If Sister Nijole can be happy, so can you

In the past five years I’ve met many people who’ve had direct, sometimes horrific, experience of communist rule. But I was more excited about doing a recent interview than I had been about any of the previous ones. It was going to be with a nun in a convent in Lithuania.

I had imagined the scene: we would enter a large, gloomy, medieval stone convent. We would be cautiously admitted into a cavernous hallway and then ushered by a silent nun into a small, bare room for visitors. Then, dressed in black nun’s garb, Sister Nijolė Sadūnaitė would enter the room, head bowed, and sit in a plain wooden chair, her face lit only by a candle. 

When the day arrived we drove out of Vilnius but then, to my horror, the taxi pulled up in the drive of an ordinary suburban house. We went up some steps and found ourselves in a brightly lit hallway with apricot walls and not a gloomy medieval stone in sight.