriate for her to be speaking of the carnal side of painting at all. Her harshest critic, the Australian feminist Germaine Greer, scoffs at the notion that a consecrated virgin would be speaking of sensuality.

Such reactions perplex Sister Wendy. "Why does [Greer] think that anybody should not delight in the creative work of God? . . . This suggests that . . . He's done these shameful things and we must do our best to cover them up. This is not the Faith." While Sister Wendy believes that modesty demands a certain "appropriateness," she doesn't believe we have any "nasty bits."

For others, this frank delight in the human form is a unique witness. It is obvious that her celibacy is not rooted in a fear and repression, but joy. "I'm an outsider to sex," she admits. "The fires of it mean nothing to me." While she is happy for the gift of sexuality for others, she considers her "solitude with God" a "bigger gift."

In a culture in which religious celibacy is seen as a neurosis, Sister Wendy is something of a walking iconoclast. My own study of religious portrayals in film over the past 30 years has revealed celibate clergy are usually portrayed in one of three bigoted stereotypes. They are either: 1) nasty and oppressive, 2) tragically suffering from their own unreasonable vows, or 3) comically lovable, but psychosexually retarded. While Sister Wendy may, at moments, play the comically lovable nun, you never forget that she is a profoundly sophisticated and mature woman.

Portrait of a Paradox on a Wire.
A recent interview of Sister Wendy by Charlie Rose left him both charmed and flustered. He didn't seem to know what to make of her charming and good-natured sanctity.

In another recent interview, Bill Moyers asked if she had ever been struck by the paradox of a cloistered nun becoming a TV star. She matter-of-factly responded, "Yes, it's bizarre. It's the kind of thing only God would do." For a brief moment one could almost sense poor Moyers struggling to suppress his bewilderment.

Sister Wendy radiates a spiritual presence which is at once attractive and yet disconcerting for many of the pseudo-highbrow PBS clan. She somehow manages to appeal to people across the cultural spectrum, from feminist to papist. Yet she can leave them all with an occasional moment of suspicion.

Some orthodox Catholics are especially dubious. After all, the media seems to use clerical garb only as a gimmick for backdoor attacks. A few are anticipating a betrayal. Yet Sister Wendy refuses to comfort them by becoming doctrinaire or triumphant. She is out to spiritually challenge everyone, and in a way we may not anticipate.

Sister Wendy has climbed upon a wire. She must balance acceptability in a popular medium, with her Faith in a hostile environment. Is the demand too much?

Many Catholics have been disappointed in her taking a positive theological stance on controversial artworks they feel should be condemned as blasphemous. Yet others argue that condemnation is what fuels such work, and her sidestepping the issue is simply a more efficient and pragmatic way to belittle the artist.

Yet there is controversy on the other side of the fence, as well. In her Bill Moyers interview, Sister Wendy confessed to battling with her producers who didn't want her to do too many "religious" paintings, lest she be perceived as proselytizing. The comment ended up on the cutting room floor, but it underscores the opinion of some that her two worlds are at odds and could ultimately compromise each other.

Sister Wendy works without a script, and to her producers' consternation, she won't tell them in advance what she's going to say. "That would spoil it," she teases. It might also make her vulnerable to an endless bombardment of pressure to modify her content in pre-production. The crew has come to call her "one-take Beckett" for her extraordinary ability to wrap each shot in a single take. Is this merely her spontaneity, or is it a shrewd guard against being edited in postproduction?

Yet, for all this, the seeming conflicts between the integrity of her art criticism and her contemplative life may be, remarkably enough, an illusion. Indeed, it is here that we find the key to the great paradox of Sister Wendy.

A view from the heavens.
In terms of our own age, Sister Wendy is the ultimate outsider. Her producer, David Willcock, notes the rather large gap in her knowledge of popular culture. "Wendy is like an alien who has very cleverly learned what's necessary to seem like a human being." Perhaps it is her ability to see as an outsider, without the prejudice of the age, that makes her a good bridge for the rest of us. After all, no one can have cultural objectivity like an alien.

Yet, as the Church is at the heart of Western civilization, she is, in terms of the work, a very intimate insider. While she avoids overt catechizing like the plague, there is a silent underpinning of salvation history which informs her work.

In her Story of Painting, we see that throughout Christendom, the Church used art to move, inspire and educate. During the Reformation, the Protestants sought first to destroy our art. She reminds us, "In the Swiss town of Biel, [the Protestants] burned all the religious paintings in a single day." Throughout Europe, Churches were desecrated, religious sculpture smashed and stained glass windows shattered.

In the Counter Reformation, the Catholics manned a counterattack. "It was the pope who insisted that the Church must use painting and sculpture to bring people closer to the drama and truth of the Bible stories." Their weapon? The most sensuous of artist styles: "The Baroque," which, says Sister Wendy, tries to "catch us off balance and catch at our emotions."

In the 20th century, we might well ask: Has the Church, in an effort to defend the Faith, forgotten to celebrate Her culture? Has She forgotten how to fight a cultural war? Today we seem to have developed a puritanical suspicion of art. What is an overly-legalistic, battle-weary Catholic to do?

Please check neurotic baggage at the museum door.
As we move beyond the paradox between the art critic and the contemplative nun, we may be recovering vital elements of the Church's charism.

At the very beginning of the Story of Painting, in the caves of Lascaux, France, where our "little hairy ancestors" proved that they were "like us in all the ways that really matter," the paradox is shattered. She tells Bill Moyers that these cave paintings were, in fact, prayers. "In a way," she reflects, "all great art is a visual form of prayer, although the artist may not know it." In teaching us to look at art, Sister Wendy is teaching us to pray. She believes that we must surrender to art. She feels you must "let this work speak to you without your setting up preconditions, without your, in any way, defending the fragility of your ego, because art can often teach us things about ourselves we would rather not know."

I found this concept of going defenseless to art challenged in the final episode on modern art. To watch the "great" abstract impressionist, Jackson Pollock, stand upon his enormous canvas, whipping wet paint from a stick, and be told that this is "white-hot creativity" is demented. Is the good Sister just being charitable, or has she sold out to the great PBS demon? "This is not great art," I think to myself, "but a great rebellion, a con, an attack against the truly beautiful."

But then, a few moments later, I find myself staring at a huge misty blue canvas of minimalist Agnes Martin. It, like the blue ocean against the blue sky, is horizontally divided in foggy hues. For a moment I feel a kind of peaceful, trance-like state. Then, suddenly realizing this could all be a terrible hoax by some new age witch in a frumpy habit, I quickly avert my gaze and cross my index fingers in front of the TV.

I find it disconcerting that a degenerate, pagan artist can be a vessel of God. Sister Wendy challenges us to confront the terrible reality of chaos, fragmentation and violence in modern art. I have begun to realize that the discomfort I feel in front of a chaotic piece or even a canvas of a lone, solid color is the discomfort I have in contemplative silence. It is the terror of being alone with my own chaos and emptiness, which can only be ordered and filled by Christ.

When Damien Hirst suspends a dead sheep in formaldehyde, Sister Wendy sees "something that perhaps opens us up to the tragedy in life." For her, when great artists create the ugly, it is their struggle to overcome it which must be understood, and understood to be a passionate search for God.

Yet one always senses that it is the beautiful that Sister Wendy loves best. "God is beauty," she tells us. "So every time we experience beauty anonymously, as it were, we're experiencing a touch of God."

Her vision opens interesting possibilities for evangelization strategies. Indeed, the capacity to be awed by the beautiful around us is the first mark of humility. So vital is this humility in the spiritual life, that vocation directors often look for it when assessing the appropriateness of a candidate for the religious life. It directs the neurotically-tended ego to look outside itself, which is the necessary focus for the worship of God.

Perhaps it is, for many of the secular pagans of our age, the common ground and starting point for evangelization.

No doctrine, no apology.
In teaching us to critique art, Sister Wendy is teaching us to see. We learn to see, not just the world the painters have created upon the canvas, but the psychic world within them. We come face to face with their truth. In strengthening our eye's power of observation for details, like a detective, we can read not just a painting, but the psyche of those around us. It is only with this vision that we can more profoundly assess their spiritual needs, and be able to offer them the next step on their journey to God.

In neo-pagan culture, our evangelization work may increasingly become pre-evangelization work. Here we can see that Sister Wendy's "no doctrine, no apology" policy may not be so much a rejection of evangelization, as a stance of pre-evangelization.

While the fruits of this artistic criticism can be surprisingly useful for evangelism, it is perhaps most profoundly valuable for the conversion of ourselves.

How easy it can be to save the world, only to lose our own soul. Sister Wendy believes that great art can increase one's integrity by forcing us to confront an external reality that is beyond us. She hopes art will save us from "zombie-dom" by teaching us to be "alert" and "in the moment, because God's coming every moment, but . . . we're not even noticing . . . We're drifting through."

Poor old Germaine Greer doesn't buy all this spiritualization of art. To her it is merely a "girlish whim."

"No, no," giggles Sister Wendy, "I think it's open to boys, as well."

Awakening a slumbering world is hard work, and Sister Wendy is very frail. When she becomes fatigued during filming, her young producer, David Willcock, gets to push her wheelchair. "The Sistine Chapel was my favorite," he confesses, "Tilting 'Wens' toward the ceiling is like aiming a piece of artillery."

It's hard to say, but perhaps Sister Wendy is a gift from God, sent to awaken Christian and pagan alike. Then again, it might all just be a plot by some new-age witch.

If so, it's the grubbiest and most devious little con that paganism ever schemed up.