17 RELINQUISHMENT

1: to withdraw or retreat from : leave behind

3 a: to stop holding physically : RELEASE, slowly relinquished his grip on the bar

b: to give over possession or control of : YIELD, few leaders willingly relinquish power

The thing about blazing a new trail in your interfaith home is that it costs something. The path is arduous, and no one has cleared the downed trees. There are no obvious faith practices to mutually draw from; instead, you must decide on family rhythms as you go. Advent rituals can be fraught. Praying before meals can get complicated. Even when you do the hard work of having these conversations with your partner outright, of deciding together how to handle Sunday mornings or bedtime prayers, things can unexpectedly snag.

It doesn’t help that grief around Josh’s deconversion can still hit me unaware. Little things can trigger it, like when I find myself crying in church during a baby dedication, or when I watched, arms crossed, as Josh cleared out his shelf of theological books and stuck them in a donation box. Or when I found a stack of old letters from college in the basement that Josh had filled with quotes from Henri Nouwen and the Psalms.

My friend Kelley says that God is teaching me something about relinquishment through all of this. When I give Josh’s lack of faith over to God during moments of sadness or disappointment, I am showing great trust in God’s goodness. Just keep handing him over, she tells me. Release him to God.

Her words reminded me of my conversation with Caroline a few years ago in Seattle, when I saw the pod of orcas and she told me that she and her husband had decided to “take our hands off each other.” It’s a curious statement. How can you be intimate with your partner if you are not touching? I want the intimacy, the trust, the interdependence. How can I do that if my hands are not on my husband, if I am not extending my arms outward to him? But I don’t think that is how she meant it; I think she meant that they fully relinquished each other. They took their hands off each other in an act of unconditional love. They let their love be free of religious conditions.

Relinquishment is a practice some Christians observe during Lent, the forty days before Easter resurrection. On Ash Wednesday, the very beginning of the Lenten season, Christians are invited to repentance. It is a time to fast from something: chocolate, coffee, watching reruns of The Office. These small acts of self-denial are an outward sign of an inward reality, or so the pastors tell me. They mark the forty days leading up to Easter as a time of preparation, of self-examination, of getting ready for Holy Week.

“What are you giving up for Lent?” the conversation would go in the campus cafeteria back in college, usually a week before Ash Wednesday. In those days I attended an Anglican church that introduced me to joyful liturgy, Communion every Sunday, and colors for liturgical seasons: purple for Lent and Advent, green for Epiphany and ordinary time, red for Holy Week and Pentecost, and white for the biggest of celebrations: Easter and Christmas. What a novel idea, this whole church calendar thing. It felt good to give something up for a season, to let go of a habit, a food group, a small comfort in an effort to reorient my day-to-day living toward God.

Despite my good faith efforts, I’ve never been very good at Lent. Despite my good intentions, I often abandon my fast halfway through.

When Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day this year, I had to laugh at the irony of it. It’s one thing to give up chocolate or caffeine. But it’s another to relinquish the love of your life, your husband, to God. I didn’t want to let the picture of my marriage, my family life, die, return to the earth, and be released so it can be formed into something new.

When I join the sisters for prayer in the small chapel at the Visitation Monastery, the alleluias are noticeably gone from the liturgy and songs. There are special Lenten antiphons, and the altar is covered in purple cloth. The ascetic practices are communal, the emphasis on our corporate journey rather than my own individual failings to stick with whatever fast I’ve chosen.

Relinquishment is something the sisters know beyond the practice of Lent. They hold no personal property; they take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They give up the autonomy that is so prized in our modern American culture; their way of life so counter to our idols of the independent woman.

But the lives the sisters lead—the people they minister to, the presence they bring to the neighborhood—wouldn’t be possible without relinquishment, without vows, without remaining faithful to radical promises. Religious life looks so different than it did when many of them joined as young women, back when Visitation Sisters wore habits and recited liturgies in Latin. I wonder if that change was ever painful.

There are more nuns over the age of ninety than are under the age of sixty. Some religious communities of women are literally dying out, and with them centuries of communal practice. Sister Katherine is in charge of vocations at the Visitation Monastery; she is the first point of contact for women who are exploring their call to religious life. In all the years she has spent in this role, she has not formally recruited anyone to join their community. It can be discouraging.

Like most people as they get older, Catholic sisters are concerned about legacy—about how their communities will change as their numbers dwindle to a fraction of their former size. If the trends toward religious disaffiliation and secularization continue, the losses are felt in the broader church as well, as congregations sell their buildings and seminaries close.

My friend Amy is preparing to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal church. She is joining the ranks of ordained leadership at a time when the church is contracting, and she knows that part of her role will be to help congregations die out.

“How do I love a dying thing?” she asked me recently.

One afternoon in mid-March, I walked over to the Fremont Avenue house for midday prayer. A sign in the window was not encouraging. It read: “The sisters are not available today. Please come back at another time.” Still, I rang the bell and waited for a few minutes, then pulled out my phone to check the monastery’s website to see if, indeed, there was prayer today. The Visitation Monastery is housed in two separate houses, so I wondered then if I had come to the wrong one.

The day was unusually warm for March—in the forties—and I didn’t mind the walk over a block to Girard Avenue to check if prayer was there instead. After what has felt like weeks of gray skies and cold, bitter weather, a sunny walk in warm temperatures can feel like a little miracle. I walked over and rang the bell to the Girard Monastery, wondering again if I had the time wrong, or if anyone was there. After a minute, I saw the shadow of someone moving behind the door’s window. Sister Karen’s gray bob emerged from behind the pane, and I caught her broad smile. “Stina,” she said in her raspy voice. “So glad you are here.” I apologized for being late and explained I’d gone to the wrong house, but she waved away my words. “Come and join us upstairs.” I turned and hung up my coat and unlaced my boots, and when I turned, she was gone. Was she upstairs? I had never been in that chapel before.

I climbed the wooden steps beside an elegant banister. A metal pipe with a grooved interior was fastened to the wall beside the railing—a track for a chair to move its way up and down the stairway for the most elderly sisters who could no longer navigate the steps. At the top of the landing I looked around at a variety of doors that were open, trying to locate where the chapel was. “In here,” I heard, so I followed the voice into a carpeted space with six chairs. Two chairs were vacant, and I hesitated until Sister Karen patted the seat beside herself. “Here,” she said. The other nuns smiled at me as I settled in, peering at the altar that held images of Mary, mother of God, in paintings and sculpture forms. There was a tiny wardrobe of sorts, with a keyhole in its front door, perched on top of the altar, and I wondered if it was the tabernacle where they kept the consecrated host, the sacred body of Christ.

“We are using a special antiphon today for Lent, so just ignore this,” said Sister Karen as she pointed to the right place on the page for midday prayer. “Sister Katherine will be saying it.”

Sister Katherine smiled at me. She was wearing her customary turtleneck and sweater, her face open and kind.

And so we began, reading the Psalms back and forth, with Sister Katherine adding the antiphon at the appropriate times.

A reading from the book of Isaiah, then another psalm. Soon, it was over, just a short fifteen or twenty minutes of prayer. Sister Katherine got up to leave for an appointment, but I stayed to chat with Sister Karen and Sister Mary Virginia for a while, who caught me up on how their sister Visitation Monastery, the one originally founded in St. Paul during the late 1800s by the city’s Catholic elite, would be closing soon. The main ministry of the monastery was to run a Catholic school imbued in the traditions of Salesian spirituality and, while the school was still going strong, the number of nuns had dwindled down to just three.

Sister Mary Frances had been charged with helping the convent that had shaped her as a new novice die a good death. She traveled back and forth between North Minneapolis and its location in Mendota Heights, doing who knew what. How painful it must be, to see the convent close after over a hundred years of faithful service.

“Sister Mary Frances is helping them along,” Sister Karen said. “But it will be a little while until the full monastery is suppressed.”

“Suppressed,” said Sister Mary Virginia, turning to me. “Isn’t that an awful word?”

“Is that really what they call it? Suppressing a monastery?” I asked. Sister Karen and Mary Virginia nodded. “It sounds like someone is pushing it down, only to have it pop up elsewhere.” I used a hand motion as I said this, pushing down with one hand and pulling up with the other.

“It’s a hard thing,” Sister Karen said, referring to the three remaining nuns in the closing monastery. “They really can’t stay there anymore.”

Later, in a conversation with Sister Brenda, she told me that I am following a “diminishment” narrative regarding the changes in religious orders. Many Catholic sisters, she told me, see the reduction of new sisters in their communities as “rightsizing” more than “downsizing.” And some monastic orders are growing, particularly in the Global South.

But no matter how you frame it, to be part of the Western church in this century is to be in a community of decline. Many Christians in North America will watch their institutions die, their buildings close, their children walk away from organized religion.

I return to Amy’s question: How can I love a dying thing? How can I hold onto faith as I watch so many of my peers walk away from the church?

There is much to mourn, and it will be painful, yet I can’t help but watch the sisters with a glimmer of hope. Some communities are attracting younger sisters who will continue in vowed, religious life, but many will close their monasteries in the decades to come. The sisters who remain model a profound trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to take what has been lost and transform it into something new. To let go of control, to relinquish their communities to God, even as they keep casting sparks around in trust that something will catch fire.

The alternative is fear: holding things so closely they distort in my grasp. Instead, the Spirit calls me to let go, let go, let go. Relinquish Josh to God again and again. Richard Rohr writes, “It’s like a secret spiral: each time you allow the surrender, each time you can trust the dying, you will experience a new quality of life within you.”

To love a dying thing is to let it go, to let your love extend beyond religious conditions. To love a dying thing is to trust that, in the dying, Easter is still coming.