One snowy January night, I walked up the steps to the Saint Jane House for a gathering the nuns were hosting on the topic of discernment. The Saint Jane House is named, you guessed it, after foundress Jane de Chantal, and it’s a place of hospitality affiliated with the Visitation Sisters. I decided to attend the four-part series not because I had a major life decision to make but because I was eager to spend more time with the sisters.
What I didn’t realize was that evening would lead me to question whether I should have gotten married in the first place.
Inside, I removed my snow boots and put on the complimentary slippers provided for each guest, taking in the cozy scene: a fire in the fireplace, comfortable looking couches and stuffed chairs arranged in a circle in the living room, candles flickering on the coffee table and mantel, and Sister Karen walking over to greet me.
“Stina!” she said. “I am so glad you could make it.” She ushered me over to the hall closet so I could hang up my coat, then to the dining room table where I signed in, wrote my name on a nametag, and gathered the handouts.
“Grab yourself a mug of tea or coffee and find a place in the circle,” Sister Karen told me. “We are going to get started soon.”
I wandered over to the kitchen and found an earthenware mug with the words “Be who you are and be that well” etched on the side. Later I would learn that those were the words of Saint Francis de Sales, a reflection on his belief that anyone can imitate Jesus in his or her particular season of life.
After a moment of silence, an opening prayer, and group introductions, Sister Katherine spoke about the series on discernment, explaining that at each session one person would share his or her story of making an important life decision.
When Sister Katherine told her vocation story, she described how her parents made her go to college, even though she would much rather have joined the convent right out of high school. Wisely, her parents cautioned her against making such a huge life decision at age eighteen. They encouraged her to go out into the world first. Sister Katherine’s desire—one might say calling—was so strong that even in college she felt the tug to join. She met with a Dominican priest to talk through her predicament. Should she stay and finish college or begin her novitiate right away? The priest then did something she did not expect.
He took out a coin and said, “Heads, you finish college, tails, you join the convent now.”
Katherine was aghast. Why would the priest do such a thing? Who dares to flip a coin to decide the future? But then the priest went ahead and flicked the coin in the air where it soared, then tumbled. Katherine didn’t look at the coin.
“I know what I want. I want to join the convent now.”
The priest smiled. “You knew all along what the right decision was. The coin was just a way to force your hand, to reveal what you really knew deep inside.”
In Salesian spirituality, Sister Katherine went on to explain, this freedom is called “liberty of spirit.” It gives credence to one’s own will and desires, suggesting that those things are often indications of God’s guidance (as long as they don’t contradict God’s “declared will” as found in Christian doctrine and Scripture). We can often trust our own hearts to know what God wants for us, which is to be happy and whole.
This idea seemed radical to me. I was formed spiritually in evangelical institutions, which emphasized humankind’s total depravity. How can we trust ourselves if we are inherently sinful? How can we possibly make good or right decisions when our judgement is constantly muddied by our unholy thoughts, our incorrect actions?
In truth, these two concepts are not at odds with each other—sin is real yet our natural desires are not always wrong or bad. A healthy spirituality doesn’t discount desire or sin. In my own experience, I had an unhealthy propensity to question every decision, to view God’s will as a black-and-white journey that you either follow perfectly or not at all.
After Sister Katherine shared her story, the nuns instructed us to break into small groups. We went around the room and counted off, round robin, and soon we gathered into groups of four. My small group gathered on the couch nearest to the fire. A woman in her midfifties introduced herself.
“The story honestly made me sad,” she said. “I just got divorced after spending two decades of my life married to someone I shouldn’t have married in the first place.” She grabbed a tissue from the coffee table. Sister Katherine patted her back sympathetically.
“When we were first dating,” she said, “I knew that God was telling me not to marry him, but I did anyway because I wanted to. I didn’t wait and listen. I was wrong and I missed it; I missed what my life was supposed to be about.”
We sat there for a moment, letting her lament take shape in the air around us. I shifted in my seat, trying to get comfortable. Another man in our small group spoke about his divorce, how it had totally altered his life. But he said that he couldn’t view it as a mistake, that he wouldn’t be the person he is now without the journey he had taken.
The fireplace was putting out a lot of heat, and I was starting to sweat. Maybe attending a discernment group full of recently divorced people had been a mistake. Was this my future? What if the warnings were true, that if we weren’t aligned spiritually, nothing would work? Would I be here in my fifties, lamenting my decades of marriage to Josh?
In our small group, Sister Katherine talked about how, even after deciding to join the convent, she had struggled. She had suffered from scruples—which I had never heard of before. It’s a tendency to become overly introspective, weighing each individual action looking for flaws, paralyzed by fear of doing the wrong thing. She said this affliction tormented her—this gnawing, accusatory inner voice, calling out each and every imperfection. Even after saying yes to religious life, she had to grow and learn to experience the love and grace of God. “It was a trust issue,” she told us.
Plenty of young women who, like Sister Katherine, joined convents at age nineteen didn’t end up living the next sixty years in monastic communities. The kind of religious life that Katherine entered in the 1950s doesn’t exist anymore. As a novice, she was cloistered away from the outside world, shedding street clothes and adopting a habit, no longer able to leave and visit family for birthdays, holidays, or even funerals. Doctors and dentists would come into the convent to treat the sisters so they didn’t have to leave the cloister. She even took a new name when she entered the convent, becoming Sister Mary William. The changes to religious life after the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s were extreme for many: Catholic sisters reevaluated medieval rules that stipulated the length of their habit, and many religious orders (like the Visitation Sisters) stopped requiring them at all. Nuns could hold onto their birth names. Conflicts broke out in convents around the world over reforming the liturgies, altering ascetic practices, and even attending college far from the motherhouse. Many sisters left.
My friend Susan said recently that most people romanticize nuns to the point of dehumanization. Even though all Christians are called to be holy, we still place religious types on pedestals, imagining them to be closer to God than the rest of us. Most nuns have the advantage of a structured, external rhythm of prayer, and no doubt these rhythms have done much to cultivate an interior life devoted to God. But nuns, just like the saints, are humans, too.
Would Sister Katherine have jumped at the chance to join the convent at nineteen if she had known so much would change—both in herself and in the institution that she had committed to? Did her scruples cause her to question her decision to become a nun? It couldn’t have been easy to stay, to continue choosing to be a nun, when others walked away.
I asked her that question one day.
“No, I don’t regret it,” she said. “My heart knew.”
Sister Katherine knew what she desired, so she left college to join the enclosed community at age nineteen. What a risky, audacious thing—to trust one’s adolescent self enough to make a lifelong commitment. What a risky, audacious thing for any married couple to pledge themselves to each other for life, not knowing how they might change or who they would become in a decade.
When Josh first lost his religion, I looked back to our wedding day with an accusatory glare. This was not what I signed up for. We were twenty when we met, twenty-five when we made those lifelong vows to each other, come what may. Did I believe that God was guiding me to marry Josh? Could I trust my own desires at that young age as being within God’s will? Should we have even gotten married in the first place?
Discernment always involves risk, no matter how judiciously we weigh the pros or cons. And, Saint Francis de Sales writes, Christians live somewhere between God’s two wills: God’s “declared will” in Scripture and Christian tradition, and the “will of God’s good pleasure” where we practice freedom to follow our intuition. There is a creative, healthy tension by living between those wills, Sister Katherine claimed. And, once we have prayerfully discerned something, we shouldn’t indulge our scruples by doubting the choices we make.
Did God lead me to marry Josh, even though it means I am now in a “spiritually single” marriage? I can’t be sure. All I know is that, like Sister Katherine, I don’t regret it. I love this man who sincerely wrestled with his faith and, when he stopped believing, had the courage to walk away, despite the cost. My heart knew then, and still does now.