What happens when love at first sight arrives at the church? Suor Mary Elizabeth he lived an austere and silent existence, spending most of his days in his Carmelite cell in the north of England. But a fleeting encounter in the convent hall in Preston, Lancashire, with a monaco equally devoted, 24 years after taking the veil and entering the order, it would change her life completely. A few words were enough, a message from her that left her amazed: “Will you leave your order and marry me?“.
Lightning strike in the convent
Brother Robert she was visiting from the Carmelite convent in Oxford, so the Prioress and Sister Mary Elizabeth had asked if she would like anything to eat. But the superior had been called to answer a phone call, so the two were left alone: ”It was the first time we were together in a room. We sat at a table while he ate and the prioress didn’t come back, so I had to let him out,” the nun told BBC News. As she walked him out the door she touched his sleeve and said she heard kind of a jolt. “I felt some kind of chemistry, something, and I was a little embarrassed. I thought: damn, did he try it too? When I let him walk out the door it was pretty embarrassing.” She recalls that about a week later she received a text from Robert asking if she would like to marry him. “I was a bit shocked. I wore the veil, she had never even seen the color of my hair. She knew nothing about me, nor about my upbringing. She didn’t even know my female name of the world”, continues Lisa Tinkler, from Middlesbrough, before becoming a nun at the age of 19.
Lisa’s vocation: Sister Mary Elizabeth is born
The woman, still a teenager, was struck by an aunt’s pilgrimage to Lourdes, she even had an altar built in her bedroom and went alone to one of the Catholic churches in her city, where she was overcome by an overwhelming love for Virgin Mary. A weekend of retreat in the monastery, when she was still very young, she then convinced her of hers vocation. In the convent, managed by Carmelite nuns, life was particularly spartan, withdrawn and severe – but she decided that was exactly the life she wanted to lead. “Since then I have lived like a hermit. We had two breaks a day, of about half an hour, in which we could talk, otherwise you were alone in your cell. We never worked with anyone, always alone”, adds the former nun. The woman describes to the newspaper how she felt about his “inner world” to open up as the outside world closed in around her. But that day, in the convent parlor, everything changed with the touch of a sleeve and a message from her asking if she wanted to leave the monastic life and get married.
The Polish monk in Oxford and the nun’s breakthrough
Sister Mary Elizabeth did not give Robert an answer to his question, he did not know what to do. During his visits from Oxford to the Carmelite monks’ sanctuary in Preston, he used to celebrate mass at the nearby monastery and Lisa had watched her sermons from behind a grate. By listening to the sermons you got to know fragments of one youth spent in Silesia, Poland, near the border with Germany, and his love of the mountains. Even if, according to her, those words hadn’t had a profound impact on her at the time. Then, suddenly, things changed. “I didn’t know what it felt like to be in love and I thought the sisters might see it on my face. So I became quite nervous – says Lisa -. I felt the change in me and this it scared me“. She finally worked up the courage to tell her prioress that she thought she had feelings for Robert, but she was told just as much disbelief. “She couldn’t figure out how it happened, because we were in there 24/7, always under her watch. The prioress asked me how I could have fallen in love with so few encounters”. “She had been a bit abrupt with me – she continues – so I put my pants and my toothbrush in a bag and left, and I never came back Sister Mary Elizabeth“, says Lisa.
Robert had sent her a message to say that he intended to go to Preston again that evening, to meet a friend in a nearby pub. Lisa decided to go to the club but instead of being a moment of joy, that night in November 2015 she was thrown into a deep turmoil. Even as she walked, she was crossed by suicidal thoughts: “I was really in trouble, I thought I should have prevented all this from happening and that Robert could go on with his life. But I also wondered if he was really convinced about getting married ”. When she arrived at the place she only found the courage to enter when she saw the monk through an open door. “When I saw her, my heart stopped,” says Robert. “But actually I was paralyzed with fear, not from joy, because at that moment I realized that I should devote my life to Lisa. But I also knew we weren’t ready for it,” she explains.
Fear for new life
Thinker, academic and theologian, a Carmelite friar for 13 years, he had approached monastic life in search of meaning during what he describes as a crisis of faith and identity. But it was a dark time, after a failed relationship, that led him to continue his research in England where, despite the Lutheran Protestant theology he had chosen, it was in a Roman Catholic Carmelite monastery that he found the peace of he. “I had never thought of becoming a monk. In fact, I’ve always been very suspicious of this kind of expression of faith,” he told the BBC today. But he adds that the order has taught him to embrace the darkness, difficulties and crises until he felt satisfied. However, meeting Lisa – whom she then barely knew as Sister Mary Elizabeth – turned her life upside down. The message he’d sent her, in which he asked if they could get married, was practically an intellectual struggle with himself. “When she appeared in the pub, the little demon in me was terrified. But my fear wasn’t religious or spiritual, it was just how I was going to start a new life at 53 years old“, continues the man.
The wedding and the new journey together
The transition to their new life has been difficult, especially in the beginning. “It was so hard because we both felt so alone and isolated that we didn’t know how to move forward. But we held hands and got over it,” says the former nun. What brought peace to their lives, in fact, was the same thing that guided them towards monasticism: the link with their personal faith. “Throughout your religious life you are told that your heart must be undivided and given to God. Suddenly I felt like my heart was expanding to contain Robert, but I realized I wasn’t going to lose what was already there. I didn’t feel any different about God and that reassured me,” adds Lisa, who first found work in a funeral home and then as a hospital chaplain. As for Robert, after the shock of a letter from Rome telling him that he was no longer a member of the Carmelite order, he was accepted into the Church of England. He and Tinkler are then married and now share a house in the North Yorkshire village of Hutton Rudby, where he has been appointed vicar of the local church. The path to new life outside the monastery is not finished, but Robert and Lisa they are going through it together.