Hallelujah! They found love while serving the Lord.
An English nun who remained celibate for 24 years broke her streak, walking away from her convent — and into the arms of a monk.
Sister Mary Elizabeth — who was in an ancient order of the Roman Catholic church called the Carmelite order — had been a nun for more than two decades in Lancashire when she met Carmelite monk Robert in 2015 while he was visiting from a monastery in Oxford.
Sister Mary Elizabeth, born Lisa Tinkler, told the BBC she knew they had something special from the moment Robert’s sleeve touched hers as she let him out the door, recalling “feeling a jolt.”
“I just felt a chemistry there, something, and I was a bit embarrassed,” Tinkler told the BBC. “And I thought, ‘Gosh, did he feel that, too?’ And as I let him out the door it was quite awkward.”
But it seems Robert was also affected by the fleeting moment, though he was uncertain what it meant.
“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,” Robert said.
Tinkler entered the order at 19, which saw her living like a “hermit.” She remained in her “cell” all day, except for two daily, half-hour recreation sessions, during which the nuns were allowed to speak to each other.
“You never worked with anybody, always on your own,” she said, adding she didn’t have much to talk about with fellow nuns, who her were all decades older.
She also only saw her mom four times a year and experienced many major life events through a grille at the convent.
“When I had my 21st birthday, my cake and my cards were all passed through the drawer,” she recalled. “And when my nephew was born he was passed through a kind of turntable.”
However, a week after meeting Robert — who was 53 at that point and had been a monk for 13 years — he wrote to Tinkler and asked her to marry him, despite never even seeing her properly or knowing her full birth name.
“I wore a veil, so he never even saw my hair color,” Tinkler revealed, adding she was “a little bit shocked” when he asked for her hand in marriage. “He knew nothing about me, really, nothing about my upbringing. He didn’t even know my worldly name.”
‘I didn’t know what it feels like to be in love.’
Although Tinkler admitted she didn’t know what it felt like to be in love, she was “scared” of how she felt.
“I didn’t know what it feels like to be in love and I thought the sisters could see it in my face,” she recalled. “So I became quite nervous. I could feel the change in me and that scared me.”
Tinkler wound up confessing her feelings to her order’s head nun, who was dumbfounded by the admission — and pushed Tinkler to make her final move.
“The prioress was [a] little bit snappy with me, so I put my pants and a toothbrush in a bag and I walked out, and I never went back as Sister Mary Elizabeth,” Tinkler recounted.
The couple then met at a nearby pub.
“When I saw her, my heart stopped,” Robert told the BBC, adding that he was “paralyzed by fear.” Although scared of what their future held — not to mention navigating their lives outside of the monastery — they “held hands” and “got through it.”
“When she appeared at the pub, the little demon in me was terrified,” Robert admitted. “But my fear was not religious or spiritual, it was purely about how I would start a new life at the age of 53.”
After some days together, Tinkler recalled, “I looked at Robert and he was distressed and crying. At that moment we both hit rock bottom and it felt like we should just take something like Romeo and Juliet and just end it.”
However, that parting would have been too much of a sweet sorrow, it seemed.
“It was so hard because he both felt so alone and so isolated and didn’t know the way forward,” she explained. “But we just held hands and we got through it.”
According to the BBC, the couple is now happily married and lives in the village of Hutton Rudby, North Yorkshire, where Robert is the local vicar and Tinkler a hospital chaplain.
