As he puts it, Peter Manseau grew up in a “fairly average, two-story suburban house with a yard out back and a driveway out front.” It was a cookie-cutter neighborhood in the Boston suburbs with kids galore and little traffic, where escaped gerbils were chased by the family cat and the fondest memories were of time spent in front of the fireplace.

Peter Manseau will read from his book "Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son" on Nov. 15 at the Pannell Gallery.
Manseau, now an author, essayist and radio commentator, was a typical child of the 70s and 80s – except his parents had each taken a vow of celibacy. “I always knew we were different somehow,” Manseau said. “I knew my parents had been something parents were not supposed to be.”

At 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 15, Manseau will read from his memoir, “Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son” at the Pannell Gallery at Sweet Briar College. The event is open to the public and admission is free. The reading is the final event of the SBC fall writers series.

William and Mary Manseau met in the late 1960s at a store-front church in riot-torn Roxbury, where he was ministering to anyone who would listen. In this makeshift sanctuary, shards of glass from a vandal’s attack were embedded in the carpet, folding chairs served as pews, and the Rev. William Manseau, a Roman Catholic priest, fell in love with Sister Thomas Patrick, a teaching sister.

“When my father describes the room in which he met my mother, he is always sure to mention the biblical murals that decorated the walls,” Manseau writes in the prologue of his book. “I suppose he likes the image of the two of them surrounded by life-size portraits of prophets and saints, but my mind is drawn instead to all that stubborn glass, to tiny slivers working their way deep into a shag carpet, catching light whenever the overhead fluorescents were on.”

Indeed, the early days of their marriage were hardly idyllic. At a time when good Catholic families were expected to send a child to the seminary or convent, priests and nuns didn’t trade in their collars and habits for wedding rings. Scathing messages arrived in the mail, and his father – who, to this day, has refused to resign his ordination to the priesthood – was censured by the Archdiocese of Boston.

“In 1969, when they married, it was an unimaginable changing of social roles for a priest and a nun to fall in love and start a family,” Manseau said. “Today, social roles are much more fluid, and people on the whole are less easily shocked. I doubt it would have been news at all, and I'm sure they would not have received hate mail.”

Nearly 40 years later, Manseau is a father himself. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, D.C., where he is writing the fictional memoir of the last Yiddish poet in America. Although not a practicing Catholic, he plans to share some of what he’s learned with his daughter, particularly as it pertains to life’s big mysteries.

“What the Church does well, I think, is tell compelling stories about things that are ultimately unknowable,” he said. “It deals in big, basic questions: Where do we come from? Why are we here? What is our connection to whatever it is that is responsible for everything we experience?

“I don’t feel these are childish questions, but they are questions that, if we’re lucky, we learn to ask during childhood. What religion does is provide a vocabulary for wondering about these things. While I don’t share my parents’ beliefs, I am grateful to them for passing down to me a sense of the importance of asking big questions.”

Manseau also believes his book, while originally intended to be the “story of a few interesting lives,” contains a message for readers about life and faith: “The message is that a life of faith is not a life of certainty, but uncertainty – uncertainty in its most positive sense, in the sense of a life full of mystery and possibility.”

Manseau is also co-author of “Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible” and the editor of the Web site www.killingthebuddha.com . He studied religion and literature at the University of Massachusetts and did graduate work in religion and literature at Boston University.

For more information, contact Chris Hallman, SBC writer-in-residence, at challman@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6181.

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer