The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

by Ronald Rolheiser

Some years ago, I was serving as counselor to a young nun who was struggling to make sense of her religious life. Her struggle was not easy. On the one hand, she had genuine faith. She believed in God and believed, moreover, that God had called her to be a nun, even though the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience did not sit very well with her natural temperament. On the other hand, there was within her a gnawing restlessness and her erotic pulse for life made living in the convent hard to take. Eventually she made a decision. She gave up trying to be a nun and this is the way she reasoned it. Her words, which I quote here, are the words of our culture, uttered consciously or unconsciously by millions of sincere women and men as they try to sort out their spiritual lives: “I’ve decided that I’m too full of life to ever be truly religious. I love life too much, am too sexual, too physical, too red-blooded, and too much rooted in this earth and what it offers to ever be really spiritual. I can’t serve God and church, I’ve too much erotic and creative energy!”