Loose Leaf Notes

The following was first published at Floyd Times on March 4, 2026

“Join the Convent and see the world,” is a tagline that Martha Taylor, a former nun and pediatric nurse, has playfully told her friends. Taylor is the author of a new book, The Color of Covering: A Life Changing African Adventure, a 172 page personal memoir that chronicles her life of service and self-discovery, and spans continents and cultures.

Growing up in Indiana as the 3rd child of 8 in a devout Catholic family, Taylor went to Catholic schools. Her mother had joined the convent but left before taking vows. When Taylor was 19 years old, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and joined The Sisters of the Holy Cross, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Life in the convent for Taylor included college classes, church services, silence, obedience tasks and working in the laundry and sewing rooms. Much of Taylor’s convent time was spent cloistered, kept apart from the outside world.  While attending a convent lecture, her superior asked for volunteers to do service work in Africa. To her surprise, Taylor was the only nun to raise her hand, thinking of the devasting reality of “children dying of hunger in Africa.”

Along with world travel, the convent also provided Taylor with an excellent education. After receiving a registered nursing degree from a hospital associated with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Taylor was sent off to a small village in Uganda, which was ruled by the brutal dictator Idi Amin at the time. The book recounts the friendships, the challenges and triumphs Taylor experienced in Uganda and beyond, serving as a pediatric nurse, learning the language of the tribes, feeding the hungry amid a civil war in Lebanon and more.

It was in Uganda where Taylor experienced a trauma that shaped her life, one that has taken years to come to terms and which she processes in the writing of her book.

During her year of service in Uganda, she experienced psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of a doctor she worked with.   His coercive pressure put the children she cared for at risk, as he would not come to the hospital to treat the children if Taylor didn’t meet his demands. The power and age imbalance between Taylor and the doctor led to a lifelong question that she has grappled with, ‘What could I have done?’

Eventually, the situation caused her superiors to send her back to the states, where she dealt with feelings of grief, remorse, and anger at having to leave Uganda after only a year of service there.

Returning to the U.S. and putting her trauma on hold, her service work continued, and she accomplished much. First in California, where she was assigned by her superiors to open a new Pediatrics Department.  She received her master’s degree in nursing at the University of Colorado, where she gave lessons to Hmong refugees from Laos, using their own language to help them navigate the U.S. health care system.  Later, she started a Home Health Agency for the homeless in Washington DC.

Taylor left the convent in 1984. “I wanted to direct my own life and not let others be in charge, but it was hard,” she wrote. She found an apartment outside of D.C., got a job, studied and practiced massage therapy and joined a Singles Social Club, where she met her husband, Lester Gillespie.

They married in 1987 and adventured together, doing home restorations, sailing the Caribbean, walking the Camino de Santiago – a 500 mile pilgrimage through France and Northern Spain that concludes with a shrine to the apostle St. James at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Together they became co-founders of an intentional community in Floyd Va, Abundant Dawn.

“It turns out that this was just the right kind of a community. This is actually what I had wanted originally when I joined a religious community, but I needed a chance to understand that,” she wrote in her book.

After attending an international dream conference in Amsterdam in 2024, Taylor was inspired to look closer at the arc of her life and to write her book. She wrote it with the intention of sharing it with family and friends and for her own healing. “It wrote itself. I’ve been writing it since I came back from Africa,” Taylor said.

She was writing the book, which contains some original poetry and journal entries, as her husband’s health declined, and she finished it after he passed. She tells the story of his decline, his death – which she and his three grown childen lovingly attended– and his home burial. “Tears of grief flow through me and I let them flow,” she wrote in the last chapter of the book, titled “Today.”

Speaking of the book’s title, The Color of Covering, Taylor explained that it refers to “what I covered up, my body, my feelings… and what I covered up with, my black nun’s habit and my white nursing habit and how I kept the story of what happened in Uganda from being told.”

Taylor enjoys dressing in bright colors now. She is still adventuring, still learning, taking classes, leading a dream group and opening to trust whatever comes next. She will be featured at an Author’s Talk and book signing at The Book House on Sunday March 15th at 2:00 pm. Her book is available for purchase at LULU.com ___________Colleen Redman

Photos: 1. Taylor as a Canonical Novice in her original habit before the Church dictated that Nuns dress in plain clothing and wear black veils. 2. Taylor’s book. 3. Taylor at home in Floyd County.