But Johnson’s relationship with Sister Niobe eventually became exploitative and unmanageable. Sister Niobe would take any opportunity that they had alone in an empty room to violently press their bodies together, despite Johnson’s insistent protests. Soon, Johnson found out that Sister Niobe had a history of coercing sisters into sexual relationships, and she tried her hardest to bring this to the attention of superiors, even Mother Teresa herself. “Sister Niobe was a sexual predator, which took me a long time to understand," Johnson says. “The sisters who had sexual relations with Sister Niobe were nearly all very sexually naïve adults who had really no experience. I hadn’t either.”
In addition to revealing an essential vulnerability that a life of chastity engenders, the case of Sister Niobe also exposed a fundamental flaw in the ability of Mother Teresa and the superior sisters in the Missionaries of Charity. The order was unable to deal with sexual exploitation, even if it threatened the well-being of many sisters. “Mother Teresa made it known that this was something not to be talked about,” Johnson says. “She even went so far as to imply that talking about this sexual sin was worse than anything that had happened.”
With doubts about Mother Teresa’s infallibility, a continual yearning for tenderness with other people, and her rebuffed attempts to have more contact with the poor, Johnson began questioning whether she belonged with the Missionaries of Charity. She set an ultimatum for herself. “I thought, ‘I’m going to give myself one more year,’” she said. “‘By the end of the year, if I feel like I can be myself in this group, I’ll stay. If I feel like I can’t be myself in this group, I’ll go.’ At the end of the year, it was very clear to me that I had to go.”
Leaving the Missionaries of Charity in 1997 was like stepping out of a time capsule. “I had never used an ATM before,” Johnson says. “I didn’t know what to do with a microwave. I could prepare a meal for 60 sisters over a wood-burning stove, but a microwave?” The last 20 years of her life were gone, along with any sense of the direction or purpose that accompanied them. Johnson faced a new life at 39 years old.
ROOM OF HER OWN
“I’m Mary Johnson from Beaumont, Texas, and this workshop is my fifth choice. You should know that at this point in my life I don’t trust women much, especially older women.” These were the first words Darlene Chandler Bassett heard Johnson speak in July 2000, three years after leaving the order. Bassett was a retired corporate executive also seeking a direction to lead the rest of her life. They were on the same women’s retreat at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keefe’s old house in the New Mexico desert that holds many retreats and workshops. Bassett took an immediate interest in this standoffish stranger.
Once she had returned to life outside the convent, Johnson’s first instinct was to continue working with the poor through institutions like soup kitchens and homeless shelters, but she stopped when people in her life suggested otherwise. “They said, ‘Don’t do that! You’ve been doing that for 20 years, and you need to try something else now,’” she says, “That kind of made sense to me.”
Johnson wondered what was to constitute the center of her life now, without religion and the Missionaries of Charity. She decided that her primary goal was to learn how to tell her story in all its rich complexity. Most accounts of Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity at the time were motivated by dogma, from unquestioning reverence of Mother Teresa’s sainthood to Christopher Hitchens’ vitriolic and equally unsubtle view of Mother Teresa as a fraud. Johnson thought that she could bring a multi-faceted evaluation of the Missionaries of Charity based on the quotidian experience of being a sister. “What interests me is looking at the whole picture [of the Missionaries of Charity]. There are good things and there are things that need to be changed, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw the whole thing out the window,” says Johnson.
Later that evening at the retreat, Johnson expressed her innermost desire to the group of strangers to whom she had been initially so hostile: She wanted to write her story, but for that purpose, she needed a room of her own. The invocation of Virginia Woolf’s titular assertion, that women needed to be able to support themselves and have their own, personal space if they were to write, immediately gave Bassett an idea. She would provide the necessary funds to support Johnson through the writing process, as long as Johnson would help her establish an organization that sponsored and taught women writers. “The idea came to me fully formed, in that instant,” says Bassett. “I had never considered doing anything like this before.”
When Johnson agreed to the idea, A Room of Her Own Foundation was born. The Foundation began by funding Johnson’s MFA program in creative writing at Goddard College, during which she developed a behemoth of a thesis—which at one point reached around 900 pages—that she eventually tamed into her much more moderately-sized memoir. Meanwhile, A Room of Her Own has become nationally renowned as a birthplace of successful female writers. For Johnson, the organization has provided the impetus for a mutually-reinforcing sense of purpose and community: with financial support and by virtue of her own writing, Johnson spurs other women to write, forming a national network of women sharing their perspectives. “I know that I can turn to so many of these different women when I have a question, when I have a problem about technical parts of the writing process, or when I’m just scared,” says Johnson of the community the organization has created.
Now that Mary Johnson’s book rests on bookshelves across the country—ironically, often in the “Christian Inspiration” section—anyone can read about her trials, her triumphs, her doubts, her journey, and, as she characterizes them, “all the racy details” as well. Johnson feels that she has grown tremendously from the process of writing. “Whether I have a reading public or not, there’s the simple fact of writing: it’s a very healing sort of process.” However, she hopes that many are intrigued enough by her story to crack the spine of “An Unquenchable Thirst,” because, after all, honesty breeds honesty. “One of the things that’s impressed me,” she said, “is the fact that many people have gotten in touch with me after the memoir was published and they tell me things like, ‘I’ve never been able to tell anybody about what happened to me, but after reading the honest account of your story, I now have the courage to tell my story to somebody.’”
Johnson hopes her writing and the tales of other women will foster an understanding of how life could be outside the comforting and confining walls of religion. “I think that we create these ideas of perfect people like Mother Teresa because it makes us feel better about our own possibilities,” Johnson says. “We create idols, when in fact, we need to look at the real complexities of life.”
—Staff writer Patrick W. Lauppe can be reached at plauppe@college.harvard.edu.