How forbidden love conquered all in a Preston pub for Sister Mary Elizabeth and Friar Robert

Sister Mary Elizabeth and Friar Robert both left the strict Roman Catholic Carmelite Order to be together and are now a happily married couple.

In a remarkable interview with the BBC, aired yesterday, they have revealed how they felt a powerful spark when they accidentally brushed sleeves after meeting for the first time at the convent on St Vincent's Road in Fulwood.

Within a week Friar Robert had asked Sister Mary Elizabeth to leave the order and marry him. Their second meeting came at the Black Bull pub in Fulwood and from that moment they realised they needed to be together.

Today, seven years on, they confess they do not regret their decision to turn their backs on the monastic life in search of marital happiness. Polish-born Robert is now a Church of England Vicar in North Yorkshire and Mary Elizabeth - whose birth name was Lisa Tinkler from Middlesbrough - works as a hospital chaplain.

Remembering that first meeting in the parlour of the convent, Lisa recalled Robert had been visiting from his base in Oxford and the two were having tea with the prioress. The couple were left alone when her superior was called away to answer a phone call.

"It was our first time in a room together," she told BBC Radio 4's programme Beyond Belief . "We sat at a table as he ate, and the prioress didn't come back so I had to let him out." As she did she accidentally brushed his sleeve and admitted she felt "something of a jolt. I just felt a chemistry there, something, and I was a bit embarrassed. And I thought, gosh, did he feel that too. And as I let him out the door it was quite awkward.

"I was a little bit shocked. I wore a veil so he never even saw my hair colour. He knew nothing about me really, nothing about my upbringing. He didn't even know my worldly name.”

Robert got a similar buzz, admitting: "That touch of Lisa's on my sleeve started a change, but while I felt something gradually growing in my heart, I don't think I ever reached a point where I felt I was crazily falling in love, because in becoming a monk or a nun they teach you how to deal with emotions like love."

Lisa, who had spent 24 years as a nun, joining at the age of 19, lived at the convent in Fulwood. She had an austere and mostly silent life and admitted she felt her vocabulary diminishing as the years went on because she had little else to talk about to the other sisters who were much older than the weather and the garden.

"I lived like a hermit," she said. "We had two recreation times a day, about half an hour, when we could speak, otherwise you were on your own in your cell. You never worked with anybody, always on your own,

"I didn't know what it feels like to be in love and I thought the sisters could see it in my face. So I became quite nervous. I could feel the change in me and that scared me."

When she eventually plucked up courage to confess her feelings to her prioress she was greeted with shock and disbelief. "She couldn't understand how it had happened because we were in there 24/7 under her watch all the time. She asked how I could have fallen in love with so little contact.

"The prioress was little bit snappy with me, so I put my pants and a toothbrush in a bag and I walked out, and I never went back as Sister Mary Elizabeth."

Robert was in Preston again meeting a Carmelite friend at the Black Bull in Garstang Road. He had messaged her to say he would be there and so Lisa decided to walk up to the pub in the pouring rain, without a coat and dressed just in her habit. "When I saw her my heart stopped," he said. "But actually I was paralysed by fear, not by joy, because I knew in that moment that I had to be entirely for Lisa, but I also knew we were not practically ready for that."

The couple admit they are still on a journey to adjust after so many years living a monastic life. Lisa told the BBC programme that if it was not for Robert, she would return to being a Carmelite nun tomorrow. And they both admit there are three in the marriage, with Christ at the centre.

"We became so used to the silence and the solitude, that's hard to find in the business of the world, you get pulled in so many different directions, so it's a constant struggle for me and Robert to remain centred and grounded,” said Lisa.

"I often think I live in a monastery here with Robert, like two Carmelites where everything we do is given to God. We anchor ourselves in prayer, but love can make a sacrament of everything you do and I realise nothing has really changed for me. Christ is at the centre and comes before everything. If we were to take him out of the equation, I think it wouldn't have lasted really."

Radio 4's Beyond Belief series is available on BBC Sounds.