I first met Sr. Mary Pat when she was hired as co-director of the Newman Center on my campus. I liked her — how could you not, with those deerlike eyes, that smile? — but could tell we were on different paths entirely.
I’d spent most of my adult life competing in the world; she’d spent her first twenty years as a nun in a strictly enclosed cloister. I had just discovered silence and solitude, become intent upon simplifying my life; she seemed completely absorbed in social-justice issues. This persistent little nun, I thought, is going to side-track me if I let her. She’s going to sweep me onto committees and lure me into worthy projects. I can’t do those and simplify at the same time.
Thus, I dragged my feet a bit when she invited me to attend my first Newman forum. First of all, she was woefully naïve if she really believed that a visiting priest — even the Maryknoll founder of the School of the Americas Watch, Fr. Roy Bourgeois — could fill up that huge campus auditorium. Second, she wanted me to become personally involved in this, to sit beside Fr. Roy on a local talk-radio show, at the very time I was trying to keep from taking on new obligations. I finally capitulated, mostly because I couldn’t figure out a good enough excuse to stay away, though I was secretly resentful about the impingement on my time.
Imagine my shock, then, when Fr. Roy finally arrived and I found myself behaving like a star-struck groupie. I was not the only one; the auditorium that night was filled to standing-room-only capacity, and our usually jaded students were riveted. There was power in Fr. Roy, the same kind of power that blows through the gospels, and nobody, including resentful me, could remain unmoved by that. Afterward, I stammered out my thanks to Sr. Mary Pat for making sure I’d had some conversation time with him out of the public spotlight. It was like having dinner with Martin Luther King, Jr., I told her. What a hero he is!
However, so was Sr. Mary Pat, though I didn’t yet know her well enough to realize this. During the years following Fr. Roy’s visit to our campus, I watched from the sidelines as she joined the protestors at the gates of the School of the Americas, as she traveled to Afghanistan with an interfaith peace delegation, as she crossed the line at Vandenburg Airforce Base in protest against the war in Iraq. Each time she put herself at risk in service of her principles — principles I shared in theory, though consistently failed to back up in deed — I shuddered. One thing seemed clear: a hero I was not.
Slowly, however, I have become convinced that I can stand up for truth and justice in my own non-heroic way. Slowly, I have come to see that a genuinely simple life is not the fruit of withdrawal but of integrity. It is falsehood and injustice that are complex and confusing; as Jesus once said, the devil is the “father of lies” (John 8:44). Truth can cut like a knife, but the pain is ultimately clarifying. The struggle for justice, even if this is confined to a struggle for what is right and good in marriage or between friends, causes upheaval, but leads to a new and genuine peace.
In the practical sense, this has meant trying to deal with a bad or unhealthy situation — for example, my relationship with a wayward relative who has been enabled by our family for years — instead of explaining it away or rationalizing my own passivity. It has required commitment to veracity in small things: to being more careful with my words; to resisting the old habit of assuring others that all is well when sometimes it really isn’t. Finally, it has meant being willing to bear tension for the sake of the truth.
Not easy. I have learned to take comfort, however, in the words of St. James, which assure us that when we start being “doers of the word and not hearers only” — when we begin to live as people of integrity — then that which we do “shall be blessed.”
(Excerpted from The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston (Loyola Press, 2003). Reprinted with permission of Loyola Press. To order copies of this book, call 1-800-621-1008 or visit www.loyolabooks.org.)
Paula Huston's most recent book is The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyola, 2003). She is also co-editor and a contributing essayist for Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments (Dutton, 2000). A National Endowment of the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing, she is the author of a novel, Daughters of Song (Random House, 1995) and numerous short stories. She is married, has four children, and is a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate. For more information, visit her website at www.paulahuston.com.
