What Leaving Religious Life Taught Me
Now 8 years ago, on this day, I walked back out of the enclosure doors to the world I thought I would never see again on this side of heaven. There, my mother and older sister were waiting for me with open arms, unsure of the state my heart would be in as I exited the cloister.
While the pain of taking off the habit and trading it for my simple skirt and blue t shirt I had worn when I entered was great, the greatest pains and struggles were to come in the following year. It was a year of wrestling with what felt like the most vulnerable and frightened places of my own heart, the belief in the love of the Lord, and His vision of holiness and wholeness for me. I wanted to be a Religious. I thought I was leaving this community to eventually enter another somewhere else, and I would not have guessed that that night on September 21st would mark the beginning of a whole new life and path for me saying yes to life in the world, marriage, and motherhood.
As I write this now, I am married to the second greatest love of my life, our 20 month old son is napping upstairs in his room, and I am due any day with our second son. My life has changed in nearly every way, yet here is this same heart that once lived, loved, suffered, rejoiced, and was pierced in those cloister walls, with the same Lord Who called me there, tenderly purified, strengthened, matured, and pierce me there, called me back out, and now communes with me with the same love, the same desires for me, and calls me to no less intimacy and radical holiness, independent of my weak response and failings to love.
As I reflect on that year of letting go of Religious Life and how those two years in the cloister shaped me, there are 5 lessons I have to share with whoever is meant to read them here in this little corner of the world. May Jesus be loved more by this!
No less intimacy. No less holiness.
I have talked about this before on this platform and I feel it is the great cry of my heart in this life: to make it known that Jesus wants no less intimacy and union with you just because you are here "in the world"! Holiness, Sainthood, mysticism, etc. is not reserved for the cloister, the convents, and the rectories. God has made every one of us for total transformation in and union with Him, to live totally ablaze with His love, abiding in His presence, living in His will, loving Him in all that we do. And that means we don't have to shirk our responsibilities to go find Him outside of our daily life... it means that the life He has called you to is the life through which this is meant to come about. So find Him there, commune with Him there, and put Him first in your heart, your life, your priorities. Believe that He loves you with this same love and wants to reveal, in your own personal communion with Him, the way in which you are meant to be a Saint in your daily life.
We don't have to live like everybody else.
Hear me out... this is not meant to contradict the previous point, and it also isn't meant to say we should we be weird and isolated in this world. What I mean is, as you and I discover what it means to live totally in and for the Lord in our daily lives, we don't have to settle for the mediocrity or sloth we see around us. Just because most Catholics don't go to daily Mass, or don't pray every morning first thing, or don't really seek intimacy with Jesus, or spend too much time promoting themselves on social media, etc. does not mean we have to... Read the Gospels, read the lives of the Saints, commune with Christ in daily prayer, and don't be afraid to make small decisions in your life and lifestyle that may set you apart as you seek Christ with all your heart. In other words, don't settle for mediocrity.
The power of recollection.
One thing that has utterly transformed my life from before Carmel to now living in the world after Carmel, even 8 years later, is the practice of the presence of God; recollecting myself in the presence of God during my day. This is something I believe we don't talk about enough as lay people. The whole life and structures of the cloister are oriented towards cultivating an ongoing recollection in the presence of God within, unlike life here where everything around us seems to be pulling us away from a more recollected spirit. But just because we have to fight a little harder to cultivate and preserve it does not mean we are exempt from the need to practice it! It is the transforming factor, in my opinion, of living daily life in the world. It changes everything, gives meaning to everything, fills our tiniest of actions with the greatest love and purpose. It is the difference between floating through our day in a blur and truly living the day for and with Christ in His plan and invitations for us. And we can cultivate it in our homes by silencing distractions, having little reminders set to draw us back into the presence of God, praying the angelus throughout our day, taking "holy pauses" to simply recenter our hearts in the presence of God within our souls.
Find Jesus in everything.
In Carmel, as I said above, everything was oriented towards cultiavting intimacy with Christ. Every part of the day was embraced as a sort of divine invitation to love. When the bell rang, we responded to God himself calling us to prayer, detaching ourselves from whatever previous activity we were engaged in, and going promptly to where the Lord wanted us. Every little inconvenience was viewed as an invitation to die to ourselves, to joyfully love the person who was the cause of our irritation, to see God’s hand in every both joyful and inconvenient encounter. Once again, just because we don’t live in the cloister, does not mean that God is not working and our every moment and day in the same, intentional way. When our baby cries and needs us in that moment that we are finally settling in to work on something, we can respond as if it is the Lord himself, calling us to love. When our alarm goes off in the morning, calling us to prayer, let us respond with the same enthusiasm and obedience as the religious to the bell calling them to prayer in the morning. We can live lives here in the world that are no less intentional and totally for the Lord in every simple, small moment.
Order.
I have mentioned this before as well, but I don’t think we can underestimate enough the power of order in our life here in the world. Yet another lesson the Lord taught me in letting go of religious life and asking me to embrace life here in the world was that of incorporating what I learned about order and rhythm in our day in the cloister into life here. Of course, we cannot pretend to live like nuns and monks, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t incorporate in some elements of those beautiful monastic rhythms that bring such order and tranquility to our days. Like rising every morning at the same time, going to prayer at the same time in a designated place in your home that is set apart for the Lord, having physical disciplines, like working out each day, fasting, having structure to how you plan meals, times in the day when you pause for brief moments of prayer or recollection, going to daily mass, doing a weekly holy hour, having time for spiritual reading each day, even if it is for only five minutes before you go to sleep, and the list goes on. This is certainly not a practice that is one size fits all and its application, but it is something that each one of us must sit with, discern, and practice, sometimes through some trial and error.
All of this being said, my hope is that my own small experience and reflections on the Lord calling me to let go of religious life, but not let go of a call to great intimacy and union with him, can edify and inspire you in some small way. Most of us will not receive the opportunity to live in a cloister for two years and learn the rich lessons that you can only learn by being there yourself, but here is a small testimony of my own heart for you in the hopes that it will affect your own intimacy with Christ.
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