Many of us, upon hearing the word 'nun,' still feel a slight twinge of rejection. Perhaps it's a generational issue. Memories remain of a religious education associated with discipline, imposed silence, and great repression. Experiences varied greatly, of course, but for a long time, the figure of the nun seemed confined to a past that was increasingly distant, almost anachronistic.
However, something has changed. In recent years, nuns have reappeared in unexpected places: in podcasts, essays, films, fashion exhibitions, and even judicial headlines. The cloister, in a way, has become permeable. Or perhaps what has filtered through are not them, but what we project onto them.
The most visible episode has been that of the Poor Clares of Belorado. For weeks, the convent ceased to be an abstract space and became the stage for a conflict followed almost like an episodic series. Nuns defying authority, questioning dogmas, and ultimately confronting the institution to which they belonged. That story held irresistible narrative elements: obedience and rebellion, confinement and rupture, tradition and conflict. But the Belorado case was perhaps just the most visible symptom of something that had been happening for some time: nuns had returned to the cultural imagination.
This was also aided by the delightful reading of Instrucción de novicias. Vidas del convento barroco para guiar tu presente by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita, where they offer us a memorable phrase: 'Anything that has happened to you has already happened to a Baroque nun.' The same conviction guides the highly successful podcast Las hijas de Felipe by the same authors. It has an element of humor and an element of solace, but also much truth. As if someone had recorded, centuries ago, all possible forms of human conflict.
We tend to imagine the convent as a place apart from the world. However, the letters, diaries, and chronicles of many nuns show something quite different. In them, we find ambition, jealousy, rivalries, friendships, frustrations, a desire for recognition, and spiritual doubts. Nothing too different from what we continue to experience today. The convent did not eliminate the human; it concentrated it. Fewer distractions, more thought. Less external world, more inner world.
Perhaps that is why the figure of the nun returns again and again. Not as a life model, but as a cultural figure. It appears in stories, films, songs, and forms of representation that have little to do with religious practice. There is something monastic even in certain contemporary sensibilities: an attention to repetition, to silence, to daily rituals, to the search for meaning.
In Los domingos, for example, the sacred does not intrude: it settles. It is in the dead times, in the repeated gestures, in what is not fully said. There is something monastic in that way of looking, even if no one wears a habit. As if spirituality had abandoned institutions, but not entirely certain ways of attending to the world.
Something similar happens to me with Rosalía. I couldn't explain it entirely. Listening to Lux, I feel something akin to what I imagine in certain contemplative practices: an invitation to withdraw, to pay attention, to look inward. It has nothing to do with religion or nostalgia for the sacred. It has to do with silence. With that momentary suspension of noise that forces one to listen differently.
Fashion, always attentive to cultural shifts, has also participated in this symbolic recovery. The exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, showed in 2018 the extent to which Catholic iconography continues to fuel the contemporary imagination. The habit became a silhouette, the veil a texture, and austerity an aesthetic gesture. Renunciation, paradoxically, began to command a high price.
All this might seem anecdotal if it weren't persistent. The figure of the nun reappears time and again, in very different registers, as if pointing to something our culture has not yet resolved. Perhaps it has to do with fatigue. With the difficulty of sustaining a life saturated with stimuli, options, and noise. Seen from the outside, the convent offers an ambiguous promise: less freedom, but also less noise; fewer options, but perhaps more meaning.
The nuns of Belorado embody, in their own way, a very ancient tension: how far to obey, when to deviate, what to do when the institution no longer aligns with personal experience. They are not a comfortable symbol or a perfect allegory. But perhaps that is why they are so revealing.
Meanwhile, the figure of the nun continues to circulate in our imagination. It no longer guarantees faith or moral authority. But it retains something that is scarce in our time. Intensity? Ecstasy? Perhaps that is why it reappears in a convent in conflict, in a film about domestic silences, in a flamenco pop album, or in a fashion exhibition. The contexts change, but perhaps the same need or longing persists: how to live serenely amidst the noise.
