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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Life in a cloistered Carmelite monastery in a rural

area in the north of England was almost the

opposite of the life my guess Catherine Coldstream had lived before that.

She'd grown up in London and had lived in Paris where she studied composition, worked in experimental

music, and performed on viola. At the age of 24, 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.

This new life seemed transcendent, but eventually she chafed against the obedience and the feeling that her artistic background, her intellectualism, and her questioning, the whole reality of her outlook and personality were rejected.

She ran away, returned, and two years later went through

official channels and left for good. After leaving the monastery, she studied

theology at Oxford University. She's written a new memoir called Cloistered, my years as a nun.

Catherine Colstream, welcome to Fresh Air.

Your book is so beautifully written, it's hard to imagine you deprived of spoken

words for ten years I know you had a half hour each day where you're allowed to speak

but what was it like for you to not speak?

Well, it's a really strange thing because we, we, when I see we, the Carmelite order, is often described as a silent order.

And of course, there's a huge amount of silence in the daily life but if you

look at it another way words are absolutely woven through the texture of your life because you

are either chanting or reading or meditating on the Psalms for

...