Deepak Chopra - The 13th Disciple: A Spiritual Adventure

THE 13TH DISCIPLE: A Spiritual Adventure. Copyright 2015 by Deepak K. Chopra and Rita Chopra Family Trust. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 9780062241306

EPub Edition February 2015 ISBN 9780062241320

15 16 17 18 19 RRD(H) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

It was a morning without sunrise, frigid and overcast, during the weeks leading up to Christmas. Mare was just heading out to work when her cell phone jingled. Her mother was calling.

Sister Margaret Thomas just died.

Who? The question came out as a garbled mumble. Mare was washing down the last bite of a raspberry Pop-Tart with the dregs of her instant coffee. The last few crystals left dark smears at the bottom of the cup.

Her mother replied impatiently, Your Aunt Meg, the nun. Im very upset.

There was silence on the line for a moment. Mares aunt had been out of the picture for a long time.

Mare, are you there? Not waiting for an answer, her mother went on. The convent wont tell me how she died. They just said shes gone. Gone? Meg was barely fifty. I need you to go out there for me.

Why cant you go?

Mare resented her mother for various reasons. One was the fact that she never ran out of demands, most of them trivial and meaningless. Making a demand was like tugging an invisible apron string.

The voice on the phone turned wheedling. You know Im afraid of nuns.

Meg was your sister.

Dont be silly. Its the other nuns Im afraid of. Theyre like scary penguins. Sign something so they can release the body. Were all she hashad. Her mother started crying softly. Bring my dear sister home. Can you do that?

Because no one had spoken of Aunt Meg in years, dear sister sounded a little insincere. But the job Mare was heading for was temp work, easy to call in sick for.

Ill do what I can, she said.

Soon she was driving west on the turnpike, half listening to a James Taylor album that came out twenty years ago, about the time her rattling Honda Civic was born. The Great Recession had stalled a career that Mare hadnt actually chosen yet. Like others in her generation, she was drifting, worrying from month to month that she might have to move back in with her parents. That would mean choosing between them. Her mother stayed in the old house after the divorce. Her father relocated to Pittsburgh with his new wife and remembered to call on Christmas and birthdays, usually.

She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, noticing a scarlet smudge where shed been careless with her lipstick. Why did she think nuns would want her to wear makeup?

Before she ran off to the convent, Aunt Meg used to wear the most stunning shade of lipstick, a dark burgundy red; it contrasted with her pale Irish skin like a drop of wine on a linen tablecloth. There was no question Meg was a looker. She had high cheekbones and that elegant McGeary nose, their proudest feature. She hadnt turned into an old maid for any particular reason. (Meg liked the term old maid, because it was so outdated and politically incorrect.) Men had vaguely drifted in and out of her life. Ive had my chances, dont you worry, she said tartly. She even frequented singles bars in the day. Nasty places, Meg said. Soul killing.

Nobody remembered her as being especially religious, so it had come as a surprise, and not the pleasant kind, when Aunt Meg suddenly announced, at the ripe age of forty, that she was becoming a nun. She had had enough of her family role as the oldest unmarried sister, being on call to babysit, expected to shop and tend house whenever somebody fell sick, listening to nieces gossiping about their boyfriends before suddenly drawing up short and saying, with embarrassment, Im sorry, Aunt Meg. We can talk about something else.

It made the family feel guilty when she announced that she had asked to train as a novice. There was a nagging sense of What did we do wrong? Mares grandmother had died of stomach cancer two years before. If her grandmother had ever held strong religious convictions, months of excruciating pain wiped them away. She didnt ask for Father Riley at the end, but she didnt resist when he showed up at her sickroom. Doped up on morphine, she was barely aware of the wafer and the wine as he lifted her head off the pillow for the Eucharist. Nobody knew whether to be glad that Gran hadnt lived to see the day a McGeary girl took the veil.

Mares grandfather was adrift in lonely grief after his wife died, retreating into his house and keeping the lights off well past sunset. He mowed the front lawn every Saturday, but the weeds in the backyard grew rank and tall, like a cursed woods guarding a castle of sorrows. When Meg knocked at the door and told him she was entering the convent, he became more animated than he had been in months.

Dont give yourself away. Youre still good-looking, Meg. Lots of men would be proud to have you.

Dont be such a fool, Meg retorted, blushing. She kissed him on the top of the head. But thank you.

In the end, she shocked everyone by simply disappearing one night to join a strict Carmelite order that was completely cloistered. She wasnt going to be one of those modern nuns who wore street clothes and picked up some arugula at the supermarket. Once the doors of the convent shut behind her, Meg was never seen again. She left her apartment untouched, the furniture all in place, waiting patiently for a return that would never occur. Her dresses hung neatly in the closet, giving off the forlorn air of things turned useless.

Mare was eighteen when her aunt pulled this vanishing act. The flight into Egypt, her mother called it, sounding bitter and neglected. Not one real good-bye.

Being a big family didnt protect them from feeling the hole where Meg once had been. It seemed vaguely sinister that she never wrote or called for ten years. They hadnt heard anything until Mares mother received the news that Sister Margaret Thomas, the ghost of someone they had known, was gone.

The convent was remote and not listed in the phone book, but GPS knew where to find it. Turn left in three hundred yards, the voice advised. Mare took the turnoff; after another half mile through some overgrown woodland of pine and birch she slowed down. The convent grounds were protected by a high wrought-iron fence. The road ended at a gate flanked by a deserted sentry box. There was a rusty squawk box for visitors to announce themselves on.

Mare felt the awkwardness of her situation. How do you say youre here for a body? She raised her voice, as if the squawk box might be deaf.

Im here for Sister Margaret Thomas. Im her niece.