Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 242

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey," by Sister Helen Prejean:

Once when I was inside the Louisiana death house awaiting an execution, Captain John Rabelais, a guard, asked: “What’s a nun doing in a place like this?” 

Here is an account of my journey to the killing chamber that night and the spiritual currents that pulled me there. 

It’s a river I’m riding.

I invite you to pitch your boat into its current and come with me.

I’m leaving home today, leaving all my young Helen years, leaving my precious family, my house, my bed, the spacious yard with the big oak trees where we could go barefoot in summer and play softball with the Barbay boys. I’m leaving all that, leaving my home with the tall grasses in the back lot where you could make a hideaway and stay for hours if you wanted to and no one could find you. 

I’m leaving home. Forever. 

When you become a nun, you can never again step into your family home—not for a meal or a family reunion or a marriage or anything except for the death of one of your parents, and even then, if they live in a city away from the convent, you may have to decide whether you’ll visit before they die so you can say farewell or wait and attend the funeral. As a nun you are strictly forbidden to sleep away from the convent.

I want to care deeply for someone and, hopefully, have someone care deeply for me. It’s not that God isn’t enough. It’s the opposite, really. If God truly is love, then the deeper I love, the more I know God.

Of all the courses at Notre Dame, what I most want to learn about are the Gospel accounts about Jesus of Nazareth. I hope not just to study Christ with my mind intellectually, but to also encounter him mystically through prayerful meditation on his life. I want to know him in his humanness—how he grew into his vocation and practiced his Jewish faith, stretching its assumed boundaries to reach out to the “foreigners” of his day, and thereby coming to understand compassion as the heart of religious practice, especially for the “least of these.” 

In my courses at Notre Dame I’m learning that the Gospels are faith testimonies, not historical accounts. When I read the Gospels, I’m learning to become an amateur literary archeologist, doing the “digs” through textual layers to get to the human Jesus. 

I already know from personal experience that an ongoing encounter with Christ can transform the way I think and live my life (a long, slow process, believe me). But my image of Jesus is still gauzed over with pious images of him shining so brightly with divinity that I lose a sense of his humanness and find it hard to relate to him.

Marie Augusta has one more zinger. She explains that working for justice necessarily means working for just policies, which means getting involved in the political process. Simply praying for people is not enough. Marie Augusta further explains that in a democracy like the United States, there’s no such thing as being apolitical. If we sit back and do nothing, leaving all the policy making to others, that is, in fact, a position of support for the status quo, which is a very political stance to take.