The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [103]
I was stunned. I could not conceive of Christ being so alive for me, or myself that intimate with him, but couldn’t deny what this sane, mature, and gracious woman was saying to me. It turned out that her expressing the unimaginable is what made the retreat for me; later that day I was thinking about my marriage—the sister’s remarks, after all, had been made in a discussion of marriage, and the fidelity it requires—and wondered if I had been coming at things the wrong way round. The problem did not start with theology—with my inability to grasp Christ as a living person—but might have more to do with my resistance to accepting the full mystery of the Christ present in any person, but most particularly, for me, in my husband. The great commandment, to love God with all your heart and soul, and your neighbor as yourself, seemed more subtle than ever. I began to see the three elements as a kind of trinity, always in motion, and the three loves as interdependent. It would be impossible to love God without loving others; impossible to love others unless one were grounded in a healthy self-respect; and, maybe, impossible to truly love at all in a totally secular way, without participating in the holy.
When the sister said, “It takes time to love,” she was reflecting on her more than thirty years’ experience in a Benedictine convent. And when I nodded my assent, I was responding in the light of nearly twenty years of marriage. I wonder if the lyrics by Dolores Dufner, quoted above, do in fact convey the great human task—to learn to live, and love, and die. Perhaps to take on one is to accept all three. These are, of course, the classic questions of human psychological development. And it may be that growing to mature adulthood requires us to reject much popular mythology: that life is simply handed to us, that love is easy, quick, fated, romantic, and death a subject to be avoided altogether. My conversation with the sister encouraged me to ask other Benedictine women what the task of learning to love has been like for them. It seemed to me that women who have committed themselves to celibacy might have a great deal to say about how the practice has formed them spiritually, and also helped them develop their capacity for love.
I soon discovered that the sister’s experience of infatuation was not uncommon, and not surprising, given the sexual repression in convents during the 1950s. “We were taught to avoid the thought of anything remotely sexual,” one friend wrote me. “We certainly never used the word ‘sex.’ Even deep friendships with other women in the community were discouraged. We sublimated all our energies into work. I think,” she added, “that’s why we worked so hard!” In a scenario that seems typical for many religious, it wasn’t until she was in her mid-thirties that a crisis developed, the first real test of her vow as a celibate. “I fell in love with a priest,” she says, “and that’s when I realized what celibacy is all about.”
She, like many of my Benedictine friends, feels that falling in love is a normal, necessary but painful part of one’s formation as a celibate. “It’s a part of human development that can’t be denied,” one sister wrote to me, “and if we deny or repress it in the name of holiness we end up with a false religion, we end up hurting ourselves and our communities.” Another sister said, “To fall in love is to experience ego collapse. The other person completes something in your own personality.” Citing the philosopher Ernest Becker, she said, “There are two basic ways to experience a radical change: to undergo a nervous breakdown, and to fall in love. And