If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked this question …
I’ve certainly asked myself this same question while I was in the process of trying to figure out what crazy thing God was calling me to. I often wondered what I could do as a nun that would be so totally different from being an “ordinary” person. I thought that if I could just name that one thing that was so exclusively nun-esque then I could decide whether to be a nun, or not to be a nun. That was the question.
I never did come up with that one thing, yet I know that this is the lifestyle for me. Being a nun “fits.” It’s the thing that will make me most fully myself, just like for my blood sister–being married and a mom “fits” who she is and makes her most fully herself.
I guess over time (9 years to be exact … no rush) the question, “what makes a nun different,” lost its meaning as I began to live the life. I fell in love not with the idea of being a nun, but with the lived reality of being a nun. I couldn’t answer the question by thinking about it, but I could answer it by living into it. Rainer Maria Rilke’s words ring true here:
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
Letters to a Young Poet
And yet the question lingers: what makes a nun different? My friends ask me, my family ask me, strangers who happen to find out that I’m a nun ask me. So, I continue to think about this question. Over the next few posts I hope to approach this question from a variety of angles. Stay tuned. Please post your comments–how would you respond to this question?
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