The nuns leaning into the serious business of fun

The beats breaking down barriers

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Sister Marizele and Sister Marisa.

Summer is for letting your hair down and water pistols. But in an age where we're super-soaked with content online, how did a couple of nuns in Brazil emerge through the saturation? As Sister Marizele sang and beatboxed, Sister Marisa danced on a Brazilian Catholic television show. They've now recorded their song, 'Vocation'.

Even though their online content was more about vocation than vacation, it's attracted huge numbers. “Why did something so simple and spontaneous take on such a huge scale?” asked Sister Marizele, “Because the Holy Spirit wants to touch people’s hearts.” “But besides the Holy Spirit,” she told the New York Times, “there’s also the algorithm.”

The algorithm's clearly helped. One of the nuns' colleagues came back from vacation to keep the content going online. Instead of only a handful of prospective nuns per year, they had over 50 women get in touch in a matter of days to ask about embarking on the life of a nun ahead. The nuns believe that God wants to draw young people to church in a country where church attendance has dropped off a cliff. Perhaps they should seek advice from Whoopi Goldberg, who has given them her blessing as a 'real-life ‘Sister Act’.

They aren't the only ones. Father David Michael is an American Catholic priest on Instagram (sometimes breakdancing) with 1.2 million followers who combines an uncompromising message with a sophisticated understanding of the need to hook people in the first three seconds of a video. This all doesn't paint the the staid picture of the church we expect. The iconoclastic act of beatboxing on TV isn't just breaking down beats, but the image of religion as being fun-averse.

Perhaps there's more to fun than meets the eye. We might misconceive fun as shallow, frivolous and lacking in depth. But you can be both a nun, and fun. Maybe it's not just a case of unexpected possibility, but actually intrinsic to those with vocations in faith.

Yesterday I returned from a crematorium in the front passenger seat of the empty hearse. The driver, along with hilarious stories of funerals gone wrong, also told me about losing his own child ten years ago. 'They say time's a great healer. But it isn't. You don't get over it. You learn to cope with not getting over it.' Those who have suffered and still carry unimaginable pain can know what it is to laugh.

It's a similar depth of fun from the nuns that can speak into pain. Far from a gimmick, their skills haven't just been breaking down beats, but barriers. According to Sister Marizele, they've been "an instrument to become closer and break down barriers" with young women at drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres, where they otherwise had little to connect over.

It might seem an odd segue, but it's striking that Jesus' first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding party. The sheer abundance of the wine signifies the abundance of what's possible when nuns lean into fun: restoration and community for addicts, purpose for people considering their calling, and – simply – joy. Joy for countless millions around the world watching on. Joy, as CS Lewis said, is the serious business of heaven.

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Belief

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Creed

10 March 2025

2 min read

Giles Coren dips his toe in the water - will he take the plunge?

In a disembodied digital age, he's made a decision to participate instead.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A casually dressed man strides down the aisle of a church between the pews.

Danique Godwin on Unsplash

It takes a lot of courage to write about what you don’t know. Newspaper columnists and restaurant critics are paid to be omniscient, and Giles Coren is very good at channeling observation and insight into his articles in an acerbic and amusing way.

He recently wrote in The Times about what he does and doesn’t know about Christianity. He wrote with humility and humour, which amongst other things made me wonder how many of us who are part of the church would do well to be honest about what we don’t know.

The journey that Coren tells about his “not not believing” is staked along the way by the language of the church and its buildings. In other words: worship.

Belle Tindall recently wrote about the prejudice met by Kate in White Lotus when she tells her friends that she finds going to church “very moving.” To them it is “self-defeating”, but perhaps it opens us up the possibility that there is a greater centre of gravity than our own selves. Going to church has been associated with so many unhelpful divisions and distractions and often the church is to blame.

But believers and non-believers alike run the risk of missing out on so much of faith. We limit it to information and observation, when the full benefit is found in participation. Whether pilgrims, prodigals or someone else altogether, we can analyse and stand on the sidelines as much as we want, but Coren and his son are taking part:

“I gave up not going to church some time ago. Most Sundays I am there, praying and singing — another lapsed atheist hoping that the non-existent God he was brought up not to believe in doesn’t see.”

Perhaps this act, and writing about it in The Times, is even braver given our seemingly disembodied, digital, post-pandemic individualistic lives. A podcast may give you propositional truths you can accept or reject, but being caught up in worship is in a different order altogether. Coren writes:

“And I have a sense that God is there — in the tradition, the words, the 2,000 years of conviction, the imagination of all the people who came before me…”

God is the interesting thing about Christianity, and Christians believe that this God became human. Amidst all that we don’t know and don’t see, going to church makes tangible what can feel intangible.

Coren writes that the only moment he feels left out is in Communion, and that perhaps one day he will get baptised. The Greek word where we get ‘baptism’ from means to overwhelm. In an overwhelming world, more and more people are seeing the merit in being overwhelmed with God. If we are to experience this, it means that at some point we need to dive into the water.