Good for you, sister!

Today when I had a spare two minutes I switched on my radio. It was Radio Two. I assume it was 'Pause for Thought'. A priestly sounding voice was telling me that the people he admires the most are people who do things for the sake of doing them. People who just get on with it and don't expect any praise. I think the focus of his Godly talk was the recent Brit Awards ceremony. I felt guilty when I listened to this. When I do things, I want something out of it, be it money or respect. Preferably both. Especially money. Perhaps I am a bad person, I thought. I only heard a few words of what the man on the radio had to say. Perhaps I took it out of context but I had had enough of him and I turned the radio over to Radio 4. A woman was being interviewed who had been a nun but had decided to stop being a nun and so wasn't a nun anymore. Whilst being a nun she had gone to university to study English so she could go back to her convent and teach. She had found that even though the university was far from a 'worldly' place, the encouragement she had been given to think for herself and to analyse and question the thoughts of the authors she studied changed her view of the world fundamentally. When she went back to the convent, the regime of unquestioning faith was intolerable to her. She had a small nervous breakdown and subsequently left the convent.

I felt bad that the nun had had a breakdown - but I liked the ex-nun's story. The Radio 2 guy may have gone on to qualify what I'd heard and I had got him completely wrong, but the nun had cheered me up and I thought about what a grim place the world would be full of the Radio 2 guy's chums.

Edit: Later I looked in 'Radio Times' and found that the above mentioned were probably 1) Rev Chris Morley and 2)Karen Armstrong.