People sometimes ask if nuns ever dislike each other, and recently I was asked if we nuns ever have to work side-by-side with those with a different ideology. With our myriad personalities, spiritualities, family styles, and cultural backgrounds, the answer to these questions, of course, is yes.
One of the first things we learn when we begin to live in community is that it is not a collection of friends; it is not a family. Religious community holds all the challenges that any non-family, non-best friend group experiences. This is one of the purifying aspects of becoming part of a religious community. Diversity of background, thought, preference, and opinion is a gift, and thus makes a community rich and deepens its effectiveness in its mission to the world.
Over the years, when I have lived with someone I found hard to understand or who really irritated me, I would return to the realization that God had called each of us to this community and to this particular house at this time. What I have discovered as I have grown is that this person is my teacher at this time. They are in my life to teach me a lesson and it is my spiritual work to figure out where I need to grow. In my younger days I guess I thought God had messed things up by putting so-and-so in my space. Or that it was "just my luck" that we’d end up together. Now I see the movement of grace.
Living or working with someone who is very different or even distressing to us can do so much for our spiritual growth. The author James Finley once said on a retreat, “The person who drives you crazy is your spiritual guru.” My how I hated hearing that at that point of my growth! The irritations or frustrations of rubbing shoulders with different, trying people helps, like sandpaper, smooth our rough edges.
Secondly, and leading to even deeper growth, is the grace of encountering our shadow. In psychology, the shadow is the part of us we don’t like to see, and that often is revealed to us in other people. Many people are different than us but it doesn’t bother us. So if someone really gets to us, it definitely tells us something is touching our shadow.
To summarize, there is a built-in grace about living with diversity in community that helps us grow personally and spiritually. One of the gifts of religious life is teaching us to love and appreciate those whom we may not have chosen to love. Very good for the soul!
