We chain ourselves to God to receive the true freedom to keep our promises and to further give our lives away to God and to others. Action—doing, giving, even enduring—are what is important. Not our feeling, psychological state, or natural optimism.
The Joy of God: Collected Writings, by Sister Mary David (208 pages, Bloomsbury, 2020)
Flannery O’Connor famously said books of devotional literature have only one effect: to corrupt the reader’s taste. They did not make her want to pray. O’Connor gives a pretty good two-prong test for any book on “Christian living.” The most important question is whether it makes one want to pray. But also important is whether it is written in such a way as to give the reader language for talking to others about the things of God and prayer. This collection of writings by the late Sister Mary David Totah, a Benedictine nun for 32 years until her death of cancer in 2017, is a good test-case for the Flannery Rule.
Of Palestinian Arab extraction, Sister Mary David was born in Philadelphia and raised in Louisiana. She studied at Loyola University (New Orleans), the University of Virginia, and Oxford University, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the English symbolist poets. After becoming an English professor at William and Mary, she visited St. Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight in 1984 and discerned a vocation to life as a Benedictine. In his foreword to this posthumous collection, Fr. Erik Varden, a Trappist Abbot (now serving as a bishop in Norway) who knew her, observes that Benedictine life perfectly matched the calling she felt as a young woman in Louisiana. She was standing in the kitchen “emptying the dishwasher and having this overwhelming and intense experience of the love of God, and a piercing joy. I felt I could have died at that moment and my life would have been complete. From then on God was like a prism through which everything passed, enriching and intensifying life and filling it with wonder.”
If joy and wonder emanating from something so ordinary as emptying a dishwasher remind you of Chesterton, you will not be surprised that in the very first of the lectures to novices, which make up the bulk of the book, Sister Mary David begins by quoting Chesterton’s line about joy as the “gigantic secret of the Christian.”
The lectures, meant to guide Benedictines who are growing in their vocations, provide a course in Christian maturity. Each one is filled with simple and ordinary language designed to help the young Benedictines understand both the gift of joy that is available at all times and the responsibility the Christian has to embrace that joy.
Nothing of taste-corrupting prose is present in these essays, which is probably why the volume did make me want to pray. That is attributable no doubt to Sister’s own familiarity with great literature, but also to her spiritual wisdom. What usually corrupts devotional prose is what is often called a “saccharine” quality: artificially sweet with a somewhat bitter aftertaste. Her advice is always solidly realistic and does not sugarcoat the difficulties that arise. In “Decision,” she addresses the modern reluctance to make any vows at all because people change. She notes that our feelings and situations do indeed change, but that fidelity “is what endures when romantic idealizing dies, which tends to make gods out of creatures and which blinds us to human failings.” She isn’t the perfect woman, he isn’t the perfect man, and this monastic community is not the perfect community—yet we can indeed commit ourselves “without regard for future contingencies.” We actually want to do so because, quoting Chesterton again, “the vow is to the man what the song is to the bird or the bark to the dog: his voice whereby he is known.”
That natural and human desire, however, usually needs supernatural help. Vows to husband, wife, or religious community are most powerful when we are “basing them on the much stronger and more stable divine will.” We chain ourselves to God to receive the true freedom to keep our promises and to further give our lives away to God and to others. Action—doing, giving, even enduring—are what is important. Not our feeling, psychological state, or natural optimism. All of these wax and wane, but they have little to do with our own spiritual state, which consists in our ability to receive God’s gifts, trust that he is in control, and continue the path of “difficult fidelity.” That path seems useless to us because our “weakness and struggle” to be faithful depress us, but it is a better tool by which God can heal us and help others: it increases our reliance on the Holy Ghost and makes us more like the Man of Sorrows.
Sister Mary David lived that difficult fidelity herself. The third part of the book, “Surrender to Joy,” is the tale of her five-year battle with cancer told by the abbey’s infirmarian, who details how she who taught the path followed it to the end. Having been sick and quit teaching early one night, Sister Mary David said, “It’s hard. . . but it’s good. . .because it means I can be strong with his strength and not my own.”
This line—along with the whole book—made me want to pray and gave me words for myself and others about how to think about God’s tough love and how I ought to think about it to reset my attitudes. I can’t say for certain, but I think Flannery would approve.
This review appeared originally in the September/October 2021 issue of Gilbert and is republished here with gracious permission of the author.
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BEAUTIFUL