A former nun on why she ran away from her 'Cloistered' life

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This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley. Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural area in the north of England was almost the opposite of the life Catherine Coldstream had lived before that. She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris, where she studied composition, worked on experimental music, and performed on viola.

At the age of twenty four, after her father died and she was at rock bottom, she found God. Entering the monastery meant starting a new life cut off from the outside world. Monastery life revolved around silent prayer, group prayer, singing hymns, work, and obedience. To her this new life seemed transcendent, but eventually she chafed against the obedience, and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism, and her persistent questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality, were rejected. After twelve years she left the monastery.

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