Contemplative Nuns Called to Community

Living the Life: 
Romanticism vs.
On-going Conversion 

Recently there was some interesting discussion on one of my favorite websites, A Nun’s Life. Two IHMs (Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, MI), Sisters Julie and Maxine are hosts for regular podcasts, fielding all sorts of questions posed by those considering a vocation in religious life. They respond with a unique combination of humor, wisdom and experience. During a podcast (7pm daily EST) a question was asked which I will reword from memory. “I see a lot of vocation websites put up by communities and other kinds of publicity for congregations and all the faces are smiling and the message is given that religious life is a lot of fun. Is it really always fun? And I hear lots of talk about the aura of holiness. Is all of this realistic? Isn’t there any downside?” Sr. Julie responded by discussing what she called a romanticism about religious life and nuns in particular. There is a good bit of misinformation or misimpression out there. Reality checks are sorely needed.

I hear a great deal of a kind of romanticism about cloistered contemplative life from those who make inquiry with our community regarding vocation discernment. I hear it from young and old. Most, unfortunately, have not explored their call with a good spiritual director and most have never visited a monastery! In other words, they have no way of making a reality check. Often they seem to have two huge misconceptions. First is the idea that they can come to a monastery and pray all day. Yes, we do pray a great deal both together and in private but we must also engage in all the necessary household tasks as well as contribute effort to the remunerative work that supports the community. These activities require a degree of community interaction.

The second misconception is that the personal sacrifice will chiefly consist in withdrawal from secular society and the development self-discipline necessary for all the devotional practices in which they will be free to engage (Liturgy of the Hours, Mass, Adoration, Rosary, etc., etc.). However, in all likelihood, the greatest sacrifice to be asked of them will be a necessary surrender of the ego in order to be transformed in Christ. Surrender of the ego; that is our penchant for control, our need to plan, the selfish desires and satisfactions to which we have become so accustomed, is required by a life in which personal autonomy is narrowed and needs, desires, preferences, and ways of doing things must always take others into consideration. Community life, interaction with individuals, is where the ‘rubber hits the road’. The choice to enter religious life is not only a choice for deeper spirituality and dedicated mission. It is, perhaps above all, a choice in favor of community, the choice to live in a group of people one might never have considered as possible friends. And in contemplative life, that group is together 24/7.

Discerners seem to understand the components of prayer and mission but rarely have any idea of what is implied by the choice for the third leg of the stool of religious life, the choice in favor of community. Because the legs of prayer and mission still allow for a good bit of personal control they do not test the ego as much as the leg that is community life. In his workshop “Intentional Community”, Marist Brother Donald Bisson, FMS (spirituality and Jungian psychology) declared, “The main task of adjustment to living in community will be shadow work.” By shadow is meant the aspects of our psyches and personalities that we hide away consciously or unconsciously because we would not want others to see them. Held in our shadow are the psychic wounds which often determine our behavior and the ego needs we cover up in polite society – control, perfectionism, insecurity, fear, etc., etc.

It is said that the choice for religious life is an expression of the desire for God, the desire to be a God seeker. The closer we come to God the more we are asked to become like God. To seek God is to consent to be transformed into God, to submit, to surrender to the process of interior conversion. And there is no better laboratory for the conversion of our egoic selves than that of community living. Spiritual devotion prepares the way. Mission gives expression to our commitment to service in the name of Jesus. However, only living in community will challenge and stretch what is hidden in the shadows, rub the wounds, and jostle the baggage we carry. 

I have met a few of those young happy faces in cloistered and apostolic communities. In many their joy is transparent and the rightness of their choice confirmed. In others I read pressure, nervousness, and stress. In any close human community interpersonal life is intense and demanding. This is not to say that the process is not good or not transformative or not a necessary part of our personal conversion process. All of that is real and true but most do not seem to see it that way at the beginning.

One of the Psalms declares that wherever people live as one it is like the blessing of “oil flowing down Aaron’s beard”. Community life is blessing. In community we experience “union of hearts and mutual charity”. We experience support, mentoring, friendship and the pleasure of sharing. We rejoice, celebrate, worship, suffer and grieve together. Truly, ‘many hands make light work’. Above, all we bond in our love for God and the endless journey of seekers. But we must also make decisions together; take into account our cultural and ethnic variety; and transcend our differences. The old must adapt to the young and the young must be compassionate toward the old because the new comers always ask, “Why do you do it this way?” and the old always respond, “We have always done it this way.”

Community life is the arena of transformation in which the God seeker can live in ever deepening participation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Paschal Mystery of our salvation and grow in likeness to the one whom we call our Beloved.

Resource: “Intentional Community” Brother Donald Bisson, FMS (2 CDs) Workshop Sries #49 – YesNowMusic.com or YesNowMusic@aol.com or google Don Bisson.

Book Talking Again

One of  gifts of our recent community retreat was the recommendation by Fr. Philip Dabney, CSsR, our director, that I read Eckhart Tolle's 2005 book "A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life's Purpose." Now some, I am sure, will scoff due to its designation as an Oprah Winfrey Book Club choice and dismiss it as just another new-agey kind of book. Others may dismiss it because it is not a 'religious book'. However, I found Tolle's insight regarding the ego constructed self and the roles we learn to play while disguised in this self extremely helpful. Traditional religious language describes conversion as an annihilation of the false self. This is exactly what Tolle reflects upon using a different vocabulary. He quotes Jesus very often but also spiritual wisdom figures of many other traditions. Tolle's name has become quite well known since his first book "The Power of Now" appeared on the New York Times best seller list. That book is really a new take on living in the present moment, a version of the "Practice of the Presence of God" by Brother Lawrence. In this Tolle follows the way of Thich Naht Hanh, the Vietnanese Buddhist spiritual teacher.

Most enlightening for me in "A New Earth was the nature of the ego-mind construction, the protective behaviors developed over time that keep us in the head, in the mind, and make us unhappy, angry, resentful, afraid, neurotic and narcissistic. Tolle writes that once we become conscious of this ego action-reaction tendency in ourselves and those around us, that realization alone can begin a kind of shedding (annihilation?) of ego-mind constructions and enable us to hestitate just a few seconds before reacting from our ego-bound position or reacting to another's ego-protective act which would normally send us over the edge.

The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer ego, but just an old, conditioned mind pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist. The old mind-pattern or mental habit may still survive and reoccur for a while becasue it has the momentum of thousands of years of collective human unconsciousness behind it, but every time it is recognized, it is weakened.

It is difficult to do this material justice. I can only heartily recommend Tolle's book for adults aware of their own need for growth in more conscious living and relating . He also offers some very valuable advice on how parents may avoid some of their unconscious behaviors and words that propel children into ego-protective construction which they will only have to stuggle to dismantle when they reach their own adulthood.

The wonderful local public library just put this brand new book into my eager hands. The wonderful Tracy Kidder has been interview in all the media about his rendering of the riveting story of medical student and Burundian refugee Deogratias (yes, that is his first name) who flees the genocide is his country and neighboring Rwanda only to arrive in New York City with little money and no English language skills. He has fled one horror only to arrive in another version - homelessness and victimization. His suffering is great but the grace of God remains and is manifest in a chance meeting with a very good soul whose determination finds Deo a family who will 'adopt' him. It seems one mircle after another and sheer instinct for survival get him through Columbia University undergraduate school and then into medical school and finally back to Burundi. There he reconnects with the family he long thought dead and realizes the dream of his boyhood to create a medical clinic in his native land.

Both of these boooks can enrich your soul.

Time for Another Book Review

A Voice from the Past

Speaks Truth for Today

In the early 1980s I was devouring popular but serious books concerning the search for God. Spiritually I was in a state of arrested development, stalled at the point of Catholic high school graduation and suffering from the lack of adult re-education at the parish level after Vatican II. An experience of the At Home Retreat Movement in 1980 brought me to a new place, a place that included meditation on scripture, contemplative prayer, and a more intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

One of the books I read at the time was Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary, his journal of a six-month sabbatical spent at the Trappist Abbey of of the Genesee in New York State in 1974. I loved it then and remembered loving it throughout the intervening years. If asked why I held it in fond memory I probably would have had trouble saying exactly why, after almost 30 years. Surely the monastic milieu fascinated, but I couldn't put my finger on why I still remembered it as speaking to my heart.

Recently a hardcover copy that no one wanted found its way into my hands and I thought, "Why not re-read it. It might touch your heart again." Today, I believe that finding this book in my hands was no accident. It was, if not a divine intervention, at least a divine synchronicity. In simple terms, it was the answer to prayer.

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch diocesan priest, was taking a break from teaching at Yale University. He was already well known for a number of books including The Wounded Healer and Out of Solitude. His complex and very human personality was evident in his writing and may have been one source of his popularity. He often wrote about constantly struggling to love God and others in spite of his wounded humanity. In other words, he was very much one of us.

The journal is not unlike many other personal accounts of time spent in the monastic environment and community. Nouwen's is made unique by its detailed accounts of numerous conversations with his spiritual director during the months at Genesee. His guide was the abbot of the community, Fr. John Eudes Bamberger. John Eudes was not only a wise and experienced monk but a physician/psychiatrist and former Navy man. The import these conversation had for me was underscored by another odd fact of my second encounter with this book. Shortly after I picked it up again the journal Human Development, in its spring issue (2009), featured an article concerning just these interactions between Nouwen and Bamberger at the Abbey of Genesee!

Suffice it to say that I feel a great personal kinship with Nouwen's 'issues', the struggles he confided to John Eudes and his process of dealing with them. The next reader may not feel that particular kinship but I do think that the substance of these conversations will touch many. In the following quotation the word "monastic" can easily be dropped anso that we understand that this is the state of angst to which we are all prone.

"When the monastic life does not hold anything new any more, when people do not pay any special attention to you any more, when nothing 'interesting' is distracting you any more, then the monastic life becomes difficult. Then the room opens up for prayer and ascesis." (p.43)

On another day John Eudes advises, "Take this as your koan: 'I am the glory of God." Make that thought the center of your meditation so that it slowly becomes not only a thought but a living reality. You are the place where God chose to dwell, you are the topos tou theou (God's Place) and the spiritual life is nothing more or less that to allow that space to exist where God can dwell, to create the space where his glory can manifest itself. In your meditation you can ask yourself, 'Where is the glory of God? If the glory of God is not where I am, where else can it be?' ....."You want God to appear to you in the way your passions desire, but these passions make you blind to his presence now. Focus on the nonpassionate part of yourself and realize God's presence there. Let that part grow in you and make your decisions from there. You will be surprised to see how powers that seem invincible shrivel away." (p.53-54)

Nouwen's journal entries about his talks with Bamberger are the subtext of the journal. They weave their way through and inter-relate with Nouwen's experiences of the routine of daily life in a monastery and his interior reactions to it. But I found John Eudes Bamberger, spiritual director/ psychological counselor, speaking directly to me in their power and wisdom. Perhaps you will too.