Joan Chittister tells of being accepted to a Masters in Fine Arts creative writing program at Iowa State University. At the time, she was teaching high school English, but dreamed of writing the kind of literature she was presenting in class. The Iowa State program threw her a lifeline. She recalls how after she received her acceptance letter, “Every day was suddenly easier than it had ever been before. Every moment was light … I could afford to treat the daily nature of grades and papers and class periods lovingly. There was suddenly no burden to it at all. Just finality. Just conclusion. Just gratitude.”
That would all end in a single hurried conversation. In a complete reversal, her prioress at the time—the same one who encouraged her to apply to the MFA program—told her the dream of studying creative writing would have to wait. She was needed to work as a third cook (yes, third cook!) at a summer camp run by her monastery. Sister Joan needed the kitchen job, her superior said, to deepen her humility.
“And so began one of the greatest struggles in my life,” Sister Joan writes. “I now wonder how I could have become the person I was meant to be if I had ever become the writer I thought Iowa State would make me.”
As is often the case, we can’t see beyond immediate disappointment. In the end, what seemed an insurmountable setback only deepened Sister Joan’s conviction that she was meant to write. She overcame the confines of her superior’s order by writing in her spare time with an even greater fervor. Having published dozens of books that have sold more than a million copies, she says she now looks back at that dark disappointment as the moment she realized no obstacle could deter her from her twin vocations, as a Benedictine and a writer.
Sister Irene Nowell of Mount St. Scholastica Monastery in Kansas is one of the world’s foremost Scripture scholars. But that is not the path she envisioned for herself. She arrived at her monastery an accomplished cellist. She expected to continue her musical studies in graduate school. Instead, her prioress informed her she would have to study German. “I said, ‘Mother, I don’t want a degree in German,’” Sister Irene recalls.
“She said, ‘That’s not the right answer.’ So I went off to get a degree in German.”
Many years later, Sister Irene asked to study Scripture at St. John’s University in Minnesota. “I got hooked on Scripture,” she says. “And do you know what they said? They told me the German degree was the best preparation I could have had because at that point so much of the research on Scripture had been written in German.”
Scripture—and music—became the defining themes of her life. She has written a translation of the Psalms for her community’s Liturgy of the Hours and was one of the scholars who worked on the English translation of the revised Catholic Bible as well as the St. John’s Bible, the first illuminated Bible in five hundred years, commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.
“So what the prioress did for me in forcing me to study German was really prophetic,” Sister Irene now says.
The stories of these two Benedictine women remind me that I have to listen not only to my inner voice, but to outside—and sometimes unwelcome—voices as well, like that of my colleague who warned that my strong opinions can sometimes be grating. Disappointment is often a useful teacher. Can I have the courage to listen to it, to discern where it might be leading me?
Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God and our ears to the voice from the heavens that everyday calls out this charge: If you hear God’s voice today, harden not your hearts (Ps 95:8). And again, You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says. (Rv 2:7).
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
In listening with the ear of the heart, I’ve often discovered wisdom comes from what at first might seem an unlikely source. My father finished high school by attending night classes while working during the day. He earned his living as a truck driver. I, with my advanced degrees, often dismissed what he had to say. I know now that while my book learning might have given me knowledge, it didn’t necessarily make me wise. My father had a staple of sayings he was fond of repeating. One of them was, “When you’re hungry you eat, when you’re tired, you sleep.” That one used to draw some of the loudest guffaws. I guess I thought it was a stupidly self-evident statement. But there have been periods in my writing career when I have been so self-driven, I literally forgot to eat. I neglected to get enough sleep. At one point, when I was making an ample salary at one of the largest newspapers in the country, I landed in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition—both self-inflicted wounds—and had to spend four months recuperating.
Suddenly my father’s little saying didn’t seem so stupid. It contained wisdom worthy of the Book of Proverbs. It’s something I still need to remind myself of, daily.
I experienced a similar lesson in listening when my husband and I led a retreat one Lent in rural Semmes, Alabama. Semmes is such a small community that when I asked for directions from the pastor of the church we would be visiting, he said, “Just roll into town on the main road, pass a cotton field and the Dollar General, and you can’t miss the church.”
On the first night of the retreat, I arrived early at the parish hall to collate the handouts, set up the CD player, and test the projector for the opening PowerPoint presentation. I became vaguely aware of an older woman flittering around the hall, sometimes talking to herself. I remember thinking, “I’d like to talk to this woman, just not now. I’m busy.”
I glanced over at the table I had been planning to use as a kind of altar. Someone had covered the table with a white linen cloth and placed an elaborate bronze crucifix in the center, along with a vase of fresh flowers.
“How do you like the way I fixed up the altar?” the woman said. “That crucifix there, that’s been in my family for generations.”
The woman I had been trying to avoid had brought the altar cloth, the flowers, and the crucifix. She not only decorated the altar, she had also brewed the coffee and baked a cake—the only cake anyone had brought to share.
I learned her name was Eva. On the second night of the retreat, Eva brought some poems she had written. One was a loving chronicle of the characters she meets on her weekly pilgrimages to the Dollar General. My husband and I thought the poem was so moving, we asked Eva to read it to the retreat group. It was early spring, and Eva talked about being an avid gardener. She said she wakes at dawn to look for new shoots beginning to break through the soil. They remind her that every day nature is renewing itself, and so are we. I soon figured out that any wisdom anyone was going to take away from the retreat wasn’t going to come from my husband or me, but from Eva.
We returned home from Alabama a few days before Easter. Two cards were waiting in the mailbox. One was an Easter card from my sister. The other was from Eva.
“Hope you all have a blessed Easter,” Eva wrote. “I think of you two often. Writers are like gardeners. They both grow things. When I lose someone close to me now, I don’t send flowers anymore. I write a poem for the family and frame it. Poems last longer.”
Who are the wise ones in our lives—like my father, like Eva? Whose words to us have been difficult to hear? Are we missing a message within the message? Are we listening with the ear of the heart?
For reflection:
