nobody... no body

I had so many selfish reasons for entering the convent. I wasn't aware (at the time) they were selfish, but am discovering it now. For one, I was sure I needed structure in my prayer life. I could not pray the daily office by myself once, let alone four times a day; my internal discipline was nonexistent. I had plenty of quiet already. I had friends and faith and beauty. Why did I think those were not enough? Or at least not what I needed? They just weren't. I needed a new way to express what God intended me to be, or so I told myself. I needed a better venue and the community looked like a fit.

I have since learned that people often visit several communities before deciding to submit an application. It never occurred to me. I never even checked out other orders. I had been welcomed here, why would I shop around? And there was that belief that God had pointed me toward this community anyway. I had taken writing classes with Madeleine L'Engle here. I had been offered (and accepted) a one-woman art exhibition. I was drawn to the wild and whacky earthiness some of the younger sisters exhibited. The older sisters scared me a little... so stern. In living among them, that's been turned upside down. The older sisters are living examples of compassionate humility. They have their priorities in vertical alignment with God. All else is secondary. And as they have aged right before my eyes, I've been given glimpses of their wry humor and gracious acceptance of this difficult transition. The younger sisters (like me) are still getting their acts together, and that's been a necessary disillusionment. I would not have traded this experience for the world.

Another thing that's been turned upside down is my reliance on the daily office (or in monastic parlance the Divine Office.) The only thing divine about it is the community of other sisters. Jesus said: "when two or three are gathered together in my name, I will be present." Sometimes it is only two or three of us, as we struggle with the language of war, of exclusively masculine divinity. The liturgy does not always feed us spiritually, and so we struggle. The ancient music, the chanting, is haunting and beautiful... but is it enough? Cross that with psalms that insist upon heaping high the corpses and it gets confusing, annoying, distracting.

So it's beginning to come down to the simplest formula of all: that the Christian life to be lived, understood, worked... has to be in some community. It's where the rubber meets the road. The body of Christ is nobody when it's only a body of one.