one specific step

The person entering physically cloistered life does not stick her head in today and leave her arms and legs dangling outside to be cloistered at a later date.  She is either in or she’s not.  And yet we can give ourselves mostly to God and leave parts of our lives dangling outside that surrender.  At least, that’s how it is for me.

Making the decision to embrace the will of God is not a once-for-all-time-thing, of course.  We re-decide, circumstance by circumstance.  But there is something about at least making a decision.  One specific step.  I have found that grace comes with making this decision.  I tell God I want to live according to His will… and then in circumstance after circumstance, I find that His grace abounds.

Sometimes I imagine myself standing before an enclosure door.  I consider.  I vacillate.  I feel afraid.  I want a print-out of all that will be asked of me before I give my “yes.”  I’m trembling, second-guessing, halting, looking back, shuffling, straining.  Then, timidly, I stick one toe forward…

…and it’s as if He suddenly, tenderly, picks me up and carries the rest of me inside.  Even those flailing arms and legs. 

“Jesus, I give You my whole heart and my whole will.  They once rebelled against You, but now I dedicate them completely to you…Receive me, and make me faithful until death.”  (St. Alphonsus Liguori). 

“I am the Gate. Whoever enters through Me WILL BE SAFE.” (Jesus, quoted in John 10:9) 

Text © 2011 Nancy Shuman.  All Rights Reserved.
thecloisteredheart.org   

Enclosure

The step from world into cloister has long intrigued me.  One leaves “here” and goes “there.”  But one doesn’t just tiptoe over a threshold into nothingness.  Anyone taking such a step has carefully considered the “there” to which they are going. 

At this point I need to do one paragraph of defining, in case anyone reading this is not familiar with the set up of monastic life.  In every monastery, of nuns or of monks, there is an area normally reserved for residents of the monastic community.  This is called “the cloister” or “enclosure.”  Some communities observe what is called full (or papal) enclosure.  This means that those residing therein live within their specified enclosure for life.  That’s right:  they go in, and under normal circumstances they do not come out (there are exceptions, of course, like for medical care).  This doesn’t mean they never see the sun again; often enclosures are rather vast places, always including some outdoor areas and occasionally even encompassing meadows or streams.  The cloistered person also still sees family and friends, meeting with them in parlors and meeting rooms.

It can be awfully strange, for those of us not called to it, to consider a life of full enclosure.  But in the analogy of the cloistered heart that we will be using here, the idea of enclosure is extremely important.  There IS an enclosure into which we are invited.  It is a genuine enclosure, one that goes beyond all of our loftiest mental images.

The fact is:  if we’re human beings, we are called to live within the will of God.   

In the analogy of "the cloistered heart," I am invited to live within the boundaries of God's will as a nun would live inside her enclosure.  A potential cloistered nun does not set the boundaries of enclosure for herself, saying that she really prefers other areas, thank you very much.  No, she accepts them as they have already been set up... or she goes elsewhere.

I look around, today, at the boundaries of my enclosure.  I don't have to map them out for myself; they are clearly defined for me in Scripture and in 2,000 years of authentic Church discernment. 

Sometimes we can fear the boundaries of God's will, worrying that they'll sap all joy and pleasure from our lives.  The saints tell us otherwise. 

“Our happiness consists in knowing and doing His holy will.” (St. Jane de Chantal)

“Freed from the heavy burden of my own will, I may breathe freely under the light load of love…”  (St. Bernard of Clairvaux)

“The height of loving ecstasy is when our will rests not in its own contentment, but in God’s will.” (St. Francis de Sales)

“Do you want to be free?  Then free yourself by your own act; have no will but God’s will.”  (La Trappe in England by a Religious of Holy Cross Abbey, 1937)

Text not in quotes © 2011 Nancy Shuman.  All Rights Reserved.
thecloisteredheart.org   

everything else is not enough

The life of a cloistered nun or a monk represents Totality.  Risking everything.  All one’s eggs in one basket.  No ifs, ands or buts.  Or, as Mother Mary Francis PCC so perfectly put it, “God is enough!  God is enough!  And everything else is not enough..”

It is the Totality that so draws me.  How I have wished I could just step over a threshold, dividing world from cloister, and be done with complacency and compromise forever.  I am not so naïve as to think it’s that simple, certainly.  But “out here,” where there are no bells to remind me to pray, where Mass is not offered daily in my own home, where the entire structure of life doesn’t revolve around God, I forget and slip and get distracted and grow very, very lazy. 

Is there help for me?  (yes, there is)  Am I the only person who has ever longed to live totally for God in the midst of the world  (no, I’m not)  Can I, in my busyness, find a way to look at life as God wishes me to – not as the world is constantly pushing me toward? (absolutely I can).  He Who calls also graces.  He does not ask of us what we cannot give. 

“Go and bless the Lord for the favorable inspiration He has given you to withdraw yourself from this great and wide road that those of your age and profession are accustomed to follow…”(St. Francis de Sales)

“You have, as it were, a poustinia (poustinia is a Russian word for hermitage) within you.  It is as if within you there was this little log cabin in which you and Christ were very close…within yourself you have made a room, a log cabin, a secluded place.  You have built it by prayer…. You live in the marketplace and carry the poustinia within you.  That is your vocation… The Lord is calling us to stand still before him while walking with men.” (Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia, Ave Maria Press, 1975)

In days just ahead, I hope to look more thoroughly into this cloister of the heart.  I hope to live more fully in each “room” of it than I ever have before.  “God is enough!  God is enough!  And everything else is not enough.” The words ring through me this night like a bell.  I know them to be true. 

Text not in quotes © 2011 Nancy Shuman.  All Rights Reserved.
thecloisteredheart.org     

...nothing else than...

“Monastic life is nothing else..than a Christian life whose Christianity has penetrated every part of it...  The monk is precisely the Christian who has recognized in Christ ‘the way, the truth, the life,’ and who intends to act logically over this discovery, a discovery of such a nature that it should not leave any of those who have made it tepid or indifferent.”  (Louis Bouyer of the Oratory, The Meaning of the Monastic Life, P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1950) 

“Christ is literally to be the monk’s ‘all,’ his life and his food, the yearning of his soul, the joy of his heart....The monk sees all things in the light of God.”  (Wilfrid Tunink OSB, Vision of Peace, Farrar, Straus & Co., 1963) 

“The earliest monasticism was directed against the tendency in the church to compromise with the world, to water down the strong wine of the Gospels to suit the vulgar taste….”  (Walter Nigg, Warriors of God, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1959)

monastic life is...

For over twenty years I’ve delved into the subject of monasticism.  I have looked at some of the key aspects of monastic life, considering if and how these may apply to a “cloistered heart.”  What I’ve found is a wealth of truth… a virtual treasure chest of inspiration!

I would like to share just a few of these gems with you now, (saving more for later).  I suspect you will agree that these “goals” are not for monks and nuns alone….

“Monastic life is a concrete living out of one’s baptismal commitment.” (Daniel Rees, Consider Your Call,  Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, 1980, 149-150)

“A contemplative will often be able to work peacefully in a kind of general absorption in God which is not expressed by any special idea and demands no particular acts.  It is a kind of ‘atmosphere’ of love that follows him wherever he goes.” (Monks of the Strict Observance, Cistercian Contemplatives, published by Monks of the Strict Observance, 1947, p. 50)

“Our religious life is not someTHING; it is SOMEONE.  It is Jesus.” (A Religious of Holy Cross Abbey, La Trappe in England, Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., London, 1937, p. 36)

“The contemplative life does not mean the contemplation of self, but contemplation of God.” (La Trappe in England, p. 188)

“While working at a desk or in a field, while on a journey or in a hospital, a man can make a choir and sanctuary within the cell of his own soul.” (Dom Hubert Van Zeller, The Yoke of Divine Love, Templegate, Springfield IL, 1957, p. 135)