Sister Mary David Totah
Benedictine nun who inspired many young novices with her teaching on the joy of the enclosed life
SISTER MARY DAVID TOTAH, who has died aged 60, gave up a lively social life and promising academic career to join the Benedictine community of St Cecilia’s Abbey at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where she was made Prioress and Novice Mistress and where her joy-filled approach to the consecrated life inspired a stream of applications from young women eager to test their vocations.
She remembered her own first visit to the enclosed monastery of St Cecilia’s, on a retreat in her late twenties, as “love at first sight”. She felt drawn “like a magnet” not only to the transcendent beauty of the Latin liturgy sung in Gregorian chant, but also to the beauty of community, “living together with profound respect, courtesy, affection and joy”.
She was born Michele Frieda Totah on March 26 1957 in Philadelphia, but brought up in Louisiana. A younger sister, Monelle, was born four years later. Her parents, Michael and Mary, were Catholic Arabs from Ramallah, just outside Bethlehem, who had emigrated to the US in the 1950s. Michael was an award-winning chef; Mary did the books. Neither of them had been to university but they happily encouraged their daughter’s academic ambitions.
Michele was an exceptionally vivacious and positive personality – an accomplished tennis player and skier, elected the first female president of her high school and voted “most likely to succeed”. Years later, an abbot who encountered her described her as a “little stick of dynamite”. She read English Literature at Loyola University, New Orleans, and completed an MA at the University of Virginia, before coming to England for graduate studies at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1980, where she was part of the first year of women undergraduates at the college.
At Oxford she worked on a Dphil on Modernist literature as well as enjoying a wide circle of friends, punting, parties and rowing in the college women’s first Eight. She attended daily Mass at the Catholic Chaplaincy and felt a deepening vocation.
Back in America, she took up a post as assistant professor of English Literature at William and Mary, and completed her thesis. Returning to Oxford for a supervision in 1984, she went on retreat to St Cecilia’s on the Isle of Wight. “I cannot forget that beauty,” she would say to her friends.
She resolved to enter the novitiate. Arriving at Heathrow passport control in 1985 she was asked how long she planned to stay in the country. She replied: “Forever, I hope.” (“Love is like that,” she later explained.) The grief she knew her decision would cause to her parents was the first great trial of her vocation, though in time they came to love the abbey deeply.
Michele Totah entered St Cecilia’s on May 31 1985, receiving the habit the following year and with it the name Mary David, after David, king of Israel and psalmist. She made her Solemn Profession in 1991, taking for her motto zelus domus tuae, “the zeal of thy house”, from Psalm 69.
In the monastery she worked in the vegetable garden, kitchen and altar-bread bakery; in the Abbey’s art studio she learned calligraphy and illumination, becoming one of the abbey’s most gifted artists.
She was appointed zelatrix (assistant novice mistress) in 1991 and then Novice Mistress in 1996. The flourishing of the novitiate at St Cecilia’s under the influence of her loving guidance and rigorous teaching was a source of marvel to other religious communities.
Nine young women went on to make Solemn Profession; four more are in formation, having received their initial instruction from her. She turned to the ancient sources, to the Desert Fathers, to St Bernard and the founding figures of the Benedictine Congregation of Solesmes to which St Cecilia’s belongs – Dom Guéranger, Dom Delatte and Abbess Bruyère – to convey to her pupils the essence of monastic life. She would play frisbee with the novices, go toboganning in the snow and inspire and participate in their amateur dramatics; her lessons on Scripture and the Rule of St Benedict were a wonderful combination of scholarship and practical application.
Sister Mary David was behind the Abbey’s decision to connect with the outside world in 2000 with a website for which she wrote a daily commentary on the Rule of St Benedict, and with the Abbess’s approval she invited The Daily Telegraph in 2000 to interview young novices.
Meanwhile, she applied her considerable literary gifts to editing the Abbey’s twice-yearly chronicle and to producing books and articles, including, for the Catholic Truth Society, Confirmation (2004),
Deepening Prayer (2006), Christian
Fasting (2012) and A Divine Gift: the
Consecrated Life (2014).
She contributed a chapter to a study of the history of enclosure for nuns, La Clôture, published in English as
Walled About With God (2005). She maintained that far from being a form of female oppression, enclosure was an ancient and indispensable element in the monastic lives of both sexes, which from the start had been seen as a privileged form of living the contemplative life for women.
She also compiled and translated an anthology of spiritual writings from the Solesmes Benedictine tradition in
The Spirit of Solesmes (1997) and wrote the history of St Cecilia’s Abbey, In the
Heart of Christ (2010). Her final publication was a booklet to accompany In Manus Tuas, a CD of the sisters singing Compline, the night prayer of the Church with its poetic reflection on sleep and death.
In 2009 the Mother Abbess appointed Sister Mary David as Prioress or second in command.
Cancer was diagnosed in 2012 but even in her final two months, in the abbey’s infirmary, she continued to inspire others with her simplicity, love and joy, teaching the novitiate until two weeks before her death. One of the sisters said: “She no longer needs to teach us. Her life itself is our lesson.”
Sister Mary David is survived by her mother and sister and by her 30 Benedictine sisters at St Cecilia’s.
Sister Mary David Totah, born March 26 1957, died August 28 2017