The life of a nun – in comparison to that of a wife – has many advantages. No cooking and cleaning; no skivvying at the kitchen sink or schlepping around the supermarket; none of the boring and interminable chores of running a household, starting with making lists, day after day after day, of what must be done. (I have left instructions for an inscription to be put on my grave: ‘She is at rest – she will never again push a trolley around Sainsbury’s.’) 

The nun, by contrast, holds sacred the idea of vocation – the calling, as dictated by talents, which, as the New Testament story tells us, we must never bury. The nun may be a contemplative, but she may also be an intellectual; a musician; a mathematician; an artist; a writer;