Althouse: "Sister Harney found a book on the vows — poverty, obedience, chastity — that she had bought once but never read."

June 2, 2019

"Sister Harney found a book on the vows — poverty, obedience, chastity — that she had bought once but never read."

"'I saw Alan creeping around with his cellphone to take a picture of the cover, and then next time I saw it Sarah had been reading it and it was full of Post-it notes all over,' Sister Harney said. 'Millennials were looking at it like this is the glue. They were looking for the secret sauce of how we do this.' The sisters began to see that the millennials wanted a road map for life and ritual, rather than a belief system. On one of the first nights, Sister Judy Carle said, one of the young people casually asked the sisters, 'So, what’s your spiritual practice?' 'That’s the first question, not, "What do you believe?"' she said... 'So many of the millennials would say, "I’m looking for rituals"'... [The millennial Sarah Jane Bradley said,] 'It sounds like it’s about taking orders, but the sisters helped me see it’s about preparing the heart for dialogue and a deep internal listening for truth... The vows opened up this portal in which to really appreciate how countercultural the lives these sisters have led are.' It’s hard to adopt practices that stem from vows without belief... For example, the millennials became interested in the idea of discernment, a process the sisters use to sift and orient options to more closely listen for God’s call. [The millennial Adam Horowitz said,] 'But now I’ve heard millennials saying they need to "discern what I’m up to this afternoon"... And it’s so important we don’t dilute it.'"

From "These Millennials Got New Roommates. They’re Nuns/A project called Nuns and Nones moved religion-free millennials into a convent" (NYT).

37 comments:

rhhardin said...: Honest aj 3. [of women] chaste; 6/2/19, 8:29 AM
mccullough said...: Rituals without belief. Good description of most institutions.

Why the devout Muslims will prevail.; 6/2/19, 8:31 AM
Biff said...: A generation raised on video games seeks "cheat codes" for the game of life. Who would've imagined it?; 6/2/19, 8:34 AM
J. Farmer said...: For the love of god please retire the word millennial.; 6/2/19, 8:37 AM
Fernandinande said...: I've decided my main ritual will be to follow Menahem Globus's lead and make all my sentences 3*N characters long.; 6/2/19, 8:42 AM
Amadeus 48 said...: Let's move Bernie in with the nuns and see what happens.

My prediction: the religious order will go bankrupt and the sisters will all abandon their vows. The money quote from Sister Harney:"A week with Bernie in the house made it clear that there is no point. No one is listening. No one really cares. I gotta get a job."; 6/2/19, 8:43 AM
Mark said...: "Sister Harney found a book on the vows — poverty, obedience, chastity — that she had bought once but never read."

The saddest line in that entire piece. And it explains why orders like hers are dying like dinosaurs.

Even when these orders see communities of younger women religious (sisters) that are growing and thriving precisely because they do take up and reflect upon and live their vows and who are not ashamed of the habit, but love it too, still these elderly ladies don't get it. Even when the millennials they meet today tell them of their hunger and thirst for spiritual meaning and ritual, still they don't get it.

It's all very sad. Because we need more sisters. The ones I know and interact with -- all young, intelligent, college educated, fun, attractive -- embrace the tradition and their orders are full and alive.; 6/2/19, 8:44 AM
Mr. Forward said...: When I’m dead and gone
Spread my ashes on the lawn
I would thank you quite a bunch
If you did it after lunch
The meaning of my afternoon
Dis urned.; 6/2/19, 8:45 AM
Phil 314 said...: The challenge is to be in the world but not of the world. Working stiffs made in Gods image.; 6/2/19, 8:49 AM
robother said...: "Nuns and Nones" is catchy, but if these Millennials are craving ritual I'd hook them up with the San Luis Valley Penitentes. Call it "Fifty Shades of Purple."; 6/2/19, 9:05 AM
Mark said...: Here's an earlier NY Times story --

Bucking a Trend, Some Millennials Are Seeking a Nun’s Life

On a recent summer morning, the sisters stood in their chapel and sang the daytime prayer in high, clear voices. Dominican monasteries are essentially engines of prayer; singing, which the nuns do seven times a day, is a deeper, fuller way of praying, Sister Mary Catharine (the 46-year-old novice mistress) said, “because we are using our whole person.”

Outside the choir door, a bulletin board was layered with a collage of cards, printed emails and letters, flags of hope and despair, asking the sisters for an intercession. . . .

While the number of women entering religious life has been in a steep decline since the mid-1960s, it is notable and even startling that a contemplative order like the Dominican Nuns of Summit — where the sisters live in cloister and practice a life of prayer — would be able to attract young, college-educated millennials. . . .

In 1991, when Sister Mary Catharine entered the Summit monastery, she was 22 and the next youngest sister was 39. Back home in Massachusetts, where she was still known as Sharon Perry and working as a pharmacy technician, there was no one she knew who was even contemplating a contemplative life. . . .

Now, she is mentoring six women under the age of 30; this summer, she welcomed four aspirants, three of them in their 20s. “You now have a whole generation that’s been given so much,” Sister Mary Catharine said, pondering the recent flurry of inquiries to the monastery. . . .

In 2007, Sister Mary Cecilia had graduated from business school, taken her securities exam and begun a plum job. “A religious life was not on my radar, but I was completely miserable,” she said. “I remember asking God what to do.”

She was touring active orders when a scheduling mishap brought her for a night to Summit. Meeting with Sister Mary Catharine in the small parlor that is the public room here, she said, “I think I have a contemplative vocation,” and burst into tears.; 6/2/19, 9:15 AM
Mark said...: And another from NY Times Live --

The comeback of the American nun

When Tracy Kemme first got the calling, at age 22, she had an active social life, an internship in Ecuador, and a serious boyfriend. A sparkly blonde with an easy laugh and a penchant for dangly earrings, she had literally never thought about becoming a “woman religious” before—in laymen’s terms, a nun. . . .

But as it happens, Kemme is far from the only 20-something to embark on what had seemed until recently like a declining career choice. Though the Church does not provide recent statistics, a slew of media reports from People Magazine to the New York Times suggest that increasing numbers of Catholic millennials are feeling the call of God in growing numbers across the country. . . .

By most accounts, the past few generations of Americans have experienced a wide-ranging loss of faith, including growing increasingly alienated from all kinds of organized religions. At the same time, smaller groups (in this case, young women) may be becoming more arduously invested in religion because the modern world, despite all its flashy materialism and sexual rewards, ultimately leaves them wanting more.; 6/2/19, 9:22 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: The loss of shared religious experiences has hurt our culture. For hundreds of years, if you knew the King James Bible and a few Shakespeare plays, you were well-read enough to converse with most English-speaking folk. We all understood references to King Solomon, Prince MacBeth, Adam and Eve, etc. Chastity and charity were concepts not names for pole dancers, and grace and works had a linked history. The loss of this shared culture not only dispersed Americans from each other, but separated us from the West as a Concept and Europe as a common root for much of what became America. Perhaps it was television that first supplanted literature as our common American culture, but even that has fragmented into a million individualized ways to obtain content that mean fewer things we, as a large group, share together st the same time with each other.; 6/2/19, 9:38 AM
traditionalguy said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 6/2/19, 10:07 AM
tim maguire said...: the millennials became interested in the idea of discernment, a process the sisters use to sift and orient options to more closely listen for God’s call. [The millennial Adam Horowitz said,] 'But now I’ve heard millennials saying they need to "discern what I’m up to this afternoon"

Cultural appropriation.; 6/2/19, 10:22 AM
buwaya said...: "Sister Harney found a book on the vows — poverty, obedience, chastity — that she had bought once but never read."

"The saddest line in that entire piece."

It doesn't mean she hasn't read a ton of other books. There are huge piles and stacks of such commentary things in any Catholic university library.; 6/2/19, 10:30 AM
Seeing Red said...: How heartening.

These kids are crying for a direction.

Some of them shouldn’t have had to raise their parents.; 6/2/19, 10:34 AM
buwaya said...: Faith very often follows ritual. Ritual is training and practice. Such repetition changes the mind. It is like any developed skill.

To deny this is to miss that most of what goes on in our heads is not rationally derived.; 6/2/19, 10:35 AM
Anonymous said...: My exposure to nuns has been at both ends of my life. I had a crush on a 5 y/o in kindergarten and got in trouble for kissing her. She later became a nun. A couple of years ago I dated an ex-nun, who was a HLS grad, international tax lawyer, white shoe partner in DC, BEFORE she became a nun.

PS: I've watched the Sound of Music.; 6/2/19, 10:36 AM
traditionalguy said...: Faith is all that you need to commune with the Living God. The rituals are reminders that God likes and accepts your worship. Don’t be gone so long.; 6/2/19, 10:44 AM
Lawrence Person said...: Sort of ties into this Joe Rogan video with Bret Weinstein (the evolutionary psychology professor at the heart of the Evergreen College freakout) about the difference between cults and religions. One of the many topics they touch on is religious ritual as an evolutionary mechanism that edits out error and helps the population groups that adopt it better survive.; 6/2/19, 10:44 AM
Mark said...: "The saddest line in that entire piece."

It doesn't mean she hasn't read a ton of other books.

I didn't say it was sad because I think her illiterate and uninterested books. It is sad because she had/has such unconcern for the vows. The vows and the Rule she should have committed to her heart.

It is sad because it is indicative of a serious problem with a whole generation of women religious who entered and view consecrated life, not as joining in spousal union with Christ, but as a form of social work.

We have plenty of social workers and if a woman wants to be a social worker, she should be. But the religious life is more than -- and different from -- being a social worker.; 6/2/19, 11:01 AM
buwaya said...: "It is sad because she had/has such unconcern for the vows."

How does that follow from not having read one book?; 6/2/19, 11:05 AM
Titus said...: I am in waunakee for the week helping my parents. I am very thoughtful.

Tits.; 6/2/19, 11:09 AM
Titus said...: Grindr guys in Wisconsin, who are fat, have pics of themselves with a fish they caught. This would be completely weird to big city girls, but because I am from Wisconsin I get it.; 6/2/19, 11:12 AM
buwaya said...: traditionalguy,

People dont usually work that way. Backwards in fact, more usually, from ritual and shared social environment to faith. Often from marketing, selling, through force of personality and attention grabbing tricks. Thats why Saint Francis Xavier rang his bell on the shores of Coromandel.

Thats why there is music in the Mass, hymns at a Protestant service, churches have distinctive symbolism, etc. ad infinitum. All of this is an irrational appeal through all the senses.

There are very few people that aquire faith, of whatever sort, intellectually.; 6/2/19, 11:14 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: "The saddest line in that entire piece."

Well, Mark, I too had an interpretation different from yours. I inferred from the context that her immersion in the lifestyle and interaction with other nuns negated the need for book instruction. She was living the daily, weekly, necessary rituals. That’s one of the benefits of joining a group of like-minded people, you learn from the senior members, who are your Sisters in Christ. But my take could be colored by the assumptions I’ve made without reading beyond what Althouse wrote above.; 6/2/19, 11:17 AM
buwaya said...: Titus for instance is indoctrinated by the customs of his subculture.
Repetition fixes a certain worldview, along with a certain concept of virtue.

If you develop a habit of asserting that something is a virtue, whether by telling the rosary or perusing Grindr, then it will be so. We are not so independent as we think.; 6/2/19, 11:21 AM
DanTheMan said...: >We all understood references to King Solomon, Prince MacBeth, Adam and Eve, etc.

To pick a nit... Macbeth was never a prince. He was a thane, and then king. He "overleaps" Malcolm, who had just become prince.; 6/2/19, 12:12 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: “Faith very often follows ritual. Ritual is training and practice. Such repetition changes the mind. It is like any developed skill.”

If that is true, and if Millennials are hungering for spiritual meaning, then a Great Awakening in Orthodox Judaism should be imminent. More seriously, I don’t think the mass of Millennials are interested in finding spiritual meaning. Quite the opposite. It’s simply outside their ability to conceive.; 6/2/19, 12:31 PM
rcocean said...: Reading the NYT on Christianity is like reading the Ozark Times on Reform Judaism.; 6/2/19, 12:43 PM
buwaya said...: Orthodox Judaism is surviving better than any other sort of Judaism, no?; 6/2/19, 1:37 PM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: The millennials have taken vows of spiritual poverty.; 6/2/19, 1:47 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: "One of the many topics they touch on is religious ritual as an evolutionary mechanism that edits out error and helps the population groups that adopt it better survive."
Sounds like another just-so story from the evolutionists.; 6/2/19, 1:50 PM
Smilin' Jack said...: 'So many of the millennials would say, "I’m looking for rituals"'

No millennial would ever say that. The actual quote should be, "So, like, I’m like, looking for, like, rituals, like."; 6/2/19, 2:36 PM
Nichevo said...: So no, Jack, with the uptalking your sentence should end with a question mark?; 6/2/19, 6:01 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: What if evolution works the other way 'round?
What if human behavior drives evolution? Our behavior certainly drives the evolution of other species.; 6/2/19, 9:32 PM