Alma Mater
Run 3: 26th-29th March 2026
Margery
a Nun
Age:
30s
Psalm 2: Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
Themes:
Visions, voices and mystical experience; being an outsider
When you were young, you watched the Whitwood nuns passing by the Olney manor house on holy days. You never thought you would become one of them: your mother and father were servants. Indeed people of your low birth aren’t expected to have any imagination at all. But God had other plans for your life. When you were still a child, the Sweating Sickness came to the village. Your family all went quickly to God, but despite two days of high fever, you survived.
Those days of fever were filled with visions of the baby Jesus Christ, St Margaret, and the blessed Alma Mater; familiar faces to you from their portraits on the church rood screen. They came to you with words of love and encouragement, and said you would recover and live a special and blessed life. They have remained your occasional companions in life since then.
At first, life after recovery was difficult, for you were now an orphan, young, and still too early in your recovery to be a useful worker. You relied on the charity of your parish alms. The village and the local priest gave you food and some money, but life was very hard. Then you began to have more visions - visions of prosperity or disaster for people in the village and for the wider world. Many of these seemed to come true, and slowly you gained a reputation that brought a few people from surrounding villages to come and hear your holy words. Some of those people brought gifts. With the assistance of the parish priest, you managed to buy a place as a novice at Whitwood Abbey.
Role:
Where they hold no named role within the community, the first and greatest role of the nuns is to pray and sing the psalms. Beyond this, they are required simply to be holy in their behaviour and to keep the Rule.
You however are proud to be a little more. Often, your closeness to God appears to draw others to you; both sisters in the Abbey and pilgrims from without. You do your best to help them, to show them how to be better and what God wants of them. Sometimes, this advice must be harsh or unwelcome, but other times you are relieved to find Alma Mater is able to offer reassurance instead. But always, your counsel is guided by His Will, and it is for the listener to find a way to hear it with humility.
Connections:
Ursula a nun
Ursula joined the Abbey a few years after you did. She had been having visions just like you do. She was scabby, lousy and very thin back when she arrived, and she was placed in your care to look after her. You did your very best and the two of you have been a pair ever since. Ursula hasn’t had visions since she got here, and she can’t hear the voices even when you point them out to her. You think that Alma Mater is probably shielding her from this burden because she had clearly been suffering a lot with it in those days. Ursula usually asks you to stop when you say this. You do your best to look after Ursula and make sure she is happier now.
You once overheard another nun speaking about how much “Ursula resents looking after Margery”. You think they were confused, because it is you who look after Ursula, and you don’t resent it at all.
Secrets:
You aren’t good at keeping secrets. You confess all your sins to the parish priest each week, or sometimes directly to the baby Jesus himself if he’s available.