Former nun Daya Norwood started painting three years ago when she enrolled in a class called “Intuitive Painting.” Ironically, the class also precipitated Norwood’s conversion to Judaism.
Students worked in tempera “so you won’t think about it. You just do it, fast,” she said.
Soon after, “paintings just started coming out of me — paintings with Jewish themes,” she realized. “I would be up painting late into the night, which is not typical for me. Then I got a really strong hit like I should go to High Holy Days services. It was not at all from my logical brain.”
Norwood, a 60-year-old Oakland resident, will exhibit her paintings in the weeklong Jewish Arts Renaissance, which opens Sunday, Nov. 14. The event is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay and the Jewish Arts Community of the Bay, or JACOB.
She has previously shown her work at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and the Berkeley Richmond JCC.
Norwood eventually made her way to Kehilla Community Synagogue, a Renewal congregation in Berkeley, where she began to practice as a Jew.
“I said, ‘My goodness, I’m not a nun anymore! I could become Jewish,” said Norwood, who left her convent 20 years ago.
Norwood’s interest in Judaism was not new, however.
“I wanted to be Jewish for a long time,” Norwood said. “I was always attracted to the religion. I went to church services as a child with a friend, and when they’d talk about Jesus, I felt that was my tribe and he was of my tribe.”
As a child growing up in Hawaii, “I’d never met any Jewish people in my daily life,” she said. “They were a people of the Old Testament. Then, when we moved to California, I started meeting a lot of Jewish people. It was very exciting.”
In high school, Norwood, the daughter of lapsed Lutherans, would go on her own to synagogue.
But Norwood’s precocious spirituality also drew her to Catholicism. Although she felt no division of the heart, both time and place would command she choose one master — or, at least, one at a time.
“I said, ‘Oh dear me! I want to be Jewish but I also want to be a nun! Whatever shall I do?'”
From reading about Orthodox Judaism, Norwood knew that to become Jewish, she would have to renounce some of her beliefs, which she felt she couldn’t do.
“I just decided I would continue to be Jewish in my heart,” she said.
She had plenty of company: She would gather with other sisters in the convent to hold Passover seders.
“And we’d always pass books around — Sholem Aleichem, Elie Wiesel. Lots of nuns are very interested in Judaism.”
Now the spiritual seeker is getting into meditation.
“That totally feels right,” she said. “It’s all coming together.”
Convent life was not so different from an Orthodox Jewish life, she said. It’s a disciplined and deeply spiritual.
Her decision to become a nun was not one that her parents greeted favorably. Norwood’s mother, “who was very artistic,” was raised on a farm in North Dakota and rebelled against her strict Lutheran upbringing.
Her mother reacted again when Norwood began visiting Catholic services with a childhood friend.
“One day, she went into my closet, and under all my dirty clothes and my shoes there was a book on becoming a nun. She said, ‘You’re not becoming a nun!’ and I hollered back, ‘I am becoming a nun!'”
Norwood now says she’s grateful her mother pushed her to go to college before making a decision. But soon after graduating at age 23, she entered the convent.
“After a while, she accepted it,” Norwood said. “She would come and visit, and stay over. And in 16 years that I was in the convent, things loosened up. Like, we didn’t wear habits anymore.”
Ironically, San Francisco’s Sisters of the Presentation School, which Norwood entered in 1962 to prepare for convent life is now the Gershwin Theatre.
Norwood left the convent in 1979, saying that she grew away from living the structured religious life, although not entirely. She now earns a living by caring for the elderly in their homes.
She is excited about attending a convent reunion next year, which will include many who left and many who stayed.
“I still say ‘we,'” she says of the world she left.
As a person who identifies with two religious worlds, Norwood says she cares deeply about the rift between them.
“I would like to see some healing, a lot of healing.”
She said if her life has a message, it’s “follow your heart.”
“That’s been my biggest thing,” she said. “I felt I had to ask myself, ‘Are you Catholic or are you Jewish? They both come together in me. I follow my heart.”