Episode Ninety-One: The Interview-Sister Merry Peter

Sister Merry Peter is a nun of Perpetual Indulgence. Created in the midst of conflict and turmoil, the nuns monitor and watch, support those struggling and most of all? Spread joy. Hear how Sister Merry has both witnessed miracles, but created them as well.

Transcript

Welcome to this week's episode,

Episode 91 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

I have a really fun treat for you coming up in the next few weeks.

I have the really sweet opportunity to interview several of the nuns of Perpetual Indulgence from the San Francisco chapter.

And if you've never heard of them before,

On their website it says,

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a leading edge order of queer and trans nuns.

We believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty.

And they've been in San Francisco since Easter Sunday,

1979.

In this episode,

I get to interview Sister Mary Peter.

And Sister Mary Peter was such a joy to interview.

And in this interview,

You're going to find that we use the word joy a lot.

Because essentially,

For Sister Mary Peter,

Spreading joy,

Being a conduit for joy,

That's what it's all about.

On Sister Mary Peter's blurb about just who she is,

Sister Mary Peter says,

An early inspiration for her,

A sign perhaps that my childhood was shaped by nuns,

Remarkable women who did the hard work despite the fact that men often reaped the public glory.

My nuns were working class girls for whom religious life offered an escape from oppression and a chance at self-expression and new horizons.

I wanted to be like them but thought,

As a boy,

I never could.

Well,

In this interview,

You get to hear how Sister Mary Peter became the nun that she always wanted to be.

And you'll hear about miracles,

Two miracles that happened for Sister Mary Peter,

Both of them very beautiful and both of them worth hearing.

So now,

Here's episode 91 in my interview with Sister Mary Peter.

Early on in San Francisco,

We had a bar called the Cafe,

Which was upstairs right off Market Street.

It was kind of a boy bar.

All the hot guys would go there to dance.

And on a Saturday night,

Sister Gina Tonic and I went out to do what we call bar ministry,

Which is just show up,

Raise money for charity and do glitter blessings.

And we were doing our work.

And then something was calling me to the center of the dance floor.

And I could see on the dance floor this real hot young couple,

Thin blonde kid,

His partner,

Dancing wildly.

I thought,

I need to go there.

So I squeezed my way through the crowd.

And the young man was clearly strung out,

Like definitely on meth.

But I stood there motionless until he finally kind of saw that I was there.

And then whatever was,

I don't know,

I still to this day don't know what it was,

But I took the glitter and I put it on his forehead.

And I said,

The man you are with is not the man you need.

And we have need of you,

And you need to wake up.

How would you introduce yourself if you were to go somewhere or tell people who you are?

I think the easiest and shortest description would be,

I'm a nun raising joyful resistance.

So I've lived in San Francisco since 1999.

I'm from Toronto.

And actually,

I had a decade of working as a sister in Canada before I came here.

So I've actually been in the order since 1987.

I've held lots of different positions,

Everything from board positions to media positions to mentoring positions.

Because I speak several languages,

I speak English,

French and Spanish.

I'm also real privileged to be connected to sisters working all across the world.

I lived in France for four years.

And even in Paris,

Which has a reputation even in France of being a little uptight,

I always felt very welcomed and very cared for.

As long as you put a good faith effort forth,

You got tons of love back.

But I used to say that the way I really understood French culture is,

When you walk into a shop,

You say bonjour.

And you're saying bonjour to everybody in the shop.

And that's just such a different starting point from this particular culture that we live in here.

And I felt from that moment forward,

It was just a different journey with people.

The truth is like every culture,

Especially if you're a BIPOC person or coming from the Maghreb,

One of the Arab countries in Northern Africa,

You have a different experience of French welcome.

And there's an underbelly to that culture as there is here.

But there are people of good intention who are always working to try to make it better,

Just like there are people on the other side who are resisting change and trying to hold on to some ideal that really was always mythic,

But for them has this powerful meaning.

So those tensions,

I think,

Are very present in France right now.

They're present in Canada.

They're present here in the United States in a very big way.

And I think for those of us working to bring light right now,

Which is the way I see the vocation of a sister,

That's really the defining tension of our age right now.

Are we going to set the intention and put our energies towards creating space for everyone to speak with their authentic voice and be heard and everyone to collaborate on something that's more meaningful,

More supportive,

More embracing for everyone?

Or are we standing in front of the forces of resistance and surrendering,

Surrendering to people who are using power and violence and lies and fear to shrink the space in which we live and exclude more people and exclude more voices and force us to speak in ways that are not honest and genuine?

I've been doing this as a nun for over 40 years.

And the most consistent thing I can say,

Like your story of your friend who had that encounter in San Francisco that changed his life,

The privilege of walking as a sister is you meet people in unexpected ways in unplanned moments.

And you can kind of open up a path right into their heart.

And if you're simply present and listening,

A lot of what you're doing is reflecting back kind of the joy and the passion and the beauty that maybe they're a little timid about or haven't quite recognized or found the words to express.

And that is life changing,

Because so much of the time,

We're walking through encounters where people are asking us to play roles or fit into boxes or do certain things or meet certain expectations.

So I think the kind of wild abandon that comes from meeting someone who looks incredibly odd and definitely doesn't fit into any particular context,

It kind of clicks open a switch and you can do some communication that's pretty profound,

Even if it's in like a millisecond.

And I've had that experience more times than I can count.

It's one of the things that I really feel is a gift of my vocation.

Back in 87,

I was a scrappy 20 something.

I was living in intentional community at the time.

It was called L'Arche.

It was a community that really saw the value of people with a disability and tried to create a safe space in which they could really come into themselves and really shape the culture around us.

It had kind of a Catholic theology behind it.

But by the time I was there,

It was very interfaith and very open.

I was also doing my divinity degree at the University of Toronto and I was very active in the Toronto branch of ACT UP and in queer theater and queer radio.

So I was kind of burning on all engines.

And one of the things I was doing is I was volunteering at the LGBT Historical Society and I was cataloging.

And one morning I happened to be cataloging and I found a box of old photos and clippings.

And it was about all these gay men who dressed up like nuns in Toronto and went out into the streets and performed blessings and did Christmas carols.

And most particularly what caught my attention at the time,

AIDS was really ravaging our community and the main hospital in Toronto that was experiencing that was called the Wellesley.

It was right in the heart of the gay village.

And these sisters,

Self-styled sisters,

Went into the AIDS ward and sat with patients and brought food and brought comfort and did cabaret and made people laugh.

And that was still at a time where even medical professionals were keeping their distance and worried about transmission or there was a lot of shame and stigma around AIDS.

I don't know,

I can't explain it,

But there was something in seeing a picture of these bearded men dressed like nuns that just hit something in me.

And I think at the time,

If you think of what I was doing,

Living in intentional community,

Getting a divinity degree,

Working in queer politics,

Working in radio,

It was this image that said all those things actually go together.

Of course,

The question was like,

Well,

How?

And by that time,

People had sort of lost a sense of who these people were.

They had kind of disappeared.

And since then,

What I learned is they've flowered for a few years.

And then it's a very Canadian story.

They got some negative feedback.

And so they wrote a letter to the community and said,

Should we continue?

And of course,

The cranky people before the Internet,

You still had trolls.

Cranky people said,

No,

You're a scandal.

And they fooled it.

And some of them had passed of AIDS.

Some of them went back to Eastern Canada.

Some of them just got on with their lives.

I found out later I lived four blocks from one of the founders the whole time I was in Toronto,

But nobody knew it.

So I didn't really have any sense of how do you approach these people?

What is this called?

What do you do?

I saw they were called Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,

But I'm like,

What is that?

And I had the good fortune that summer,

I was struggling a bit.

And a friend gave me the keys to his car and said,

You know,

There's this place in Tennessee called a radical fairy sanctuary called Short Mountain.

Go there.

They're having a big gathering for summer solstice.

Go.

You need a break.

So I drove to Tennessee,

Parked the car in this rural field.

And the first person I met was this tiny bearded guy who came out in wellies and a tutu and a dirty T-shirt and said,

Oh,

You're here for the gathering.

Leave your stuff here.

I need help with the goats.

Like,

OK,

I don't know what that means.

But it turned out for the for the time of the gathering,

I ended up staying with this person.

The gathering itself,

If you know the radical fairies at all,

It's a group of kind of gender queer people who really believe that there's another way outside of capitalism and strict gender norms to express your spirituality.

There's a lot of borrowing and taking from other cultures as well as Celtic cultures and spiritualities in the European traditions.

It was just I'd never been to anything like that before.

It just blew me open.

And a couple of days in,

I was talking about what I was doing in Toronto,

And then I got to this thing of how I saw these photos.

And the little guy started stroking his beard and said,

Well,

I need to let you know.

It's great that you found them in Canada.

That was one of the first orders.

But this was started in San Francisco.

I'm one of the founders.

My name is Sister Missionary Position.

Let's talk.

And before the gathering was over,

She'd introduced me to a couple other sisters who were there and around a bonfire for solstice,

I ended up kneeling and professing my first vows as a sister to do good work.

And,

You know,

Mish put a veil on my head.

I took the name Mary Peter,

M-E-R-R-Y,

Peter,

As an homage to the fairies,

You know,

Because a greeting is Mary meet,

Mary part,

Mary meet again.

And I took the name Peter because that was my confirmation name.

But also it was a sort of F-U to the bishop,

Because at the time I took it,

Peter had sort of bested Jesus by,

You know,

Saying crucify me upside down.

I'll go one better.

And always,

Always kind of an inferiority conflict inside his soul.

So I kind of merged those two things.

And the next thing I know,

I've got vows.

I've got a mission to go rebuild the lost convent in Toronto.

And I'm driving back.

I think I got to,

I don't know,

I think it was Windsor where I was crossing the border and it suddenly hit me.

OK,

Nobody told me how to do this.

Like now I've taken vows as a gay nun to go raise joy.

Well,

How the hell do I do that?

There was a tradition in the order of putting on white face like a clown to sort of give people the impression,

Don't take me too seriously.

Then there was the tradition of women wearing what were called habits.

So I thought about mine and I chose a purple color for kind of queerness.

I put a scapular on that piece of cloth you see on a nun.

And I was sequins,

I wove spirals in the colors of all the chakras.

So I thought,

Well,

Really,

My work is about raising energy.

And then I'd always been inspired by French nuns and these nuns in Eastern Canada,

You know,

The big mother patril,

Wimple.

So I had a friend sew a piece of starch cloth to a dancer's hood.

I put that on and then I walked out into the streets of the village one night.

As soon as I got out,

I thought,

I don't have a plan,

But I'll just keep going.

People did not have a memory of the nuns.

They didn't know what this was.

And it was the mid 80s.

So there was a real vibrant drag community in Toronto.

The MCC church had started with Brent Hawks.

There was a lot of political action.

But walking out as a gender fluid nun with those kinds of images,

That was not something people recognized.

So after a few minutes of just kind of walking the main street,

I sat on the steps of a place called the second cup,

Which was Canada's sort of Starbucks back then.

And I just sat down on the steps to take a break.

But those steps were kind of a meeting place,

Like people get their coffee and come out inside.

It was just a block away from some of the streets where the young street workers would work.

So a few minutes after sitting down,

Some of the young street kids start coming up and razzing me pretty hard,

Like reading my beads,

Going,

What is this?

And I sort of explained what I was trying to do.

And they're like,

Oh,

You're a nun.

You should hear my confession.

Oh,

Gosh,

Sister,

Hear my confession,

Like jab,

Jab,

Jab.

So I said,

OK,

OK.

You know,

I guess that's fine.

So these kids started sitting down,

And each one was trying to best the next one,

Like,

Well,

I've got a bigger story and a bigger problem.

And you know what happened,

Kirsten?

It's just a few minutes in.

I just started listening hard to these kids.

And underneath all the bragging and kind of teasing,

What I was hearing was a story of these amazing young people who had suffered so much and ended up in street work,

Most of them unhoused,

Most of them unsafe.

Some of them first-gen Canadian kids.

But there was something in them.

There was just a spark of life.

There was this tenacity.

And what I ended up doing was almost like counseling and just listening.

And then with kind of joking and humor,

I'm like,

Oh,

That's not a sin.

That'll blow off like the fluff from the shoulder of the goddess.

Like give me something better.

Or I started saying,

Go and sin some more.

And I had in my pocket some glitter that I had from putting makeup on my face.

And I decided I would use that at the end and put a little bindi of glitter on their head as kind of an anointing or a blessing.

And I wasn't 100% sure what I was doing at first,

But I thought,

Okay,

This is a very tangible sign.

What I didn't realize is,

Of course,

Then these kids were walking back to the street and all the other kids were like,

What is that on your head?

And the next thing I know,

I had a lineup of street worker kids like standing on the steps coming to talk to this sister.

They called me sister.

You know,

Like the story of the Velveteen Rabbit that always wants to be real.

And it's the love of the boy.

This idea I had in my head of what this meant,

That was the moment it became real.

Did you grow up in a religious household?

You know,

Was your childhood religious?

Was your family religious?

What did that look like?

Sort of.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic family.

So I went to mass.

It was an altar boy.

I received the sacraments.

I think for my mother,

Faith was very important.

I think for my father,

Much less so.

But it was more of a cultural experience.

I went to Catholic school.

You know,

I studied history of the church and all these things.

For a long time,

I thought about becoming a priest and actually pursued that in university.

But I would say for me,

What I understand now was the gifts of that was the sense that there's something more than what you see with a naked eye,

But that you experience those things tangibly,

Physically.

I mean,

The whole sacramental theology is basically,

You can connect to the divine through physical tangible things.

That was a really important thing for me to hold on to.

The other thing was kind of indirect.

So my mother being Irish,

She used to read me all the fairy stories at bedtime.

And now what I understand is she was giving me keys that as I got older,

I could unlock doors and I could go back further.

So from Roman Catholicism to Celtic Christianity to pagan lore,

To fairy spirit.

So in a way,

The other thing that that experience of being in an Irish Catholic household did is it gave me keys to go back and listen to kind of the grandmas and grandpas and start reworking my story,

Connecting to something that was much older.

On that part,

I'm really grateful.

On the other part,

It caused a lot of tension.

And at four,

I knew I was queer.

So from that moment,

I knew there was a issue.

And a lot of people kept putting me back in after I kept coming out.

So that took longer than it needed to to work itself out.

So I don't regret it.

But that was certainly a place of pain.

And it would have been nicer to be in an affirming culture that supported that.

But it also gives me a place where I can walk alongside other people who are experiencing that and understand where they're coming from.

So for the 40th anniversary of the Order,

We gathered people together in San Francisco.

And one of the things we did was we had an outdoor ceremony where members from all over the world came together to create what we call Sister Blessing Mix or Glitter Mix or Fairy Dust.

That was a tradition that was introduced to me from the fairies that I brought into the Order.

And what it is is creating a mix of elements that have something to do with some powerful energy.

So the ashes of sacred fires,

Waters from holy wells,

Flowers that were exchanged in grief or blessing or wedding or death,

The ashes of loved ones,

Sand from holy beaches,

Dirt from sacred places.

So all that stuff gets mixed together.

And for me,

Originally,

Where I just took glitter and put it on people's heads,

Well,

Now we use this mix.

And we've been percolating this for over 20 years.

So people all came together with their elements.

We opened a circle together.

And then I just invited people to come up and add their bit to the mix.

It lasted for over two and a half hours.

And what happened was people came forward.

And it was like one of those tent revivals where people give a testimony.

And that just raises the energy.

And then another person comes forward and tells a story.

And then the energy gets even higher and builds and builds and builds.

And the diversity of things people brought.

One in particular,

First Nations nun came forward and said,

When I was growing up,

My mother was the life of the party and the one everyone on the reservation loved.

But to me,

She was always mean and bitter and criticizing me.

She's passed.

Now what I understand is,

To have so much light to give to others,

She had to have a place to put her shadows.

And unfortunately,

She chose me.

So that got us all.

And what this person said is,

So I'm bringing my mother's ashes.

And I'm going to put them into this mix,

Because what I want from this moment is to claim the same light work that my mother had,

But to release myself from the need to put my shame on anyone else.

And then poured these into the mix,

And like this cloud of dust rose.

All of us were just focused on this,

You know,

And maybe 80 people came forward to do that.

Herbs from their gardens,

Ashes of loved ones,

Pets,

Glitter,

Mixes that had been mixed in Berlin or in Edinburgh or Toronto or Montreal or Mexico or Japan.

And then at the end,

Some beautiful people in our community that we call heroes,

Some of our founders,

Some of the nuns from abroad all came together and with their hands,

Mixed all this in a big mixing bowl,

A washing basin.

And you just could see the energy and the clouds coming from that.

And while we're doing this,

All these little urchins,

These little street kids started gathering.

And so we started handing vials of this to the street kids.

And for me,

That was a full circle moment,

Right?

Because those are the kids that made me real.

Well,

There they were,

And they were like,

Peddling off into the city with this stuff.

And then what we did is we invited everyone to come and take some home.

And so Germans,

Scots,

French,

Swiss,

Italian,

Mexican,

Canadian,

Scooping this stuff up,

And you felt like this energy web just starting to go,

You know,

Ripple outward into the world.

That's a moment of profound magic,

I think,

For me,

I will never forget.

Early on in San Francisco,

We had a bar called the Cafe,

Which was upstairs right off Market Street.

And it was kind of a boy bar,

All the hot guys would go there to dance.

And on a Saturday night,

Sister Gina Tonic and I went out to do what we call bar ministry,

Which is just show up,

Raise money for charity and do glitter blessings.

And we were doing our work.

And then something was calling me to the center of the dance floor.

And I could see on the dance floor,

This real hot young couple,

Thin blonde kid,

His partner,

Dancing wildly.

I thought I need to go there.

So just squeezed my way through the crowd.

And the young man was clearly strung out,

Like definitely on meth.

But I stood there motionless until he finally kind of saw that I was there.

And then whatever was I don't know,

I still to this day don't know what it was.

But I took the glitter and I put it on his forehead.

And I said,

The man you are with is not the man you need.

And we have need of you and you need to wake up.

And he he froze and fell like people do when they're,

You know,

In spirit.

And I picked him up,

Of course,

Because my coach and made sure he was okay.

And then he went back to dancing.

And you know,

I went on my way.

Didn't hear anything.

Two years later,

I was at a fairy gathering in the northwest outside of Seattle.

And a really beautiful drag friend from Vancouver came up and said,

Sister,

Sister,

There's someone here that really wants to meet you.

And like,

Okay,

All right,

Sure,

We'll get together.

And then at the lunch table,

She brought this young person over.

And they said,

Do you remember me?

And I said,

Yeah,

You look really familiar.

He said,

Well,

You saw me at the cafe two years ago,

And you put this stuff on my head.

And I don't remember much.

But I remember in the hotel,

The next morning,

I woke up and I went to the bathroom to pee.

And as I was peeing,

I looked at my face,

And I saw this stuff on my forehead.

And I burst out sobbing.

And then I realized I needed to get out of there.

And so while my boyfriend,

Who was also my pimp,

Was sleeping,

I packed my stuff up,

Got a cab,

And I headed home.

And I went into rehab.

And I'm clean now.

And I'm two years sober.

And I just want you to know what you did.

I think it speaks to the power of simply being present,

And allowing yourself to be a channel for light.

And so for me,

This blessing idea,

You know,

The idea of joy,

I talked to people,

Kirsten,

Joy is different than happiness.

I didn't take a vow to spread happiness.

Because happiness is is ephemeral.

It's fleeting.

You got your paycheck,

You got a new job,

You're dating someone,

You had good luck.

Good sex.

And then a day later,

Something happens and you're miserable again.

Joy for me is a crucible in which you pour every experience,

The happiness,

The tragedy,

The anger,

The frustration,

And you turn up the heat,

Just like an alchemical bowl,

And you fire that up,

And you test it.

And then what's left when that all burns away is this gold,

Powerful,

Strong alloy that you then take out in your life.

And for a nun,

You know,

My vows were to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt through perpetual manifestation.

And what that means to me is I show up every day as a nun,

Whether I'm manifested or what we call in face or in habit,

Or I'm just in my day clothes.

Whether I'm at a public event,

Or in a personal relationship,

I show up,

I try to be authentic.

And I try to make space.

And then if I'm offering my life to joy,

It means I'm offering my life,

All of it.

I'm not a caricature.

I'm not a role.

I'm not role playing.

I'm not hiding.

Everything in me shows up when I'm a nun,

Which means you see my ego,

You see my vulnerability,

You see my insecurity,

As well as my confidence and my strength and my humor.

And seeing that,

And knowing that I can stand in whatever you're throwing at me without judgment in kind of this equanimity,

Like,

You're having a good day,

You're having a bad day,

You're an asshole,

You're lovely.

I'm there,

No judgment,

That creates space.

And hopefully in that space,

You tap into that joy inside you.

When I think about it,

I'm just built towards hope.

I'm oriented towards joy.

And as long as I'm setting the coffee maker,

I know I'm still on that path.

So I'm not going away.

And neither are the people I love,

And neither are the people we love.

And we will be heard.

And we will share the table.

And we will make the world a better place.

Thank you so much for listening to Episode 91 of Bite-Sized Blessings and my conversation with the joyful Sister Mary Peter,

For more information on the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

I'm going to have a link under the episode show notes.

Be sure to check them out.

I'm very positive they'll bring some joy and delight to your day.

I need to thank everyone who's left a rating or written a review.

I'm so very grateful.

Those ratings and reviews help others find us.

And if you haven't yet done so,

You know who I'm talking to.

Consider doing either or both.

But I'm very grateful to those who have already done so.

I need to thank the creators of the music used for this episode,

Frank Schroeder,

Sasha End,

Alexander Nakarada,

Fat Sounds,

And Winnie the Moog.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sizedblessings.

Com.

On the website,

You'll find links to books,

Artists,

Playlists,

And other groovy things I think will lighten and brighten your day.

And can you believe it?

We have reached Season 10.

I can't believe it.

Thank you for joining me along the way and listening to these conversations.

They've certainly brought a lot of joy and happiness into my life.

And so I hope they're doing that with yours as well.

So thank you for listening.

And here's my one request,

Be like Sister Mary Peter.

Spread joy.

Spread delight.

Spread the idea that we can all come together,

Be at the same table,

Include everyone,

And make this world a better,

More joyful place.