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is required in marriage as well, or in any lifelong commitment to another. But the culture does not encourage self-transcendence; just the opposite. Our cultural myths about love give witness to a comment Sören Kierkegaard once made about the “self-love of erotic love”; too many young people grow up understanding that “true love” means possessing and being possessed. Both are incompatible with celibacy, which seeks to love non-exclusively, non-possessively. This can be a healthy witness against the consumer model of love—the “If I can’t have her, nobody will” psychology that spurs so many men to acts of violence. Nearly half of the murders in North Dakota, for example, are “domestic” in origin. Judging from the newspaper headlines, it seems that many men, and some women, can’t give up the illusion of possessing another person. They can’t allow a former boyfriend or ex-wife to be an independent human being.

When mature celibates talk about the value of celibacy, “freedom” is a word they commonly use. Freedom to keep their energies focused on ministry and communal living, freedom to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them. As celibates grow older, they tend to speak in terms of the “generative” qualities of celibacy. “We’re not making babies,” one sister says, “but we can make relationships.” One reason so many celibates find satisfaction in working as teachers, spiritual directors, and pastoral ministers may be that it provides ample opportunity to help others grow. “To donate the self as a gift to others; that’s the vow of celibacy,” one sister told me.

Sisters are keenly aware that for years church teaching emphasized celibate religious life as the most holy of responses to God, with marriage as a distant second, and they resent that as deeply as anyone. They’re often quick to point out similarities between a celibate commitment and fidelity in marriage. “Both are a discipline,” one sister said. “Both can be a form of asceticism.” Still, they also feel the need to define their monastic call in its own terms. “Celibacy is just one of the ways God calls us,” one sister said. “It’s another way, but not a better way.”

When one sister described to me what she considered a healthy celibacy, she said, “First of all, it means not focusing on ‘what I gave up,’ but on what being freed by what I gave up has allowed me to do in terms of service to the church and other people.” She said that she’d learned the need for balance in her life. “For me, the discipline of celibacy means a commitment to grow, intellectually and in my prayer life, to engage in regular prayer, both privately and with my community, to engage in some form of meaningful ministry, to take care of my body, to seek out solitude at regular intervals”—this, she admitted she often felt too busy to do—“and to take pleasure in beauty.” Many sisters spoke to me of celibacy as something that had encouraged them to be sensitive to the many guises of beauty. “When I can enjoy a sunset, or a music concert, or a work of art, or people of all ages,” one sister said, “then I know that celibacy is working.” Having experienced the pleasure of friendships with many celibate men and women, it did not surprise me that all of the women connected the practice of celibacy with their ability to relate to others. “Celibacy,” one sister said, “has given me a good way to integrate my sexuality with my spirituality; I’ve come to realize that the goal of both is union with God and with others.” One woman put it very simply. “The fruit of celibacy,” she said, “is hospitality.”

THE CLOISTER

WALK

Love is intensity, that second in which the doors of time and space

open just a crack . . .

—Octavio Paz

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

—William Butler Yeats, “ A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER”

I know exactly what I was doing at 10:30 A.M. on Sunday, May 31, 1992, but have no idea where I was. The enormous church of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, designed by Marcel Breuer, was familiar to me, as I’d gone there nearly