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February 8

MORNING PRAYER

Now that I am a Visitation Companion, I try to make it to the monastery for morning prayer. Even when I slip in and out of certainty about my own faith, I always feel better when I pray with the sisters.

“O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise” the sisters sing most mornings in the tiny chapel on Fremont Avenue. Today, despite last night’s snowfall, I am determined to join them. After opening the back door into a drift of new snow and wading out to the driveway in my Sorrel boots, I struggled to clear the car windshield of its bumpy ice.

By the time I finished and arrived to the monastery, I was fifteen minutes late. I climbed the cement steps, which someone had nicely shoveled earlier in the morning. Was it the men in transitional housing, who helped the sisters with seasonal chores? Those men had helped carry in the nuns’ Christmas tree and carted away furniture no longer needed. I wondered whether Sister Brenda had been out in the snow that morning yet. As the Texas-raised former Baptist missionary to Asia, she had a delightful tradition of making snow angels in the backyard—one for each sister—whenever there was a fresh snow.

The snow was so bright that I had to squint. I picked up the Star Tribune, which lay in its plastic sack on the front stoop, and carried it inside the covered front porch. The front door was locked. As I knocked, I could hear the electric keyboard begin the opening prayer, “Oh Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.”

I was surprised—and a bit relieved—to hear they were getting a late start. After a year of praying here, the words were familiar to me. Sometimes they would spring up, while washing dishes or walking to the mailbox, and I would hear those notes ringing in my head. For now I stood and listened, the sunlight gleaming through the porch windows, the brilliant cold air moving in and out of my lungs in cloudy breaths. I knocked again, then stopped.

It was a holy moment, standing outside a locked door, listening to the voices of women singing, the cold sharpening each of my senses. The Jack Frost–latticed ice crystals on glass, the new snow and the smell of stacked firewood, the feeling of cold on my face, my fingers, my toes. As I stood there, I remembered that holy moment last November, when I got lost wandering in the Massachusetts woods. The words “spiritual singleness” had appeared, ex nihilo, and set me on this journey. And now I stood here at the monastery’s front door, just waiting, knowing that I wouldn’t be there long, that soon there would be a pause before the first antiphon. I would again rap my knuckles on the glass, and someone would hear me and open the door into spiritual community.

A woman around my age came to the door. I had met her a few times at Mass in the summer. She was with her husband and two small kids, and they sat clustered around the piano bench where Sister Mary Frances sat behind the keyboard. When I walked into the small chapel, Sister Karen pointed to a vacant chair they’d saved for me. It was Sister Mary Virginia’s chair—she had broken her hip a few weeks ago and was unable to come to morning prayer.

I took the seat—Mary Virginia’s seat—and felt my own spiritual poverty. Despite everything, the sisters welcomed me to sit as an equal, to be among the choir, to sing antiphons and pass around the golden bowl of Communion wafers.

As I took my place in the chapel, I knew that I was welcome here, even though it’s not my home. There are kids present, but they’re not my kids. I am not a sister, not covenanted to this community. My vows were made to Josh, my promises to have and to hold. He is at home, making breakfast for our own children, washing last night’s dishes. I am here to foster my own spiritual identity, to practice my faith and learn from these companions, so I can return to my family and love them well.

I picked up the prayer book with the morning’s antiphons and flipped to the front cover. The book was published in the mid-1970s, and there, in delicate cursive that reminded me of my grandmother’s writing, was the name Sister Mary Regina. When I asked Sister Katherine about it later, she said the monastery holds on to the prayer books of sisters who have since passed for visitors to use. When I told her my book had Sister Mary Regina’s name, she closed her eyes for a moment. “She was a real leader in our community,” she said. “I miss her. We were very close.”

I examined the book more closely as we prayed through the Psalms and sang hymns and antiphons. The pages were soft and rounded at the edges, the spine cracked from decades of daily use. Each page bore pencil marks from where this now-dead sister had written chant breaks. I sensed the pages themselves were soaked in her prayer.

After the Scripture readings, there was silence. One sister spoke, “The Psalm today makes me think about what’s happening on the border.” Most monastic communities do not encourage individuals to add their own commentary in the midst of morning prayer, and I suppose that if a person was in a larger community then the practice might not work. But these sisters are intimate. They see their charism as primarily relational, a reflection of the biblical Mary and Elizabeth, two women that bless each other and bear witness to God’s work in the world.

The little kids moved back and forth between Sister Mary Frances and Sister Katherine, who held them on their laps. Midway through Psalm 147 (“when the world is like ice”), Sister Brenda’s phone pinged. She lifted up the screen, which was open to the Lyft app. In a few minutes, she motioned to Sister Mary Paula, and they made a hasty exit, followed by Sister Mary Frances.

Sister Karen explained. “Sorry for the interruptions this morning—we’ve had to push back prayer and it conflicts with some meetings, so everything is a little messed up.” Then she launched back into the prayers of intercession.

Later, when Sister Katherine and I sat by the fire, she reflected on morning prayer. In the year I have known the Visitation Sisters, they have experienced big changes. They watched their sister convent close and welcomed a new member, Sister Mary Paula, from that monastery into their community. Despite all that transition, they continued in their ancient rhythms, gathering to chant Psalms from old books saturated in faithful prayer.

“But that’s just the way things are, and it’s what makes Salesian spirituality work so well,” Sister Katherine said. “You hold on to the schedule, but you have to be flexible. You have to go with the interruptions and changes of plans. And who knows how the Spirit will show up next?”

She took a bite of jelly toast before going on. “I can’t remember Saint Francis de Sales’s exact words on this, but he said that a pliable heart will not break.”

A pliable heart. Not completely malleable, like playdough. That would hold no center, no sense of itself. But pliable connotes something firm but bendy—like the wand in Mr. Olliander’s shop that is eventually matched with Harry Potter. Marriage requires a pliable heart, a willingness to bend, to yield to the other, to see God in the interruptions.

“O Lord, open my lips,” I sing with my not-sisters, longing for the man wrestling with our kids on the living room rug, the one who brings me coffee each morning without fail. I want him to be my anam cara—soul friend. I want to be one in spirit.

We will likely never share a religion again, but our vows together still hold, and so does our love for one another. Our children are our common, daily work during this season of life, the ones we nurture and guide and hold close. Each day, we build a home for them to know safety and love.

“O Lord, open my lips,” the nuns are praying most mornings when I am home instead, boiling eggs, buttering toast. We don’t recite the Liturgy of the Hours or even pray together much in our agnostic-Christian home. We have other rhythms: family meals, school and work, weekend hikes, movie nights. In between our sacred daily work, we talk—sharing our own commentary in another ordinary day.

I know that many people are praying for us. Our parents, the Visitation Sisters, my church community at Calvary.

I am grateful for their prayers, but I no longer feel fear’s tightness in my chest. I am learning to take deep breaths, to trust Josh’s eternal fate to a greater power than I possess. “O Lord, open my lips,” I hum to myself each morning, unable to keep myself from praising a God who opens his sacred heart to agnostics and doubters alike.

In the first years after Josh’s deconversion, I would whisper to the Holy Spirit: “This is on you to woo him back.” Now, after walking with the Benedictines and Visitation Sisters, I rest in Sister Theresa’s wisdom that everyone is on a journey with God, whether they know it or not. Josh most likely will never be a Christian again. And if God is really good, I can still trust God to be good after death.

I don’t tell my children that Josh is going to hell because he is no longer a Christian. I don’t want them to feel the way I did in elementary school, when I sat down my best friend at the back of the school bus and tried to convert her to Christianity. I don’t want my kids to live with the fear that God might forever cut him off from his family in the afterlife.

I wear the image of Saint Francis de Sales on a little medallion around my neck. Francis, the patron saint of writers, wrote a voluminous treatise on the love of God. But Francis didn’t always know God’s love. He lived for several years in morbid terror of losing his own salvation. Francis worried that he was not among the elect. You were either in or out. Saved or damned. But how could you know?

This question sent de Sales into a flurry of existential angst. After months of torment, de Sales stumbled into a church and knelt before a statue of the Black Madonna. There he prayed the Memorare and declared that, in fact, he didn’t care one whit if he was saved or damned. It was enough to live for God this day, to choose the everlasting water of life in the present moment. Even if he was going to hell, Francis de Sales was still going to live for God.

A strange and sweeping peace rushed over his soul, putting out the fires of anguish that had tormented him. And from that day forward, Saint Francis began proclaiming the love of God as a missionary—but it wasn’t unreached people groups that he converted. He targeted Calvinists, Protestant Christians, the ones living under the predestination theology that had once terrified him, and he spoke to them about the all-encompassing love of God. Saint Francis saw humans as inherently good. He warned fellow Christians against focusing unduly on hell and damnation but instead preached a message of hope, of comfort, of joy. His theology didn’t traffic in fear but in trust that God is good.

When I dig into my limited understanding of salvation, I find comfort in Francis’s decision to stop focusing on what happens after death and instead live for God today. I don’t have to live in dread every day of my married life. These are the truths I hold close: that perfect love drives out fear. That nothing can separate us from the love of God. That God is good. That God is bigger and better and more mysterious than we can comprehend.

A few years ago, I attended a writing conference where I heard Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber give a blessing over the audience:

“Blessed are the agnostics,” she said, riffing on the Beatitudes while extending her muscular, tattooed arms over us. “Blessed are they who doubt. Those who aren’t sure, who can still be surprised. . . . Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction. Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean.”

As she spoke, I felt those blessings covering us all: the in-laws who worry about their child’s soul after death, the alienated son who no longer believes. It even covers me, the one who doubts, who isn’t sure, but is still hanging on to faith by her fingernails.

Maybe we will all someday be surprised. Maybe my in-laws’ prayers will be answered, and Josh will return to faith in Christ. Maybe our twenty-first-century understanding of heaven and hell will be different from our actual experience of death. Maybe God’s love reaches nonbelievers in ways and through channels we don’t yet comprehend.

I hope we are surprised. All of us.