The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [107]
One of the first things I noticed about monastic people, when I first encountered them, was that most of them were not noticeably repressed, and certainly not infantile. Over the years that I’ve gotten to know the Benedictines better, this first impression has been strongly reinforced. Often their struggles with celibacy have given them a truly sophisticated outlook on the subject of human sexuality, and many of their observations—for instance, that sexual stability and spiritual growth work together as a person matures—are of as much use to non-celibates as to monastics. In giving a conference on celibacy to her community, one woman said that it was extremely foolish to take celibacy, or any other aspect of sexuality, for granted. “As monastic people,” she said, “we do need to sublimate our sexual energies, but we need to be conscious about it. Otherwise we run the risk of giving in to compulsions and addictions.” She depicted the celibate as extremely vulnerable in American culture, which promotes addictive behaviors. “Celibacy, like so much in the monastic life,” she said, “is mostly a matter of paying attention. We have to be wary of anything that dulls conscious awareness, such as alcohol, or even television commercials.”
“The object of celibacy is consciousness,” she said, “taking our unconscious feelings and sexual urges and placing them where we think God wants them. Our goal is to be celibate, conscious, passionate people.” When it works, the celibate is, in the words of another sister, “stretching the ability to love, and particularly, to love non-exclusively.” The students taught by sisters have often been the beneficiaries of this. More than one sister spoke to me about the joy of being able to draw on maternal instincts, particularly with their younger students. But I believe it goes beyond that. As Sally Cline, who as a child had the odd experience of being the only Jewish girl in a British convent school, has written, “I [understood] that one of the greatest gifts the nuns gave to us, their girls, the gift of passionate attention, came from their celibate philosophy that ‘loves all’ and ‘loves all well.’ ”
Realizing that this was love, Cline says, was helpful in her teenage years. The nuns helped her see, she says, “that a non-sexually active love can be just as passionate and just as absorbing as a genitally rooted one, and that such a love has as its center the idea of being fully focused and intentional.” According to all the sisters I spoke with, intentionality is a major part of celibacy. But for many of them, this was not at all clear when they first sought the monastic life. “I don’t think that celibacy was much on my mind at all,” one sister said. “It was certainly not what I was pursuing when I asked to join the community. It just came along as part of the deal.” Eventually, however, she realized that “it did have to become a conscious choice, and one that has to be made time and time again. It is a daily choice,” she said, “to live as a celibate.”
The same might be said about a commitment to monogamy. But what distinguished all the Benedictine women that I spoke with from most of the married people I know is how consistently they spoke of celibacy as being rooted in the religious, as “having gospel value,” or of “being a sign of the kingdom.” It may be that the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, do not adequately convey to married people the sacredness of a lifelong commitment to another person, whereas for sisters the religious nature of their vows is an everyday reality. As one sister said, “One needs a deep prayer life to maintain a celibate life. It is only through prayer that the hard choices get made, over time, only prayer that can give me the self-transcendence that celibacy requires.”
Self-transcendence