An expected love story has taken place between a priest and nun, causing them to leave behind their lives of celibacy for each other.
It all started with an instant of chemistry between Sister Mary Elizabeth and Carmelite friar Robert. A simple touch of Robert’s sleeve by Sister Mary Elizabeth, as she was leading Robert out of the convent he had visited, jolted her.
“I just felt a chemistry there, something, and I was a bit embarrassed. And I thought, gosh, did he feel that too. And as I let him out the door it was quite awkward.”
Within a week, Robert, who lived at a priory in Oxford, had emailed to ask if she would leave the convent to marry him. He knew nothing about her, even her hair color, yet he had felt the spark as well.
Although she had felt content in her 24 years of solitude and reflection, that changed when she met Robert. She soon asked her prioress for advice.
“She couldn’t understand how it had happened because we were in there 24/7 under her watch all the time. The prioress asked how I could have fallen in love with so little contact,” she says.
Robert himself had come to monastic life only 13 years earlier.
He had grown up with a Catholic mother and a German father. After a relationship ended in disappointment, he went to England from Germany to find fulfillment. Despite the Lutheran Protestant theology that he had adopted, it was in a Carmelite Roman Catholic monastery where he eventually found peace and solace.
The meeting with Sister Mary Elizabeth changed everything.
Robert explained, “that touch of Lisa’s on my sleeve started a change, but while I felt something gradually growing in my heart, I don’t think I ever reached a point where I felt I was crazily falling in love, because in becoming a monk or a nun they teach you how to deal with emotions like love.”
His message to Lisa, formerly Mary Elizabeth, started them on a journey. Both fearful and tearful sometimes, and feeling alone, they also found their hearts expanding. Eventually, they married.
Although they at times yearn for the solitude of their old life, together they have found their way. She is a hospital chaplain, and he is a vicar in their local church.
She sees three of them in the marriage, with God their third partner.
Lisa says, “I often think I live in a monastery here with Robert, like two Carmelites where everything we do is given to God. We anchor ourselves in prayer but love can make a sacrament of everything you do and I realise nothing has really changed for me.”
