This post will be is a ramble—no fixed destination, simply one thing reminding me of another and another. I begin with the death last week of Daniel Ellsberg, 92, former military analyst and whistleblower. Troubled by the Vietnam War and what he knew were massive government lies, Ellsberg secretly copied thousands of pages of what became known as the Pentagon Papers and released them to newspapers.

I certainly remember well enough the news in those years about anti-war protests and Ellsberg’s name and notoriety as part of the chain that led to Watergate and eventual U.S. withdrawal, in defeat, from Vietnam. I experienced a tiny protest event of my own at the Bible school I attended when I criticized an American missionary who had championed the war from the pulpit during chapel, and was angrily criticized in turn by some loyal American students standing with me in the line for lunch.

Generally, however, U.S. news and the release of the Pentagon Papers seemed a long way from the basement room I occupied in Calgary in June, 1971 when the New York Times began publishing excerpts, a truly long way indeed from the boring summer job I had for the City, mainly, as I recall, outlining in colour on a large city map the streets that the men in their street cleaning machines had cleaned during their last shift. I also remember that a couple of the women in the office took me along to a mall during our noon break one day and urged me to buy the dressy hot pants outfit I tried on, hot pants being all the rage that season. At that stage of my life I still had the legs for hot pants, but on account of my upbringing did not have the freedom and inclination, so while it was fun to model I demurred to purchase.

I was alerted to Daniel Ellsberg again this past year by occasional mention of him by in the book Dearest Sister Wendy…, which consists of letters exchanged between Daniel’s son Robert Ellsberg, publisher at Orbis Books, and cloistered nun Sister Wendy Beckett, whom I had come to admire from the BBC documentaries on art she did back in the 1990s. She would stride into art museums with her black habit billowing behind her, about as far from hot pants fashion as you can imagine, bringing love and insight and utter lack of pretension to all she saw. (These can be viewed on YouTube.) Hers was a brief and unlikely fame, and come to think of it, in that unlikeliness, she was very similar to Daniel Ellsberg, who a friend of his called “one of those accidental characters of history who show the pattern of a whole era.” (Read an interview with Robert about his father here.)

There’s a wonderful painting of Sister Wendy on my “mantel” (over a television, not fireplace), painted by my artist friend Melody Goetz. I’m finding that hardly anyone who sees the painting has heard of Sister Wendy, but she’s been an inspiration to me through the documentaries and also her books about art and now this recent book of letters, compiled by Robert. Her cloistered world was small, yet large in its generosity and assurance of God’s love for and within people. As, for example — opening the book at random — in these sentences in response to his frustration over the then-president:

…dear Robert. Perhaps you should put Mr. Trump on the altar and sacrifice all your reactions to him. Where does it get you? He needs love as does everybody…. God despises nothing “that he has made.” 

My friend Melody is a great admirer of Sister Wendy as well, hence the many hours she spent on this fine rendering of the nun, posed against a heavy door where she waits, slightly bowed, hands at rest, for Mass. When I saw it I said if it were ever available for sale, I’d be in line for it, and then one day, she felt it was ready to leave her house, and now Sister Wendy presides in mine. I’m drawn to her prayerful composure, to her enviable peace about aging, to her hands. And I’m reminded of the hands of my great-grandmother, Katharina Mandtler Derksen, who led a very different life than Sister Wendy (a difficult marriage, and birthing 11 children with only three surviving to adulthood) but exhibited, according to my mother’s recollections as a child, a similar calm and praying presence in their home in the last years before her death.