Meg- The Top 5 Lessons I Learned From My Journey Through Consecrated Life
I often wonder how to describe my 7 years spent in a community of lay consecrated women. To break down that lofty term for you, basically I lived like a nun or religious sister. We had a fairly monastic schedule, especially in my early years. Every minute of my day was scheduled out for me, with sparse ten minutes of free time here and there. In total, I think I prayed 3.5 to 4 hours every day. We took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Someday I hope to share a bit more about what led me into consecrated life. Today I want to share a bit more about what lessons have remained with me after I left.
The circumstances of my time as a consecrated woman were far from ideal. I joined in October of 2008. By February of 2009 the news broke about the horrific private life of the founder of our community, a man up to that point virtually all of us considered to be a saint. I won’t go into it here. Google “Fr. Marcial Maciel '' and it will all come up. It’s pretty hard to find let alone focus on God’s personal call when the organization you have just entered is going up in flames. I remember reading St. Ignatius’ rules for discernment (specifically his rules for desolation) but would turn to God in prayer asking, okay God but how can know what is a true spiritual desolation telling me I don’t belong in this vocation, and what is the desolation from this chaos in which I’m living? By temperament I’m fiercely loyal when others are suffering. And the loyalty that came over my heart to remain within the community and provide for my fellow sisters in distress clouded the spiritual detachment that is required for healthy discernment.
On top of this, the manipulation of the founder had left its mark in our community in the unhealthy restrictions, rules, and mechanisms of control that took years to unpack. Frankly I think there’s still unpacking to do but that is no longer my task. On top of that, many of the leaders in the organization were deeply broken people (victims themselves in many ways) who in turn became spiritual and emotional abusers to those entrusted to their care. It was brutal. Suffice it to say—I’ve seen it all.
And yet as I type this, I can truly say that I don’t regret or pine (much) for the years I spent living out a vocation that the Lord was in fact not calling me to embrace. The rare moments of grief are usually during college football season when I turn to my husband and shed a silly tear that I don’t have a big school to cheer for as my own. But truthfully as I look at the tapestry of my life today I can say that on the other side of the mess of scattered threads shines a beautiful image that is the fruit of each and every moment of the wild decade of my 20s.
So without further ado, here are the 5 BIG lessons that I carry with me from my “convent days.””
1. You must learn to discern between God and God’s works
This is a phrase taken from Venerable Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, one of my spiritual heroes. In the midst of our community being rocked to the core by scandal and abuse, I remember sitting in our formation center chapel with Cardinal Van Thuan’s 10 Rules for Life. I was yelling at God at all the crazy things that were happening to me and wondering if he really cared, or was really present. Lord I’m here to follow you and spend my life serving you. Why are you allowing all this hurt and dysfunction?
The response came through this book. In it Cardinal Van Thuan shares his prayer of frustration as a prisoner of the communist regime in Vietnam for 13 years. His experience was so powerful that I’m going to put it all right here:
Alone in my prison cell, I continued to be tormented by the fact that I was forty-eight years old, in the prime of my life, that I had worked for eight years as a bishop and gained so much pastoral experience and there I was isolated, inactive and far from my people... (1700km)
One night, from the depths of my heart I could hear a voice advising me:
"Why torment yourself? You must discern between God and the works of God. Everything you have done and desire to continue to do, pastoral visits, training seminarians, sisters and members of religious orders, building schools, evangelizing non-Christians. All of that is excellent work, the work of God but it is not God! If God wants you to give it all up and put the work into his hands, do it and trust him. God will do the work infinitely better than you; he will entrust the work to others who are more able than you. You have only to choose God and not the works of God!"
Then and there I knew I had my answer. And it stayed with me for the entirety of my time within the community. Any scandal or new revelation of evil in the Church or in our community (and there were plenty during those years) brought me back to that original distinction taught by my spiritual friend: God and the things of God.
If it allow something to steal my peace, it’s usually because I’m focusing on the things of God rather than God Himself.
I also think this distinction gave me the ability to discern out of consecrated life very peacefully. The core of my life hadn’t changed (God himself) and therefore a secondary change (my vocational path) didn’t shake my peace. Which leads me to my next point…
2. Whatever you do, whatever transition you’re in…find the core pillars of the Christian spiritual life.
This came as I was transitioning out of consecrated life. I no longer had a schedule telling me I had to pray. I no longer had a chapel in my house (I still miss that every day). My spiritual director urged me to identify a rule of life that fit into my new life as a single woman, working a busy job and finishing graduate school. Those pillars were: Morning offering, the Eucharist, devotion to the Blessed Mother, spiritual reading, confession and the Word of God. I wrote each of them on a piece of paper and decided how I would incorporate that into my life.
When I was engaged and planning a wedding I had to revisit that list. When I was a newlywed, I had to revisit the pillars again. And again right after our daughter was born. (think, spiritual reading on audible while breastfeeding). And then it hit me: all those years in consecrated life imbued a spiritual rhythm into the fabric of my days that I get to take with me into every season of my life. Holiness means continuing to construct those pillars again and again. In every vocation, for every person, they are essentially the same.
3. Perfection vs. Perfectionism
When I started my journey of discernment in consecrated life, I was very eager. I wanted to do everything I could to love God as He had never been loved before. As I was learning the ropes of community life I wanted to get everything “just right,” and do all the things that characterized a “good consecrated woman.” My heart was in the right place and I imagine Jesus loved the way my heart was offering myself to Him the best way I knew how.
And yet the way I was seeking God in those early days needed some maturing. Sadly those efforts to “do everything just right,” were augmented by a formation culture that focused on perfectionism in external behavior to the detriment of personal integration. More on personal integration in a later post. We sat through hours of lectures and corrections on external behavior. I literally got a correction one day because I didn’t wear my slippers across the communal dormitory to my little bed. This developed in me a somewhat neurotic obsession with external actions as the measure of one’s holiness. I was wracked with guilt if I was late to chapel because I had been wrestling with my thick, unruly head of hair and couldn’t get it to sit in the dignified way that marked a “good consecrated woman.”
It’s important to note, none of those external behaviors were bad. In fact, many of them were good and some of them I continue to this day. The problem was that it left no room for the thing that unites me to Christ the most: my weakness surrendered to Him. WE miss the substance for the shadow if we think about external actions to the detriment of conforming our whole person--mind, heart, soul, strength--to Christ. Holiness is fundamentally about surrender in the context of a loving relationship. One summer I was lucky enough to make a personal retreat and re-read the letters of Saint Paul with fresh eyes. In that time I experienced a deep conversion around the idea of holiness. I wrote it down in this chart and carried it with me for years to overcome my false concepts:
4. Don’t JUST offer God the parts of you that feel “worthy” of Him
This came as a natural consequence of what I just wrote above. I had been crippled under my idea of perfectionism. What ended up happening in my spiritual life was an unfortunate “closing off” of me that didn’t feel worthy of God. It started to fragment my spirituality. I was like the hostess who stuffs her closet full of all the junk around her house 5 minutes before her guests arrive. That was me before walking into prayer. If perfectionism was the goal, I had no place for the parts of my life that didn’t seem….well, perfect.
Through those years of struggle I gradually learned that I was closing myself off from real friendship with Jesus because I wasn’t entering into the relationship exactly as I was. One day in prayer, I felt an inner voice say “You just give me the part of you that feels worthy, and I miss the real you”. I started to gradually open myself to give God everything in my prayer: my good and bad feelings, my constant mistakes…I’d even swear at Him sometimes just to remind myself that “He was my loving Father and he could take it.” He could take all the parts of me, even what felt like “too much.”
If you’ve ever read the spiritual journal of Pope St. John XXIII from when he was pope you’ll know that it was filled with daily conversations to the Lord in prayer about his overeating, his anxiety and his repeat failings. Prayer is better when the real you is there.
5. He reconciles all things in Himself (Col 1:19)
This one might be my favorite lesson. I thought of calling it, “God won't let you mess up your life if you surrender to Him” but St. Paul’s opener in Colossians was much more profound. I highly recommend you read it slowly sometime and apply it to your life.
Prior to my experience of discerning in and out of consecrated life the idea of “God’s Will” filled me with a tremendous amount of anxiety. I thought of His will as an elaborate scavenger hunt: God provides me with cryptic “clues” which I have to solve and unravel so that I know exactly where to turn next. If I misread one clue it will lead me further and further off the marked path until I wind up alone, unhappy and unfulfilled.
An attitude like this can fill every little moment and decision with so much pressure! “Man if I get this wrong, if this isn’t what God really wants, I’m doomed! I’ve lost my chance at finding my purpose in life!” Or do you remember those books in middle school where you could choose the next step of the narrative and the plot would alter dramatically based on each tiny decision? I hated those!
I’ve come to realize that God is a loving Father, not a master clue-giver. The greatness of God’s creativity is that he can take all things in my life--my history, inclinations, mistakes, successes, fears-- and take it up into Himself through the power of His Redemptive love and give it a meaning that in turn discloses the form of my own receptivity to His love.
The form of my response to the love of Jesus is called...my vocation.
Pope St. John Paul II said in almost everything He ever wrote that Jesus alone shows us the meaning of human existence. In being loved by Him and entering into His own relationship to the Father, we find our own personal identity and mission on this earth. It’s a wonderful adventure, not a math equation!
See how that’s way more complex and way more beautiful than the cryptic game of clue? And how it’s way beyond the realm of “messing up, getting it wrong, needing every little action and decision to be “perfect?” This might not give you an immediate answer to your vocational questions but it does invite you into the only relationship where those questions are eventually answered, in His good time.
In that relationship, we say “yes” like Mary did everyday. Knowing that we don’t have to have the burden of figuring it all out, right here and now. God loves you and your life is safe in His hands. Say “yes” to today.
“For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” Col 1: 19-20
