Excerpts from

THE CLOISTER WALK

By Kathleen Norris

Celibate Passion

The Cherub was stationed at the gate of the earthly paradise with

his flaming sword to teach us that no one will enter the heavenly

paradise who is not pierced with the sword of love.

- St. Francis de Sales, TREATISE ON THE LOVE OF GOD

Celibacy is a field day for ideologues. Conservative Catholics, particularly those who were raised in the pre-Vatican II church, tend to speak of celibacy as if it were an idealized, angelic state, while feminist theologians such as Uta Ranke-Heinemann say, angrily, that “celibate hatred of sex is hatred of women.” That celibacy constitutes the hatred of sex seems to be a given in the popular mythology of contemporary America, and we need only look at newspaper accounts of sexual abuse by priests to see evidence of celibacy that isn’t working. One could well assume that this is celibacy, impure and simple. And this is unfortunate, because celibacy practiced rightly is not at all a hatred of sex; in fact it has the potential to address the sexual idolatry of our culture in a most helpful way.

One benefit of the nearly ten years that I’ve been a Benedictine oblate has been the development of deep friendships with celibate men and women. This has led me to ponder celibacy that works, practiced by people who are fully aware of themselves as sexual beings but who express their sexuality in a celibate way. That is, they manage to sublimate their sexual energies toward another purpose than sexual intercourse and procreation. Are they perverse, their lives necessarily stunted? Cultural prejudice would say yes, but I have my doubts. I’ve seen too many wise old monks and nuns whose lengthy formation in celibate practice has allowed them to incarnate hospitality in the deepest sense. In them, the constraints of celibacy have somehow been transformed into an openness that attracts people of all ages, all social classes. They exude a sense of freedom. They also genderbend, at least in my dreams. Sister Jeremy will appear as a warrior on horseback, Father Robert as a wise old woman tending a fire.

The younger celibates of my acquaintance are more edgy. Still contending mightily with what one friend calls “the raging orchestra of my hormones,” they are more obviously struggling to contain their desires for intimacy, for physical touch, within the bounds of celibacy. Often they find their loneliness intensified by the incomprehension of others. In a culture that denies the value of their striving, they are made to feel like fools, or worse.

Americans are remarkable tone-deaf when it comes to the expression of sexuality. The sexual formation that many of us receive is like the refrain of an old Fugs’ song: “Why do ya like boobs a lot – ya gotta like boobs a lot.” The jiggle of tits and ass, penis and pectorals, assault us everywhere – billboards, magazines, television, movies. Orgasm becomes just another goal; we undress for success. It’s no wonder that in all this powerful noise, the quiet tones of celibacy are lost; that we have such trouble comprehending what it could mean to dedicate one’s sexual drives in such a way that genital activity and procreation are precluded. But celibate people have taught me that celibacy, practiced rightly, does indeed have something valuable to say to the rest of us. Specifically, they have helped me better appreciate both the nature of friendship, and what it means to be married.

They have also helped me recognize that celibacy, like monogamy, is not a matter of the will disdaining and conquering the desires of the flesh but a discipline requiring what many people think of as undesirable, if not impossible – a conscious form of sublimation. Like many people who came into adulthood during the sexual permissive 1960s, I’ve tended to equate sublimation with repression. But my celibate friends have made me see the light; accepting sublimation as a normal part of adulthood makes me more realistic about human sexual capacities and expression. It helps me to respect the bonds and boundaries of marriage.

Any marriage has times of separation, ill-health, or just plain crankiness, in which sexual intercourse is ill-advised. And it is precisely the skills of celibate friendship – fostering intimacy through letters, conversation, performing mundane tasks together (thus rendering them pleasurable), savoring the holy simplicity of a shared meal, or a walk together at dusk – that can help a marriage survive the rough spots. When you can’t make love physically, you figure out other ways to do it.

Monastic people are celibate for a very practical reason: the kind of community life to which they aspire can’t be sustained if people are pairing off. Even in churches in which the clergy are often married – Episcopal and Russian Orthodox, for example – their monks and nuns are celibate. And while monastic novices may be carried along for a time on the swells of communal spirit, when that blissful period inevitably comes to an end, the loneliness is profound. One gregarious monk in his early thirties told me that just as he thought he’d settled into the monastery, he woke up in a panic one morning, wondering if he’d wake up lonely every morning for the rest of his life.

Another monk I know regards celibacy as an expression of the essential human loneliness, a perspective that helps him as a hospital chaplain, when he is called to minister to the dying. I knew him when he was still resisting his celibate call – it usually came out as anger directed toward his abbot and community, more rarely as misogyny – and I was fascinated to observe the process by which he came to accept the sacrifices that a celibate, monastic life requires. He’s easier to be with now; he’s a better friend.

This is not irony so much as grace, that in learning to be faithful to his vow of celibacy, the monk developed his talent for relationship. It’s a common occurence. I’ve seen the demands of Benedictine hospitality – that they receive all visitors as Christ – convert shy young men who fear women into monks who can enjoy their company. I’ve witnessed this process of transformation at work in older monks as well. One friend, who had entered the monastery very young, was, when I first met him, still suffering acutely from an inadequate and harmful sexual formation. Taught that as a monk he should avoid women, he faced a crisis when he encountered women as students and colleagues on a college faculty. Fear of his own sexual desires translated all too easily into misogyny. As a good Benedictine, however, he recognized, prayed over, and explored the possibilities for conversion in this situation. Simply put, he’s over it now. I’m one of many women who count him as a dear friend, including several who became serious scholars because he urged them on.

One reason I enjoy celibates is that they tend to value friendship very highly. And my friendships with celibate men, both gay and straight, give me some hope that men and women don’t live in alternate universes. In 1990s America, this sometimes feels like a countercultural perspective. Male celibacy, in particular, can become radically countercultural if it is perceived as a rejection of the consumerist model of sexuality, a model that reduces women to the sum of her parts. I have never had a monk friend make an insinuating remark along the lines of, “You have beautiful eyes” (or legs, breasts, knees, elbows, nostrils), the usual catalogue of remarks that women grow accustomed to deflecting. A monk is supposed to give up the idea of possessing anything and, in this culture, that includes women.

Ideally, in giving up the sexual pursuit of women (whether as demons or as idealized vessels of purity), the male celibate learns to relate to them as human beings. That many fail to do so, that the power structures of the Catholic church all but dictate failure in this regard, comes as no surprise. What is a surprise is what happens when it works. Once, after I’d spent a week in a monastery, I boarded a crowded Greyhound bus and took the first available seat. My seatmate, a man, soon engaged me in conversation, and it took me a while to realize that he wasn’t simply being friendly, he was coming on to me. I remember feeling foolish for being so slow to catch on. I remember thinking, “No wonder this guy is acting so strange; he didn’t take a vow of celibacy.”

When it works, when men have truly given up the idea of possessing a woman, healing can occur. I once met a woman in a monastery guest house who had come there because she was pulling herself together after being raped, and said she needed to feel safe around men again. I’ve seen young monks astonish an obese and homely college student by listening to her with as much interest and respect as to her conventionally pretty roommate. On my fortieth birthday, as I happily blew out four candles on a cupcake (“one for each decade,” a monk in his twenties cheerfully proclaimed), I realized that I could enjoy growing old with these guys. They were helping me to blow away my fears of middle age.

As celibacy takes hold in a person, over the years, as monastic values supersede the values of the culture outside the monastery, celibates become people who can radically affect those of us out “in the world,” if only because they’ve learned to listen without possessiveness, without imposing themselves. With someone who is practicing celibacy well, we may sense that we’re being listened to in a refreshingly deep way. And this is the purpose of celibacy, not to attain some impossibly cerebral goal mistakenly conceived as “holiness” but to make oneself available to others, body and soul. Celibacy, simply put, is a form of ministry – not an achievement one can put on a résumé but a subtle form of service to others. In theological terms, one dedicates one’s sexuality to God through Jesus Christ, a concept and a terminology I find extremely hard to grasp. All I can do is catch a glimpse of people who are doing it, incarnating celibacy in a mysterious, pleasing, and gracious way.

The attractiveness of the celibate is that he or she can make us feel appreciated, enlarged, no matter who we are. I have two nun friends who invariably have that effect on me, whatever the circumstances of our lives on the infrequent occasions when we meet. The thoughtful way in which they converse, listening and responding with complete attention, seems always a marvel. And when I first met a man I’ll call Tom, he had much the same effect on me. I wrote in my notebook, “such tenderness in a man . . . and a surprising, gentle, kindly grasp of who I am.” (Poets aren’t used to being listened to, let alone understood, by theologians.) As our friendship deepened, I found that even brief, casual conversations with him would often inspire me to dive into old, half-finished poems in an attempt to bring them to fruition.

I realized, of course, that I had found a remarkable friend, a Muse. I was also aware that Tom and I were fast approaching the rocky shoals of infatuation, a man and a woman, both decidedly heterosexual, responding to each other in unmistakably sexual ways. We laughed; we had playful conversations as well as serious ones; we took delight in each other. At times we were alarmingly responsive to one another, and it was all too easy to fantasize about expressing that responsiveness in physical ways.

The danger was real, but not insurmountable; I sensed that if our infatuation were to develop into love, that is, to ground itself in grace rather than utility, our respect for each other’s commitments – his to celibacy, mine to monogamy – would make the boundaries of behavior very clear. We had few regrets, and yet for both of us there was an underlying sadness, the pain of something incomplete. Suddenly, the difference between celibate friendship and celibate passion had become all too clear to me; at times the pain was excruciating.

Tom and I each faced a crisis the year we met – his mother died, I suffered a disastrous betrayal – and it was the intensity of these unexpected, unwelcome experiences that helped me to understand that in the realm of the sacred, what seems incomplete or unattainable may be abundance, after all. Human relationships are by their nature incomplete – after twenty-one years, my husband remains a mystery to me, and I to him, and that is as it should be. Only hope allows us to know and enjoy the depth of our intimacy.

Appreciating Tom’s presence in my life as a miraculous, unmerited gift helped me to place our relationship in its proper, religious context, and also to understand why it was that when I’d seek him out to pray with me, I’d always leave feeling so much better than when I came. This was celibacy at its best, a man’s sexual energies so devoted to the care of others that a few words could lift me out of despair, give me the strength to reclaim my life. Abundance indeed. Celibate love was at the heart of it, although I can’t fully comprehend the mystery of why this should be so. Celibate passion – elusive, tensile, holy.

Learning to Love: Benedictine Women on Celibacy and Relationship

It is the union with God that is the original, and the human

union that is the imitation, just as the marital union of Adam

and Eve was an image of the creative act whereby God

created each one of them, body and soul, and created

them in relationship to himself. – Maximilian Marnau,

O.S.B., GERTRUDE OF HELFTA: REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE

So dar to be as once he was, who came to live, and love and die.

Gaudeamus Domino. . . – Dolores Dufner, O.S.B.,

THE WORD OF GOD

During each of the four semesters that I was at St. John’s, I took brief retreats at St. Benedict’s, a neighboring community of Benedictine women. It was my first experience of “directed” retreats, which entailed meeting with a sister once or twice a day. As we were planning one such retreat, I said I’d like to focus on my marriage, and asked if I might prepare a brief paper for her to read in advance. She agreed, and when we met our discussions soon became very frank.

The sister began to speak of her own life as a celibate woman. She had entered the convent in her late teens and a few years later, when she was still in formation – that is, she had not yet made life-long vows as a Benedictine – she’d become infatuated with a priest. “I quickly learned,” she said, “the truth of Psalm 32; I was miserable as long as I tried to keep it hidden. But as soon as I admitted to myself, and to my novice mistress, what was going on, I felt an enormous release from guilt.” She’d been corresponding with the priest, “an innocent correspondence on his part, I think,” she told me, “but I was truly infatuated, for the first time in my life.” The advice she got from the novice mistress was “to just put it away, break off all contact, and let it work its way out.” While she found this painfully difficult at the time, she obeyed, sneaking off just a few cards to the man during the course of a year. Not long after she’d finally thrown out the last of his letters that she’d kept hidden, she attended a workshop where she ran into him by accident. “I realized then,” she said, “that my obedience had dispelled the mental image that I’d built up of him. My infatuation hadn’t taken the real person into account. I found that love starts,” she added, “when you see the real person, not the one you’ve invented.” She and the priest have no been friends for many years.

The sister said, “I learned from this experience that it isn’t ‘how good you are’ that matters – I was still full of a romantic desire to be a ‘good nun,’ but my image for that didn’t have much to do with reality. What matters,” she said, “is not that you’re good but that you trust. I had trusted God, and I had trusted my novice mistress, to see me through this. It was the obedience that did it. However,” she added, “I also learned something about myself. Infatuation is a part of me; I like to fall in love, I like to be in love.” I teased her a bit; “Sister,” I said, “that sounds a lot like me. Maybe we’re just a couple of floozies.” Her astonishment – never in her life had anyone come close to calling her a “floozie” – soon turned to laughter. “It was quite an experience,” she said, “to discover that I was a floozie at heart, after having entered the convent.”

“I learned to accept my need for live,” she said, “and my ability to love, as great gifts from God. And I decided that, yes, I did want to remain in the monastery, to express my love within a celibate context. It was not difficult to see falling in love as a part of seeking God. But it was also good to realize that while infatuation might be an impetus to seek God, it puts you out of balance, and therefore is something to be treated with care.” Then she said something that has stayed with me for years, that seemed utterly mysterious, but that I knew I’d have to try to grasp if I were ever to understand my monastic friends. “I finally realized,” she explained, “that I had to keep in mind that my primary relationship is with God. My vows were made to another person, the person of Christ. And all of my decisions about love had to be made in light of that person.”

I was stunned. I could not conceive of Christ being so alive for me, or myself that intimate with him, but couldn’t deny what this sane, mature, and gracious woman was saying to me. It turned out that her expressing the unimaginable is what made the retreat for me; later that day I was thinking about my marriage – the sister’s remarks, after all, had been made in a discussion of marriage, and the fidelity it requires – and wondered if I had been coming at things the wrong way round. The problem did not start with theology – with my inability to grasp Christ as a living person – but might have more to do with my resistance to accepting the full mystery of the Christ present in any person, but most particularly, for me, in my husband. The great commandment, to love God with all your heart and soul, and your neighbor as yourself, seemed more subtle than ever. I began to see the three elements as a kind of trinity, always in motion, and the three loves as interdependent. It would be impossible to love God without loving others; impossible to love others unless one were grounded in a healthy self-respect; and, maybe, impossible to truly love at all in a totally secular way, without participating in the holy.

When the sister said, “It takes time to love,” she was reflecting on her more than thirty years’ experience in a Benedictine convent. And when I nodded my assent, I was responding in the light of nearly twenty years of marriage. I wonder if the lyrics by Dolores Dufner, quoted above, do in fact convey the great human task – to learn to live, and love, and die. Perhaps to take on one is to accept all three. These are, of course, the classic questions of human psychological development. And it may be that growing to mature adulthood requires us to reject much popular mythology: that life is simply handed to us, that love is easy, quick, fated, romantic, and death a subject to be avoided altogether. My conversation with the sister encouraged me to ask other Benedictine women what the task of learning to love has been like for them. It seemed to me that women who have committed themselves to celibacy might have a great deal to say about how the practice has formed them spiritually, and also helped them develop their capacity for love.

I soon discovered that the sister’s experience of infatuation was not uncommon, and not surprising, given the sexual repression in convents during the 1950s. “We were taught to avoid the thought of anything remotely sexual,” one friend wrote me. “We certainly never used the word ‘sex.’ Even deep friendships with other women in the community were discouraged. We sublimated all our energies into work. I think,” she added, “that’s why we worked so hard!” In a scenario that seems typical for many religious, it wasn’t until she was in her mid-thirties that a crisis developed, the first real test of her vow as a celibate. “I fell in love with a priest,” she says, “and that’s when I realized what celibacy is all about.”

She, like many Benedictine friends, feels that falling in love is a normal, necessary but painful part of one’s formation as a celibate. “It’s a part of human development that can’t be denied,” one sister wrote to me, “and if we deny or repress it in the name of holiness we end up with a false religion, we end up hurting ourselves and our communities.” Another sister said, “To fall in love is to experience ego collapse. The other person completes something in your own personality.” Citing the phiosopher Ernest Becker, she said, “There are two basic ways to experience a radical change: to undergo a nervous breakdown, and to fall in love. And love is preferable. Love, if we can move beyond projecting onto another person and see them as they really are, also makes us more aware of who we are.”

It was clear to me that when the sisters spoke about “falling in love,” they did not mean engaging in sexual intimacy but rather coping with the emotional onslaught that infatuation brings. Several women spoke of the goal of celibacy in terms of “having an undivided heart” and said that they’d learned to be wary of any relationship that seemed out of balance with their goal of seeking God in a religious community. Sally Cline, in her book Women, Passion and Celibacy, relates a story about a nun who had once been romantically involved with another nun, who told Cline that the worst thing about the relationship “(though at the time it seemed the best) [was] the intense focus on each other.” I suspect that many romantics would agree with Cline’s conclusion that “the difference between sexual intimacy and social celibacy is less a matter of genital contact that that matter of focus.” (Emphasis Cline’s.)

One prioress sent me a tape of a talk she’d delivered to her community, and when she spoke of what she termed “sins against celibacy” it was not sexual acts that concerned her so much as emotions. “Celibacy is not an excuse for being unhappy or uncharitable, to stuff feelings down, to become angry, or an iceberg,” she said. “The worst sin against celibacy,” she told the sisters, “is to pretend to not have any affections at all. To fall in love is celibacy at work,” she said, adding, in a remark that drew a knowing laughter from the women present, that “most of us should have fallen in love twenty times or so by now.” Her remark was by no means a license for the sisters to run out and have affairs. It was an honest, realistic assessment of human sexuality as celibates experience it. As was clear from what she said next, she was confirming the religious context in which monastics seek to place their affective experience. “Celibacy is not a vow to repress our feelings,” the sister told the group. “it is a vow to put all our feelings, acceptable or not, close to our hearts and bring them into consciousness through prayer.”

When celibacy goes wrong with men, it often makes headlines. Although women’s religious communities have had sexual abuse suits brought against them in recent years, their failures at celibacy have generally not been as public. Several sisters told me they felt this is in part because men and women celibates define their celibacy in different ways. “The men,” one said, “tend to define it as not having sex; they want to use that energy to serve the church. They’re more clinically oriented. And when they overcompensate for being celibate, it’s through food, alcohol, sports, or work.” She felt that women tended to see celibacy as more an issue of communal living, and would discuss it more in terms of “a way to govern affective relationships.” She said, “We women can also lose ourselves in work.” But, she added, “the worst thing that we do is to deny our true feelings and become rigid, afraid to relate. We distance ourselves from both men and women.”

Several sisters spoke to me about emotional frigidity as a maladaptation that celibate women especially are prone to. “It seems a distorted image,” one sister said, “of the nurturing quality that to me is so much at the heart of our identities as women.” I suspect that many of the horror stories people tell about nuns in the parochial schools of the 1950’s are about women who adapted to celibacy by closing up their emotions and refusing to love. As one sister said to me, “I’m always so sad to experience women whoa re not loving people, but they’ve been celibate their entire life. To be celibate, it seems to me,” she added, “means first of all being a loving person in a way that frees you to serve others. Otherwise celibacy has no point.”

For the women I talked with, deep and enduring friendships seemed to provide a healthy channel for their affections. They saw friendship not merely as a safety valve, however, but as having a profoundly religious dimension. One sister said, “Unless we’re open tot he gift of friendship, allowing ourselves to be loved and to really love in return, only then can we know what it might be to have God love us and to love God. I really believe that the experience of love is the only teacher of love.” Although being open to friendships and to “falling in love” has obvious danger for celibates, and most of the women felt that wrong moves and mistakes were inevitable, one said that “I am less inclined to name them mistakes and believe that they are genuine experiences of growth, of learning how to be a celibate.”

Monastic women do sometimes suffer from their own naivete, and from the fact that most monastic formation programs, at least until recently, gave short shrift to the issue of celibacy. The remark of one sister is typical: “We were pretty much left on our own to work it out, because sexual matters simply were not discussed.” A former prioress who said much the same thing about her own days as a novice, added, “I now see that this was utterly foolish, considering that celibacy is something that has to be formed in us. It is not a simple part of our monastic vow, but a part of the long conversion process that lasts a lifetime.”

Loneliness is one of the issues that all the women said had to be faced in learning to be a celibate. A sister who works in formation said, “That’s a big part of adjusting to life in a monastic community, to sit and face your loneliness, your emptiness, and not let distractions turn you from the task. If a young sister comes to me and says that she’s been masturbating, the question I want her to address is: Why? Why now? Is she lonely? Is this a pattern she’s establishing? Has there been some major event in her life – the death of a friend or family member, or an experience in the monastery that’s left her feeling alienated? Is she infatuated with someone, and using this as a way to find sexual release?” The latter situation, the sister said, “makes me rejoice. If she’s falling in love, then she has an opportunity to grow past the romantic image of what it means to be a nun. I know this from my own experience. The questions she’ll need to ask herself, if she wants to remain a nun, are: How does Christ’s love show through this person she loves? How can she best show her love in return – for the person, for the community, for Christ? Chances are it’s not by masturbating.”

Many sisters have said that they felt it was important for them “to be able to talk about and learn about our bodies and how they function. I do not think that ignorance is any kind of holiness.” But in the years before Vatican II, sexual ignorance was often accepted as a given for monastic women. One sister who worked for years as an obstetrics nurse said that she chose that specialty in part because she was appalled that so many sisters had no knowledge of their own anatomy. “So much of Catholic moral teaching has to do with knowledge, intention, and consent of the will,” she said, “and these women had so little knowledge, I felt that they had no way to grasp the basics of sexual morality as their own church understood it.”

Sisters have told me of pathetic attitudes toward sex that were largely the result of such ignorance. Several mentioned being disturbed as young sisters to hear older women say things like, “Babies are so beautiful; it’s too bad they come into the world in such a disgusting way.” Such an attitude would be incomprehensible to most parents, and serve only to reinforce the idea that nuns are otherworldly. It also reflects, in a most unpleasant way, the notion that virginity is equated with divinity, and that on the scale of holiness married people are inferior to those who have taken religious vows. I once heard a Benedictine woman say that gynecological exams made her feel violated, as if she’d been raped. It was not a casual remark; her whole body tensed as she said it, her disgust became physically apparent. I was stunned to think that a grown woman might not comprehend the difference between a medical exam, rape, and sexual intercourse. While she would never learn this from experience, I began to wonder if there weren’t some way for her to accept on faith that sexuality could be something other than an object of fear and loathing. It seemed especially important as the sister was working as a pastoral minister, which of course meant that she was engaged on a daily basis with married people and their families. I wondered if her sexual attitudes had something to do with the fact that several parishioners had told me that they found her ineffectual as a minister, distant and cold.

As more and more sisters work as pastoral assistants and hospital chaplains, I sense a tension between the ignorance that once insulated them from the world and the demands of these new ministries. A prostitute beaten half to death by a customer should not have to explain to a hospital chaplain what a “blow job” is; it’s something the chaplain should know. (Even if the chaplain’s job is mainly to listen, it helps to understand the language being spoken.) When a sister working in Minneapolis, long a center of child pornography and prostitution in America, sees a copy of Playboy for the first time and says in shock, “Why – those are real women posing in those photographs!” she reveals a naivete that borders on the criminal. I wonder if “criminal naivete” might not be a good term to add to the lexicon of moral theology, to apply to false innocence, the ignorance of people who should know better.

I am not one of those people who think that monastics are a bunch of escapists who should all become activists in the world. I believe that a contemplative who is being with God, praying with and for the world, is doing something that is invaluable in part because it transcends utility. And my experience of praying the psalms with the Benedictines has taught me that a contemplative who knows the psalms by heart is keeping up-to-date on the evils in this world – the record of human evil and violence in the psalms will make sure of that. But when monastic people are engaged in active ministries, as some have been throughout monastic history, they can’t afford a drastic ignorance of the people they teach and serve.

Benedictine women know that such ignorance can cause considerable strain for them and their own communities. “We women have not been able to avoid the hard sexual issues,” a former prioress told me. She related a story about a young sister whom she described as “terribly naive,” who was befriended by an older woman who invited her on pilgrimages to several Marian shrines. “She had no idea that anything sexual could happen,” the sister said, “and she was torn apart when it dead.” The prioress added, “For us, the question is the same whether sisters are having affairs with men, or with other women. Pairing off does violence to the group. It’s a little like a marriage; a good community, like a good marriage, can survive an affair, one big shock to the system. But we can’t survive a lifestyle of infidelity. We have to ask sisters to discern their choices and decide: Do they want that person, or the community?”

She asked the young woman to see a counselor to help her make a decision. “But,” she told me, “the counselors saw their purpose as helping people to grow emotionally, so they promoted the relationship. They seemed to feel that it was better for her to grow through a sexual relationship than to remain a childish nun.” This raised a dilemma for the prioress. While she herself recognized the need for the woman to grow up – like many Benedictines I’ve talked to, men and women, she felt that monasteries have all too often provided a refuge for immature people – she was disturbed that the counselors seemed to be implying that one can’t grow emotionally in the monastery, in celibate relationships. The prioress knew from experience that this was not true, but she felt at a loss when dealing with the counselors. I suspect she’d run up against a classic conflict between a psychology that emphasizes individual development, and the Benedictine charism of life live in community. She was also contending with a strong cultural prejudice against celibacy. To channel one’s sexuality into anything besides being sexually active is seen as highly suspect; it leaves celibates vulnerable to being automatically labeled as infantile or repressed.

One of the first things I noticed about monastic people, when I first encountered them, was that most of them were not noticeably repressed, and certainly not infantile. Over the years that I’ve gotten to know the Benedictines better, this first impression has been strongly reinforced. Often their struggles with celibacy have given them a truly sophisticated outlook on the subject of human sexuality, and many of their observations – for instance, that sexual stability and spiritual growth work together as a person matures – are of as much use to non-celibates as to monastics. In giving a conference on celibacy to her community, one woman said that it was extremely foolish to take celibacy, or any other aspect of sexuality, for granted. “As monastic people,” she said, “we do need to sublimate our sexual energies, but we need to be conscious about it. Otherwise we run the risk of giving in to compulsions and addictions.” She depicted the celibate as extremely vulnerable in American culture, which promotes addictive behaviors. “Celibacy, like so much in the monastic life,” she said, “is mostly a matter of paying attention. We have to be wary of anything that dulls conscious awareness, such as alcohol, or even television commercials.”

“The object of celibacy is consciousness,” she said, “taking our unconscious feelings and sexual urges and placing them where we think God wants them. Our goal is to be celibate, conscious, passionate people.” When it works, the celibate is, in the words of another sister, “stretching the ability to love, and particularly, to love non-exclusively.” The students taught by sisters have often been the beneficiaries of this. More than one sister spoke to me about the joy of being able to draw on maternal instincts, particularly with their younger students. But I believe it goes beyond that. As Sally Cline, who as a child had the odd experience of being the only Jewish girl in a British convent school, has written, “I [understood] that one of the greatest gifts the nuns gave to us, their girls, the gift of passionate attention, came from their celibate philosophy that ‘loves all’ and ‘loves all well.’ ”

Realizing that this ways love, Cline says, was helpful in her teenage years. The nuns helped her see, she says, “that a non-sexually active love can be just as passionate and just as absorbing as a genitally rooted one, and that such a love has at its center the idea of being fully focused and intentional.” According to all the sisters I spoke with, intentionality is a major part of celibacy. But for many of them, this was not at all clear when they first sought the monastic life. “I don’t think that celibacy was much on my mind at all,” one sister said. “It was certainly not what I was pursuing when I asked to join the community. It just came along as part of the deal.” Eventually, however, she realized that “it did have to become a conscious choice, and one that has to be made time and time again. It is a daily choice,” she said, “to live as a celibate.”

The same might be said about a commitment to monogamy. But what distinguished all the Benedictine women that I spoke with from most of the married people I know is how consistently they spoke of celibacy as being rooted in the religious, as “having gospel value,” or of “being a sign of the kingdom.” It may be that the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, do not adequately convey to married people the sacredness of a lifelong commitment to another person, whereas for sisters the religious nature of their vows is an everyday reality. As one sister said, “One needs a deep prayer life to maintain a celibate life. It is only through prayer that the hard choices get made, over time, only prayer that can give me the self-transcendence that celibacy requires.”

Self-transcendence is required in marriage as well, or in any life-long commitment to another. But the culture does not encourage self-transcendence; just the opposite. Our cultural myths about love given witness to a comment Soren Kierkegaard once made about the “self-love of erotic love”; too many young people grow up understand that “true love” means possessing and being possessed. Both are incompatible with celibacy, which seeks to love non-exclusively, non-possessively. This can be a healthy witness against the consumer model of love – the “If I can’t have her, nobody will” psychology that spurs so many men to acts of violence. Nearly half of the murders in North Dakota, for example, are “domestic” in origin. Judging from the newspaper headlines, it seems that many men, and some women, can’t give up the illusion of possessing another person. They can’t allow a former boyfriend or ex-wife to be an independent human being.

When mature celibates talk about the value of celibacy, “freedom” is a word they commonly use. Freedom to keep their energies focused on ministry and communal living, freedom to love many people without being unfaithful to any of them. As celibates grow older, they tend to speak in terms of the “generative” qualities of celibacy. “We’re not making babies,” one sister says, “but we can make relationships.” One reason so many celibates find satisfaction in working as teachers, spiritual directors, and pastoral ministers may be that it provides ample opportunity to help others grow. “To donate the self as a gift to others; that’s the vow of celibacy,” one sister told me.

Sisters are keenly aware that for years the church teaching emphasized celibate religious life as the most holy of responses to God, with marriage as a distant second, and they resent that as deeply as anyone. They’re often quick to point out similarities between a celibate commitment and fidelity in marriage. “Both are a discipline,” one sister said. “Both can be a form of asceticism.” Still, they also feel the need to define their monastic call in its own terms. “Celibacy is just one of the ways God calls us,” one sister said. “It’s another way, but not a better way.”

When one sister described to me what she considered a healthy celibacy, she said, “First of all, it means not focusing on ‘what I gave up,’ but on what being freed by what I gave up has allowed me to do in terms of service to the church and other people.” She said that she’d learned the need for balance in her life. “For me, the discipline of celibacy means a commitment to grow, intellectually and in my prayer life, to engage in regular prayer, both privately and with my community, to engage in some form of meaningful ministry, to take care of my body, to seek out solitude at regular intervals” – this, she admitted she often felt too busy to do – “and to take pleasure in beauty.” Many sisters spoke to me of celibacy as something that had encouraged them to be sensitive to the many guises of beauty. “When I can enjoy a sunset, or a music concert, or a work of art, or people of all ages,” one sister said, “then I know that celibacy is working.” Having experienced the pleasure of friendships with many celibate men and women, it did not surprise me that all of the women connected the practice of celibacy with their ability to relate to others. “Celibacy,” one sister said, “has given me a good way to integrate my sexuality with my spirituality; I’ve come to realize that the goal of both is union with God and with others.” One woman put it very simply. “The fruit of celibacy,” she said, “is hospitality.”

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