A few days after Halloween I got up the gumption to contact the Visitation Sisters. I knew I had to go back. I scrolled through ministry opportunities on their website: retreats, immersion experiences, and something called “Visitation Companions,” which was described as a way to “partner with the Sisters in ministry.” That sounds right, I thought to myself, then sent a short email asking how I could learn more.
It wasn’t until ten days later, when I was at a week-long writing workshop in Massachusetts, that a reply popped into my email inbox after lunch. A woman named Jody wrote to say that my “message was timely” because a new cohort of Visitation Companions was just beginning. She explained that companions must undergo a yearlong spiritual formation process, meeting monthly to pray together and to study the Salesian order to which the sisters belong. Would I be free to stop by the monastery for Mass sometime soon to discuss it?
Yes, I wrote back, explaining that I was out of town but would visit when I returned. Yes, I thought, closing my laptop on the desk in the hotel room. There it was, that feeling. A resonance, a rightness.
I sat on the hotel bed with my copy of Give Us This Day, the Catholic prayer book I had been reading on and off ever since Kathleen Norris had handed one to me. I thumbed through, looking for the day’s date, crossing the weekly heading: Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time, I was learning, was a liturgical placeholder for the in-between time. Not Easter or Advent or Lent, just a humdrum Tuesday.
I skimmed the morning prayer, stopping at my favorite daily section called Blessed Among Us. In three short paragraphs, it pays homage to some notable figure in the church—a saint, a martyr, a writer, a nun. In many of these stories, medieval young women with considerable wealth are married and cannot live out their vocation because of their cruel husbands or overbearing parents. But then the husband dies, or the parents renounce their daughter, and the young woman throws off her familial obligations and joins a monastic order, selling all her possessions and giving her sizable fortune (if she still has one) to found hospitals and schools and charitable works for the poor. In many of these stories, the saintly woman finds new intimacy with God—becoming the bride of Christ, “married” to Jesus.
Some might pity these women with their strange, ascetic practices. Their sexual repression and over-the-top devotions seem, to modern eyes, off-kilter. Maybe she was just mentally ill, I thought while reading about Saint Teresa of Ávila, who had mystical unions with the Holy Spirit. Yet I often found myself admiring the gutsy female saints. Most of the women lived in an age when they had little control over their destiny, not having a say in their marriages and no rights to property. Maybe submitting to Jesus and committing to a religious order was a way to reclaim agency in their lives. Less fatalistic weirdos and more like early feminists.
I set down the prayer book and checked the clock by the bed. There was still time for a walk before the next workshop session, so I grabbed my winter coat from the open suitcase on the floor. My hotel was on the grounds of a nature preserve, with marked trails that circled a reservoir. Each day of the weeklong workshop I made myself go outside and walk—away from the stuffy conference room and swivel chairs, away from glowing screens and writerly insecurities.
I stepped out of the dimly lit lobby and into the autumn light. It was a cool November day, one where the light filtered through trees in patches and the wind rustled aspen leaves like pinwheels, and the air felt delicious and brisk as it moved through the woods. Dead brown leaves covered the ground, no longer crisp but old and soggy, like bran flakes left in milk too long, and the walking trail around the reservoir was roped with tree roots, some climbing up, raising their bony knuckles, others slender and snake-like, ready to catch an unassuming ankle or stub an unsuspecting toe.
Before I transferred to Wheaton College as a sophomore, I had attended a small Christian college in Massachusetts, where I spent hours walking in New England woods like these, following skinny mountain-bike trails that led to broad paths that circled ponds. One trail I frequented then led to a ropes course where students lifted their fellow classmates over a tall wooden wall in a group challenge or belayed each other as they walked across elevated logs and rope bridges thirty feet in the air. I had considered everything in those woods as potential metaphors for the spiritual life: the belay rope, the carabiner, the wind in the trees, the climbing wall, the blindfold, the obstacle course, the compass needle always pointing to true north.
This was the language of my faith then, how I grew to understand God and how God worked in the world—through metaphor, through mosquito bites and fighting back tears on the rock wall and awkward team-building exercises. No detail was inconsequential to my meaning-making gaze. A pebble in my shoe was a sin I kept carrying. The half-hidden moon was God’s presence, guiding us forward on a hike that had extended long into the night. The twittering of a bird was the praise of creation. And the roots of a tree climbing over rocks or clinging to ledges, or small plants springing up in cracks of boulders, were all signs of God’s unrelenting nourishment in stony soil. Likewise, twisting tree branches, the trunks that hunched like a cook over her soup, were always moving to where light fell through canopy. Though the tree sometimes bent over backward, it was wise to reach for sunlight that would become its food.
My faith had been less steady in recent years. I was teetering on the edge of belief and disbelief every day, not always sure which side I would land on.
Yet on this hike I fell into old habits, rambling aloud to God about my uncertain spirituality, about how I didn’t know what to believe in. I picked my way around treacherous New England rocks, following the trail until it petered out. The orange blazes marked on trees with spray paint were nowhere to be seen, and the route sputtered into earth and roots. With my eyes always on my feet, always watching for the next step, I had kept myself from tripping, but now I was lost.
“Great,” I said aloud. “Just great.” Who was I talking to? God? The trees? I checked my phone for the time and wondered whether I would get back before the next workshop started.
A friend of mine once compared adulthood to bushwhacking. There’s no highlighted trail on a map telling you where to go and what swampy ground to avoid. Yet Christianity did give us one kind of map, and it’s one that Josh and I followed for a long time. Find a Christian spouse. Don’t have sex before marriage. Get on the right track by going to church together, joining a small group, and nurturing your mutual spiritual growth through Bible study. Do all these things, follow these rules, take these surefire paths, and you will protect yourself from sin and danger and brokenness.
But, for me, adulthood and grown-up faith has meant bushwhacking. I wonder if it’s that’s way for everyone, even for those who mostly follow the straight and narrow and do the “right” things. Some kind of disappointment will upend your life sooner or later, whether it be divorce or infertility or illness or adultery or unemployment or plain old selfishness. Franciscan Richard Rohr writes that the first half of life is when your childhood understanding of faith and default mode of operating work just fine. For many, it’s in the second half of life that it all falls apart and something has to give. There needs to be a new way of operating, of being in the world, that embraces the messiness of a life no one expected to be living.
There is no trail here, but I kept walking, kept my eyes on my feet and the twisted, gnarled roots. As I made my own path along the water, I thought about the nuns on Fremont Avenue, about the sisters at Saint Benedict’s Monastery, about wild women saints that served God in miraculous ways. I wondered why I was so attracted to them and their work.
The light shifted, and fragments of sunshine sliced through the air around me like shards of glass. I stopped, my senses heightened: the sound of water along the shore, the smell of cold wind, the feel of tree roots under my sneakers. I listened to my own breath. It was a singular moment, almost holy. Were the nuns praying right now? The light continued to shift, illuminating new circles of earth around my feet.
Then something remarkable happened. I heard the words “spiritual singleness,” right there in the middle of the woods. Two words I had never put together before were now in my consciousness, ex nihilo. I sensed a puzzle piece clicking into place.
Where had the words come from? Were they from God? Was it just my subconscious making connections under the waters, sending up a missive?
Maybe that’s what this is about. The celibate nuns, the saints, my clinging to faith, my desire to partner with the sisters in my neighborhood. Somehow the nuns had figured out a way to God without an earthly husband. I’m spiritually single, and so are they.
I stopped to type the phrase into my phone, sending myself a text message so I wouldn’t forget. I stuck my phone into my back pocket, then turned to face the woods. An orange blaze was just now visible through the trees.