ARLA VAN RAAY is tall and imposing, her elegant clothing and bearing giving few clues to her remarkable life as a nun and then a prostitute. When she announces sweetly over a cup of coffee as we discuss her life story, including her 12 years with a genteel order of nuns in Victoria, "oh yes, and then I became a prostitute", the effect is quite unnerving. It makes you instinctively look around you in the coffee shop to see who else has heard. But no one seems to notice the startling revelation from the respectable but still striking 60-year-old.

Van Raay, whose early childhood was spent in a conservatively Catholic region of the Netherlands before her family migrated to Melbourne, has written a book about her experiences. To be published in March next year by HarperCollins, it has the provocative title of God's Call Girl. At the moment she is working on two new small books called Myths of Prostitution and Myths of Religion and is looking for sex workers, past or current, to interview for her research.

There are lots of misconceptions about evil and guilt and wrong assumptions about what's good and bad in society, she says, which need to be sorted out.

Her own story is frighteningly full of guilt and feelings of sin because of the actions of someone else—her father—who, she says, began sexually abusing her at the age of three.

And who, she also says, threatened that if she ever told anyone, especially a priest in confession, he would kill her. She believed that she was the guilty one, and became convinced that she would go to Hell.

In fact, so strong was her belief in her damnation that at the age of six she made a pact with the devil that he would let her live for as long as possible so she could put off the inevitable entry into Hell.

The guilt she felt as a result of her alliance with the devil created dramatic and long-lasting effects. And though it became submerged in her subconscious, it has taken her until the last few years to get over.

"It changed my life," she said in her soft, calm voice. "From being a robust, confident child I became a gibbering mess, very nervous of being noticed.

"Life became a desperate game, of covering it up, of appearing to be a normal person. I was basically an honest person, so this was doubly difficult. I felt a fake."

When she turned 18, not wanting to face life and with a sense of vocation, she decided to enter the convent of the nuns who had taught her in Melbourne, the Faithful Companions of Jesus.

She stayed until she was 30. She was teaching at a school in a Victorian country town when one morning she could "see clearly" that she had to leave the convent.

The nuns had been swept up in the radical changes in religious life instituted by the Second Vatican Council and not all of them were happy about it.

In fact, Van Raay says, she was about the only one who embraced them enthusiastically and was ostracised by the rest of the community.

Her anger at the nuns remained for years after she left them and was the trigger for her first attempt to write a book on her life. "I was so mad, I just wanted to expose them," she says. But gradually she lost the anger and the book instead became a story of healing from sexual abuse.

She married 18 months after she left the convent but, try as she might, she never quite fell in love with her husband, a "good man" whom she much admired.

The couple had a daughter but she fell in love with a 19-year-old man and they embarked on a tempestuous affair which ended her marriage and left her alone with her daughter.

Now living in Perth, she was short of money and desperate for a job but did not want to teach again. "I wanted to explore my sexuality and had lost my religion and the mores of the Catholic Church," she says.

So she embarked on a career as a prostitute, at first working for others to "learn the game". Having established herself on her own, she began working from a house in Floreat, which she shared with another woman she paid to look after her daughter.

"I enjoyed it all tremendously," she says unrepentantly. "My customers were mostly businessmen from the Eastern States. They treated me very well, the house was always full of fiowers. I had a great time."

Her first phase of life on the game ended when her husband talked her into coming back to him. But the marriage failed again when she fell in love with his best friend, by whom she had another daughter.

After five years, this relationship also failed and, taking her first daughter with her, she started out on her own again. "At first I started doing massages, then relief massages and gradually this led back to full-on prostitution again," she said.
But God's call girl?

"Well," she explains, "when I became a call girl, I didn't want to be just an ordinary prostitute. It seemed so sleazy. I needed to be inspired! I found what I was looking for at an art exhibition.

"There was a vase with a Chinese nun shown in coitus with a travelling merchant. They were exchanging their spiritual energies, it was mutually beneficial. That's how I justified it to myself."

That attitude also, she says, saved her from some of the worst things about the trade. But gradually she had to face some of the "nasty aspects of the game".

What was urging her on to follow this sort of life, she said, was a quest for self-understanding.

Happily celibate for the past 12 years, she is now far removed from the sex business. She has also driven out the demons which haunted her, in a long process of healing in which she "tried everything under the sun".

Eventually it all clicked into place when she discovered "the gift of knowing who I really was as a spiritual being". She returned to her native Holland to train in a counselling method called The Work which "took away my last vestige of shame".

Now she counsels others, gives talks about her life and views, and continues writing. She looks back on her eventful life and reflects that "it's been a long way to get to know myself, to find out who I was not".

As for prostitution, she has no inclination to get involved in any way again. But she believes it is a much-needed service. "Prostitutes," she says, "should be respected in our community instead of being hounded and humiliated."

Published in The West Australian Weekendextra Saturday August 2 2003 p7