The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [102]
LEARNING
TO LOVE:
BENEDICTINE
WOMEN ON
CELIBACY AND
RELATIONSHIP
It is the union with God that is the original, and the human union that is the imitation, just as the marital union of Adam and Eve was an image of the creative act whereby God created each one of them, body and soul, and created them in relationship to himself.—Maximilian Marnau, O.S.B., GERTRUDE OF HELFTA : REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
So dare to be as once he was, who came to live, and love, and die. Gaudeamus Domino . . .—Dolores Dufner, O.S.B., THE WORD OF GOD
During each of the four semesters that I was at St. John’s, I took brief retreats at St. Benedict’s, a neighboring community of Benedictine women. It was my first experience of “directed” retreats, which entailed meeting with a sister once or twice a day. As we were planning one such retreat, I said I’d like to focus on my marriage, and asked if I might prepare a brief paper for her to read in advance. She agreed, and when we met our discussions soon became very frank.
The sister began to speak of her own life as a celibate woman. She had entered the convent in her late teens and a few years later, when she was still in formation—that is, she had not yet made lifelong vows as a Benedictine—she’d become infatuated with a priest. “I quickly learned,” she said, “the truth of Psalm 32; I was miserable as long as I tried to keep it hidden. But as soon as I admitted to myself, and then to my novice mistress, what was going on, I felt an enormous release from guilt.” She’d been corresponding with the priest, “an innocent correspondence on his part, I think,” she told me, “but I was truly infatuated, for the first time in my life.” The advice she got from the novice mistress was “to just put it away, break off all contact, and let it work its way out.” While she found this painfully difficult at the time, she obeyed, sneaking off just a few cards to the man during the course of a year. Not long after she’d finally thrown out the last of his letters that she’d kept hidden, she attended a workshop where she ran into him by accident. “I realized then,” she said, “that my obedience had dispelled the mental image that I’d built up of him. My infatuation hadn’t taken the real person into account. I found that love starts,” she added, “when you see the real person, not the one you’ve invented.” She and the priest have now been friends for many years.
The sister said, “I learned from this experience that it isn’t ‘how good you are’ that matters—I was still full of a romantic desire to be a ‘good nun,’ but my image for that didn’t have much to do with reality. What matters,” she said, “is not that you’re good but that you trust. I had trusted God, and I had trusted my novice mistress, to see me through this. It was the obedience that did it. However,” she added, “I also learned something about myself. Infatuation is a part of me; I like to fall in love, I like to be in love.” I teased her a bit; “Sister,” I said, “that sounds a lot like me. Maybe we’re just a couple of floozies.” Her astonishment—never in her life had anyone come close to calling her a “floozie”—soon turned to laughter. “It was quite an experience,” she said, “to discover that I was a floozie at heart, after having entered the convent.
“I learned to accept my need for love,” she said, “and my ability to love, as great gifts from God. And I decided that, yes, I did want to remain in the monastery, to express my love within a celibate context. It was not difficult to see falling in love as a part of seeking God. But it was also good to realize that while infatuation might be an impetus to seek God, it puts you out of balance, and therefore is something