The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [104]
It was clear to me that when the sisters spoke about “falling in love,” they did not mean engaging in sexual intimacy but rather coping with the emotional onslaught that infatuation brings. Several women spoke of the goal of celibacy in terms of “having an undivided heart” and said that they’d learned to be wary of any relationship that seemed out of balance with their goal of seeking God in a religious community. Sally Cline, in her book Women, Passion and Celibacy, relates a story about a nun who had once been romantically involved with another nun, who told Cline that the worst thing about the relationship “(though at the time it seemed the best) [was] the intense focus on each other.” I suspect that many monastics would agree with Cline’s conclusion that “the difference between sexual intimacy and social celibacy is less a matter of genital contact than that matter of focus.” (Emphasis Cline’s.)
One prioress sent me a tape of a talk she’d delivered to her community, and when she spoke of what she termed “sins against celibacy” it was not sexual acts that concerned her so much as emotions. “Celibacy is not an excuse for being unhappy or uncharitable, to stuff feelings down, to become angry, or an iceberg,” she said. “The worst sin against celibacy,” she told the sisters, “is to pretend to not have any affections at all. To fall in love is celibacy at work,” she said, adding, in a remark that drew a knowing laughter from the women present, that “most of us should have fallen in love twenty times or so by now.” Her remark was by no means a license for the sisters to run out and have affairs. It was an honest, realistic assessment of human sexuality as celibates experience it. As was clear from what she said next, she was confirming the religious context in which monastics seek to place their affective experience. “Celibacy is not a vow to repress our feelings,” the sister told the group. “It is a vow to put all our feelings, acceptable or not, close to our hearts and bring them into consciousness through prayer.”
When celibacy goes wrong with men, it often makes headlines. Although women’s religious communities have had sexual abuse suits brought against them in recent years, their failures at celibacy have generally not been as public. Several sisters told me they felt this is in part because men and women celibates define their celibacy in different ways. “The men,” one said, “tend to define it as not having sex; they want to use that energy to serve the church. They’re more clinically oriented. And when they overcompensate for being celibate, it’s through food, alcohol, sports, or work.” She felt that women tended to see celibacy as more an issue of communal living, and would discuss it more in terms of “a way to govern affective relationships.” She said, “We women can also lose ourselves in work.” But, she added, “the worst thing that we do is to deny our true feelings and become rigid, afraid to relate. We distance ourselves from both men and women.”
Several sisters spoke to me about emotional frigidity as a maladaptation that celibate women especially are prone to. “It seems a distorted image,” one sister said, “of the nurturing quality that to me is so much at the heart of our identities as women.” I suspect that many of the horror stories people tell about nuns in the parochial schools of the 1950s are about women who adapted to celibacy by closing up their emotions and refusing to love. As one sister said to me, “I’m always so sad to experience women who are not loving people, but they’ve been celibate their entire life. To be celibate, it seems to me,” she added, “means first of all being a loving person in a way that frees you to serve others. Otherwise celibacy has no point.”
For the women I talked with, deep and enduring friendships seemed to provide a healthy channel for their affections. They saw friendship not merely as a safety valve, however, but