Why storytelling matters

My grandmother tells a story, entirely in Spanish, of a viejita, an old woman, who collects small logs on her way to her casita, her little home, and gets caught in an aguacero, a downpour. My grandmother sings this story to life, inching her fingers up my arm to the rhythm of the song in a scissor motion like a small pair of legs.

At the point when my grandmother sings that the rain has caught the old woman, her fingers ram into my armpit, giving me tickles of delight.

In an instant, any trouble or pain is vanquished by laughter.

I had always assumed that my grandmother made up that song just for me. But recently, I told it to a group at a women’s leadership and spirituality course. At the end, a young woman in the audience started crying. Her grandmother had sung her the same song.

Suddenly, we weren’t just speaker and audience. The two of us shared a moment — we connected through this story, and a shared history.

Jesus was a storyteller. Stories were the way he reached the people to convey the message he needed them to honor, claim and synthesize. We learn from the Bible that Jesus spoke to the people using story as the vehicle for connection because it fulfilled what God had said: “I will speak to you in parables. I will explain things hidden since the creation of the world” (Matthew 13:35 NLT). The people called it wisdom.

That is still true today. Often, people gravitate to stories with happy endings or tales about everyday people — but even unpleasant stories can be a powerful way to convey a message. Storytelling can be used as a mode of healing, because stories carry in them all the voices of those who have recounted the same story time and time again.

When the church employs storytelling in a way that can reshape people’s lives, reflecting who they are back to themselves, the church becomes a shared space where each person is a part of history.

My priest tells a beautiful story about the origins of our community. He ties our origins to the Christian creation story as well as to the Native Americans, reminding us of our interconnectedness. Speaking to a congregation of predominantly Latino/a, Mexican and Tejano/a families, the connection to our origins is vital; it’s important that we understand our South Texas history, which is one of violence and colonialism.

The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the end of the Mexican-American War, named the Rio Grande as the border between the United States and Mexico. Our families were given the choice to uproot and relocate to Mexico from what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas or to stay on their land and in their homes and receive citizenship in the United States.

The offer came with a promise of full civil rights, but that was far from the truth. Mexican Americans were lynched by the Texas Rangers and continue, nearly 200 years later, to be questioned about their citizenship.

Because our priest understands the complexity of the land and our people, he weaves our history into stories of strength and hope. He acknowledges our indigenous ancestry and is open to the church’s choice to keep our Blessed Mother of Guadalupe, a figure highly revered in our culture. As a congregation in service to our community, it’s important that we are not only seen by God but also seen by our church.

When I faced that class on women’s leadership and spirituality, I knew that in order to convey how storytelling had brought me to my vocation and why storytelling matters to their individual and collective learning, I had to know their stories.

I asked each young woman what she was passionate about. Some were passionate about mujerista theology; some were passionate about family; some were passionate about writing.

I asked the question not only to help my teaching but also to help those women hear themselves. The answer was their reminder that in a room full of leaders, they were heard and they were validated. They were seen.

The same goes for our congregations. While it may seem impossible to spend some or all of a service asking our members what they are passionate about, it is possible to gauge what they respond to.

A sermon rooted in the tradition of story, relevant to the needs and lives of our people, transcends a typical Sunday morning homily. A story has the potential to get carried throughout generations. The story becomes a thread between generations as an intergenerational healing method.

The key question is, do the people see themselves in the story?

My grandparents were master storytellers. They could take any myth, legend or spooky cultural tale and turn it into a lesson that I needed to hear. My grandma and grandpa used to tell me stories that were relevant to me — even when they might have been considered too scary for a child.

My priest has shown me how important it is to know the history of our people — even when it is difficult and violent. How does that history affect the congregation, and how can storytelling be the vehicle by which they begin to heal?

Stories take history and make it possible to believe. Stories give us hope and allow faith to work in the details. When we tell stories, we acknowledge the people who hear them, and we connect with them.

Whether they make us laugh or make us weep, stories give us the power to see ourselves.

In the early 2000s, Kristen Filipic had become well-established as an attorney in Boston, earning more money than ever before. But she’d started to notice a disconnect in her life.

Despite being an active churchgoer, she was receiving no moral guidance on what to do with her dollars beyond giving a portion to the church.

“I wanted so much to be responsible, … using this [income] well, and I couldn’t talk about it with anybody, because in our culture, we just don’t do that,” Filipic said.

That changed in 2013 when a friend invited her to join an economic discipleship group based on a curriculum called Lazarus at the Gate. The eight-week program challenged participants to examine and discuss their personal budgets, be mindful of abundance and needs, give up something nonessential, and give away the new savings together.

For Filipic, cutting cable TV generated a $70-per-month savings. The initial two-month sum went to support a group gift of more than $1,000 for water infrastructure improvements in the developing world. Six years later, still forgoing cable, she puts the savings toward a tithe that includes both church and nonchurch causes.

“There is a lot of freedom in just having avenues where we can talk about such things,” Filipic said.

Broadening the conversation

Lazarus at the Gate is a signature program of the Boston Faith & Justice Network, a 13-year-old parachurch organization that equips individuals to put biblical values into practice. Launched independently in the mid-2000s, the Lazarus program convenes small groups to explore personal economic discipleship. Soon thereafter, BFJN developed Lazarus to expand the program throughout Greater Boston and make its curriculum available as a free open-source file.

For several years, BFJN also convened public discussion events to raise awareness of economic justice issues such as underpaid workers and unsafe conditions in agriculture, textiles and other industries. It played a key role in making Boston a recognized Fair Trade city, committed to fair trade policies and practices that seek equity and create opportunities for workers at risk of exploitation.

More recently, BFJN has been refining its focus on equipping disciples by helping them walk the talk of faith in their use of personal assets. With respect to finances, the Lazarus curriculum continues to be available to all as a free electronic resource, with 320 downloads since updates were added in October 2018.

But in today’s culture, concepts of economic discipleship are expanding to include other types of assets at people’s disposal. To help bring individuals’ use of time and energy into sync with their Christian values, BFJN’s new Micah Six:Eight program provides a framework for making volunteering a way of life.

The program draws on the concise imperative of its namesake verse: “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8 NIV). Paying $150 each, participants come together for a weekend of daylong events at sites in need of help in the Greater Boston region. At each location, they work alongside the project’s beneficiaries and then engage in facilitated theological reflection to reinforce new habits of service.

“We bring people to serve, and then we provide some context around what’s happening with these issues,” said Elizabeth Grady-Harper, BFJN’s executive director. “It’s not just the triage piece. It’s also understanding the broader perspective, such as, ‘What is homelessness in this country?’ ‘What does homelessness look like in Massachusetts?’ ‘What is trafficking?’”

Within this economic discipleship niche, BFJN tackles areas of life that can be awkward for congregational leaders to engage alone but transformational when pursued systematically by a third party in an invitingly packaged format.

Though rooted in progressive evangelicalism, BFJN’s offerings appeal across the Christian spectrum, because they build on a shared conviction about abundance and gratitude. God’s blessings have been abundant, BFJN teaches, and ought to be leveraged in a spirit of generous gratefulness to benefit neighbors who are also children of God.

“The driving force behind the study of economics is scarcity,” said Christa Lee-Chuvala, an assistant professor of social sector leadership at Eastern University and former co-director of BFJN. “BFJN’s mentality, and the mentality going into Lazarus and Micah, is abundance. And that’s actually the mentality of Christianity, this promise of abundance. … God is calling us to be abundance for other people.”

Reimagining the work

BFJN was born in Boston after a nationwide call for action in 2006 by Sojourners/Call to Renewal, a progressive evangelical organization based in Washington, D.C. The Lazarus program’s push for economic discipleship needed a local container to build momentum, and BFJN evolved to provide that role.

To maximize the program’s impact, BFJN has relied on a donor-based model, appealing to grant makers with a heart for social justice to help disseminate the Lazarus curriculum widely and facilitate access to public education events. Yet even with a one-person staff and a lean $60,000 annual budget, BFJN is aware that it can’t survive indefinitely on donations alone. Revenue from the new Micah Six:Eight program is beginning to help defray the organization’s overhead expenses.

With the model becoming more sustainable, BFJN is positioning itself for longevity as a partner to faith groups in the region and beyond. A peek inside its primary programs shows how they’re nudging participants beyond comfort zones in ways that congregational leaders might find difficult to pull off. In intensive settings coordinated by BFJN, people of faith are making mental connections that have immediate pragmatic implications for their wallets and calendars.

Kathy Laflash of suburban Hopkinton, Massachusetts, grew up Roman Catholic and now attends a nondenominational evangelical church. Her personal convictions are woven into her professional life as a public utility clerical worker and a labor movement leader. The 300 Eversource Energy employees who belong to the United Steelworkers Local Union 12004 look to her — as their president — to provide direction and advocacy on their behalf.

But it wasn’t until Laflash engaged in BFJN programming that she started to connect the dots between faith and work. Taking part in a Lazarus program with her husband, she said, led the couple to talk as they never had before about where their money goes and what types of enterprises it supports. As her eyes were opened to modern-day slavery, human trafficking and other exploitative situations around the world, Laflash came to see her labor movement work as part of something bigger than union brotherhood.

“Something we do every day — buying chocolate, buying coffee — affects people on the other side of the world because of labor, exploitation, and just really bad circumstances that a lot of people are in,” she said. “That understanding was just a huge eye-opener into who I am in the labor movement. … To see it in a scriptural way kind of tied a lot of pieces together into who I am in my paying job and who the Lord has given me a heart to be.”

Lazarus groups seem to be most popular with young adults, Grady-Harper said. Millennials tend to welcome opportunities to learn which industries and companies are pursuing fair policies and practices and then examine how their own spending habits could be more intentional and less wasteful, at least in certain areas.

As participants make lifestyle changes and pool savings for one or more charitable causes, they become excited to see the dollars accrue over the program’s eight weeks. One group raised about $40,000. Another raised $3,000, which was enough to pay a year’s salary for an outreach worker to victims of human trafficking in Thailand.

Giving away the money can be exhilarating, but getting to that point can be a bit nerve-wracking. Lee-Chuvala said her first Lazarus group agreed to be wholly transparent in budgeting, all sharing how much they earned and how much they spent in each category. That level of sharing is radically countercultural and even taboo in America, she noted, and people feel vulnerable in the process. But it can bring rewards.

“It’s terrifying, but there is something really liberating about creating that space to be that vulnerable,” she said. “It points to the need for community in discipleship and in spiritual discipline. … What you’re asked to do in Lazarus is to come back each week with a small change that you’ve made and how it’s gone. Everybody is on the same page.”

Confronting discomfort

The Micah Six:Eight program also pushes participants to go, physically and emotionally, to places where they aren’t at first comfortable.

Laflash recalled going to Boston’s common cathedral, an outreach project in which homeless individuals share their stories, worship outdoors and help volunteers distribute basic forms of assistance such as a hot breakfast and warm, dry clothing.

Uneasy at first, Laflash gradually got to know a few of the participants, including a man who was writing a book to draw attention to homeless conditions. Now, she said, she is no longer afraid to pass homeless people on the sidewalk.

“I used to walk by and just not want to make eye contact,” she said. “Now I look at them. I talk to them. I offer to pray for them. I’ll give them something. I don’t give them money, but I give them something tangible.”

Host sites also notice how BFJN enhances volunteering. In Malden, Massachusetts, the Salvation Army Corps Community Center hasn’t always been able to find reliable volunteers who show respect for the church, according to Captain Debora Coolidge.

But volunteers were needed to clear an overgrown area so that kids could play there. One weekend last year, the Micah Six:Eight program sent a team of 30 to worship with the beneficiaries at the Salvation Army and then work alongside the congregants, including a 9-year-old girl named Ryleigh who wanted to help create the play space.

What Coolidge noticed was how volunteers didn’t just do the work and scatter. They circled up afterward to debrief in a way she’d not seen other volunteer groups do.

“I’d never seen a group come out [to our site] and be trained,” Coolidge said. “They broke that verse [Micah 6:8] down: ‘What does mercy mean? What does justice mean? What does humility mean? And how did you show these things in what you provided today?’ You could see lightbulbs go on in their heads as they talked about it.”

BFJN is continuing to evolve. Micah Six:Eight, for instance, was piloted last year as a weeklong endeavor, but that proved to be too much time. Just a weekend gives participants a chance to experience a different pace while remaining connected to their home territories and weaving outreach into their usual routines. Such experiences, organizers hope, can lead to new ways of experiencing and reflecting Christ in everyday life.

“We’re meant to do this as a lifestyle; we’re not meant to do this as a one-time thing,” Grady-Harper said. “And you do it according to your own makeup and your own passions. That’s the vision.”

I come from a long line of singers. I remember as a child gathering around the piano with my parents to sing old gospel hymns.

My mother and father loved to sing, and they turned my three brothers and me into a pretty good quartet. In my preteen years, people discovered that I was a boy soprano, so I got invited to sing for various civic clubs in our small town.

Singing was also part of my church life. We went to church often, and I quickly figured out how to survive the long sermons: get ready for the next hymn.

On Sunday evenings, my favorite part of the service was the 15-minute “Hymns We Love to Sing.” Members of the congregation would call out the numbers of hymns, which we’d sing with gusto.

When I turned 18 and it came time for me to consider a vocation, some suggested that I pursue a career in music. Would I choose ministry or music? Was there a way to choose both? I decided then that I would use music as part of my ministry.

Thus, for my entire career, I’ve been a singing minister — in church choirs, symphony choruses, ensembles, a folk band. I occasionally sing in the middle of my sermon. (When preaching about healing, how can one resist bursting forth with, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole …”?)

I’ve reflected often about why singing captures us and won’t let us go. What I’ve concluded is that singing inspires hope. In these times of tumult and strife, where do we find hope? I think that when a poetic text is set to a lovely melody, that combination becomes irresistible — and motivational.

It may be a simple text such as, “We shall overcome. … We’ll walk hand in hand. … We shall live in peace.” Singing this tune draws us together; it’s a galvanizing force that lifts activists and marchers in the struggle for justice.

Singing forms community. While solos have their place (and I’ve done my fair share of them), I’ve long preferred the chorus over the individual voice. Why? The corporate song draws us into a unity, a communal cohesion, connecting us with each other through times of stress and distress.

When we sing, we can’t do anything else. We get “lost in wonder, love and praise,” as the hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” says. The singing takes over and invites us to stay in the present moment, thus giving us access to vitality and aliveness.

As a pastor, I found that singing is another way to connect with members of the congregation. Songs express blessing, forgiveness, delight and lament. When singing makes us come alive, “that is the area in which we are spiritual,” as David Steindl-Rast writes in “Music of Silence.”

Go to any church funeral, for example, and listen to the congregation sing, “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing,” and you will hear hope singing through grief. Likewise, grief is tempered when we sing, “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come.”

We sing the pain, and we sing through the pain. We sing with fervor until the song gets inside us, and the song sings us.

Through the years, various parishioners would confide to me that they were unsure about what they actually believed. They had doubts and questions that prevented a clear, verbal statement of their faith. When I heard these concerns, I usually asked whether they had favorite hymns.

“Make a list of your favorite hymns,” I would tell them, “and you will see what you believe.” Hymns have a way of moving into our hearts and staying in our memory banks; they become a storehouse and expression of our faith, theology and spiritual commitment.

“Amazing Grace” is often at the top of the best-loved hymns list. It’s a compelling affirmation: “Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come. ’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”

After singing these hymns for so many years, I often find an old tune popping into my consciousness at some unguarded moment. I then sing from memory a welcome word — the song is singing me.

A few years ago, I was sitting in the silence of a Quaker meeting for worship when a Friend rose and said, “This may be out of order, but I know Mel is here, and I’d like to call him out to sing ‘How Can I Keep from Singing?’”

I was startled, but I recovered and did as requested, singing from memory a version of the 19th-century hymn based on Psalm 145. It’s a call for hope in the midst of lament:

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the real though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.

No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging;
It sounds an echo in my soul
How can I keep from singing?

On another occasion, I was walking in a forest when an old hymn started singing me. I found myself singing, “Are you weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care?” (The lovely word “cumbered” means “hindered” or “obstructed.”)

This hymn kept on singing me, until I got the message: release the stresses you’re carrying. As I finished my forest walk, I said aloud, “Thanks. I needed that.”

Theologically, it seems clear to me that God has chosen music as a primary vehicle to reach us. God rides on music. Singing becomes a spiritual practice; it wakes us up and gives us a surge of life and hope.

This speaks even to those who have difficulties with church. One Sunday, a stranger appeared in worship. At the church door, he said, “I used to go to church a lot, and now I don’t. The only thing I really miss is the singing.”

I understand what he was saying. In our worship, Scripture, the liturgy and the sermon can bring insight and inspiration. But as my aged mother once said to me, “I’ve been listening to sermons all my life, and I don’t remember a one of them.”

Yet she remembered many hymns and sang them often from memory. Those hymns sang her — and sustained her — through many ups and downs. And after a lifetime of deriving hope and joy from the music, how could she keep from singing?

Roger stood before our quarterly gathering of church leaders wearing faded jeans and a button-down shirt suitable for the gardening and other activities that occupied his retirement years. He sported a short gray ponytail, reminding us of both his age and his perennial countercultural vibe.

He began telling us that the Bible frustrated and irritated him and he didn’t read it much at all anymore.

Roger is a trusted and respected elder, befitting his decades of church leadership and service. I had asked him to tell us about his Bible reading, the spiritual practice we were highlighting that evening.

Our church had emerged from an evangelical tradition that emphasized the Bible and the holiness it was thought to inspire. To encourage spiritual formation in our community, we’d taught seven core faith practices over the years. One was regular, systematic Bible reading. But like Roger, most of our members weren’t reading the Bible anything close to daily, and when they were, it was with growing confusion and frustration.

Privately, if I had been honest with myself, I would have admitted that this was true for me as well.

In my training in evangelical institutions, I’d been taught that with sufficient time and tools, the Bible was reliably clear and helpful. Usually, I was told, a plain reading of the text would lead to greater insight about God and direction for faithful living.

But now I found that even I, a trained pastor, couldn’t always fathom or stomach what I read.

Parts of the Bible are violent, and I could no longer make peace with a fundamentally violent God. Other sections require considerable interpretive gymnastics to not undermine the lives and faith of women, sexual minorities and many other people who have experienced marginalization, not to mention how particular readings have been used as active weapons in that harm.

Given the Bible’s age and complexity, its mix of freedom and patriarchy, love and war, beauty and terror, it’s no wonder that many in our church weren’t reading it anymore.

I understood Roger’s frustration. It was also my own.

So what would we as a church do?

Parker Palmer’s poem “November 22nd” has this gem of a line and a half: “the world unravels always, / and it must be rewoven time and time again.”

Things fall apart; means of accessing God and truth that once worked well no longer do. The world unravels always. But the call is then to grab a needle and thread and get busy mending.

In my own life of faith, and in my work as a pastor, I’m looking for ways to incorporate the classical spiritual disciplines, including Bible reading, in ways that breathe life and produce good fruit in our time and place.

The Bible and the extraordinary story of Jesus of Nazareth are too important to be abandoned.

In our church’s post-evangelical practice of faith, we are still vigorously committed to spiritual formation, but with more honesty, more freedom and wider means of engagement.

We teach reading the Bible as much as ever, but we do so with full awareness that we are reading the Bible from a life 19 centuries after the most recent books of the Bible were written.

We are honest, talking about all the elephants that enter the room each time we try to read the Bible devotionally.

Last year, I wrote a guide to the book of Revelation for the season of Lent. In it, I acknowledged that the text’s characterization of Jezebel sounds misogynistic to modern ears. Some people were angry with me, but far more were given permission to acknowledge their own reactions to the text.

In our Bible teaching, we make room for the work of the Spirit by putting the learner, not the teacher, in charge of the experience.

When I write about the Bible for our congregants, I don’t tell them what it means but rather share my own experience as a reader: my musings, my difficulties, my responses. When the pastors preach the Bible, we try to model humble reading that employs a hermeneutic of love: how can this reading help me more fully love myself, love my neighbor, love God, love all that God made?

And then we freely encourage the congregation to do the same, making peace with the knowledge that their readings and interpretations often won’t match ours.

I’m just not stressed out about how people in our church may or may not read their Bibles every day. Instead, I’m longing for whole lives with growing wisdom, hope and love. We’re learning to adjust our spiritual formation toward that end.

We no longer tell our members that every single day, if they are serious about following Jesus, they must systematically read the Bible, talk to and listen to God, and do five other things. We teach them to stay engaged in learning more, to keep a curious mind regardless of the answers they may or may not find.

This is exactly what Roger was doing with the Bible.

After telling us how much the Bible as a whole gave him trouble, he shared that recently he had read and reread the four Gospels, exclusively, for three months.

While he still wasn’t reading the rest of the Bible yet, he said that he loved Jesus as much as ever and that his engagement with the life and teachings of Jesus had given him a profound sense of purpose and hope for his retirement years.

There was a time when that story could not have been told at our church, or at least not encouraged. But now we see the mending in Roger’s story, the renewal he’s finding in the Bible. And we celebrate it.

The haenyeo — female divers who have been harvesting seafood off the coast of Korea since the 17th century — know the importance of exhaling before inhaling.

In her recent novel “The Island of Sea Women,” Lisa See introduces us to the life of the courageous haenyeo through the all-female diving collectives of remote Jeju Island and protagonist Young-sook. In this culture, while the men stay home to care for the children, the women spend their days diving. Sometimes 20 meters under the icy ocean waters, they hold their breath for several minutes at a time while searching for abalone, conch or octopus.

When the divers finally emerge for air, they first exhale, each emitting a distinctive cry, or sumbisori — a high-pitched, rhythmic whistle to expel carbon dioxide from the lungs. A deep intake of breath follows.

The chief diver of a collective listens for each sumbisori as the women — grandmothers, mothers and young teens — pop up all around the diving area. The chief knows each diver’s sound and waits anxiously for the full complement of sumbisori to confirm that every diver is safe and rested before resubmerging. In concert, the exhalations make a kind of music, a song of safety, life and rest.

Young-sook’s mother, the chief of her diving collective, tells her daughter, “I’m responsible for every woman’s safe return to shore. I listen for the sumbisori of all women in our collective. Together our sumbisori create a song of the air and wind on Jeju. Our sumbisori is the innermost sound of the world. It connects us to the future and the past. Our sumbisori allows us first to serve our parents and then our children.”

I recently shared this powerful image at a program for Christian institutional leaders in their 30s and early 40s. These leaders have increasingly intense roles in complex institutions, often have working partners and maybe children, and want to stay physically fit, civically minded and spiritually whole.

What might a restorative breath sound like for these leaders? Who is the “chief” listening intently for their exhalations?

The practice of taking Sabbath is deeply theological. Candler School of Theology Old Testament scholar Ryan Bonfiglio describes Sabbath as a part of our very identity as created beings, created in the image of God. The Sabbath, Bonfiglio says, is the first thing God calls holy — not people, not creation, but Sabbath.

Ceasing work in our culture may seem inefficient, but efficiency is not a fruit of the Spirit, Bonfiglio says. Christian leaders may do well to practice “the holiness of inefficiency,” what Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel called “a sanctuary in time.”

The chiefs of the diving collectives do this by teaching their divers from an early age not only how to breathe in to begin the work but how (and when and how often) to breathe out. That exhalation in community — a life-sustaining song, as Young-sook’s mother describes it — equips the women to serve.

For those of us who supervise other leaders, how do we teach the importance of coming up for air? Do we model how to set boundaries, to stay home when we are sick, to use our vacation days, to prioritize spiritual practices like prayer, a walk or centering breaths?

And for those who are bivocational or multivocational, like so many Christian leaders today, how do we learn to make room for exhaling before inhaling life-giving breath? When one task stops but another, overlapping task starts, how do we structure time for the breath in between? And how do we ensure that others in our communities or on the margins are not holding their breath until they pass out?

Traditions of breath prayer can help us practice and teach life-giving breath and praying without ceasing amid Christian vocational life. Many Christians practice yoga as a way of “returning to the breath.” When we are mindful of the God who in Genesis 2:7 breathed life into the dust of the ground to create humans, we understand our every breath in and out as bound inextricably with who we are as created beings and how we are to serve and love our neighbors as ourselves.

If we do not emerge and help others emerge from the deep waters for sumbisori, then we are betraying the very breath that is the gift of life from God. We are meant to inhale for the work and then exhale for our rest before inhaling again. This is the crucial rhythm of the Christian vocational life.

For whose sumbisori are we listening this week or this summer? To whom can we “give” Sabbath? What music does our community’s collective sumbisori make? Is it music that mourns? That soothes? That celebrates?

The air was thick with ash from raging wildfires last November when five millennials with no fixed religious affiliation moved into a Roman Catholic convent campus in northern California to spend six months under the tutelage of the Sisters of Mercy.

The pilot residency was the most ambitious evolution yet for the two-and-a-half-year-old national movement that brings together religiously unaffiliated young adults — often called “nones,” for the box they check on surveys asking about their religion — and Catholic sisters, colloquially known as nuns.

Since its inception, Nuns & Nones has garnered intense interest and widespread media coverage. The friendships between the millennials, most in their late 20s and early 30s, and the nuns, many in their 70s and 80s, have aroused the curiosity of many religion-watchers to see just what may emerge from the unlikely pairing.

Up until November, Nuns & Nones met for monthly or twice-monthly conversations in convents and living rooms in cities such as Grand Rapids, Boston, Minneapolis and New York, and for monthly video conference calls and occasional conferences.

Aside from a website, the group is pretty informal, with no structure, offices or nonprofit status — just a set of budding relationships.

But the five millennials who arrived at the Mercy Center in Burlingame, California, about 15 miles south of San Francisco, were intent on having an immersive experience. They wanted to study the nuns’ democratic leadership structures. They wanted to explore the balance these women have struck between social action and contemplation.

Perhaps most of all, they wanted to explore what it’s like to live in spiritually grounded community, and how they might adapt parts of the model to their own lives.

The nuns, who are aging and declining in numbers, wanted to reflect on their accomplishments and transmit the wisdom they have accumulated to a younger generation. The two generations do not often interact but do share a passion for social justice.

The air outside may have been smoky and dark, but from the moment Sister Joan Marie O’Donnell stepped outside to greet the guests with a bottle of wine, the atmosphere brightened.

The five millennials had already formed strong personal bonds with some of the Mercy Sisters through quarterly meetings in the Bay Area. They were eager to build on those.

They settled into the convent’s retreat center, where they were each provided their own bedroom, simply furnished with a single bed, a small desk, an armchair and a sink. They shared bathrooms and were offered the use of a gathering room with a kitchenette.

After getting to know the 39-acre convent campus, called “The Oaks,” with its gardens, walking trails and labyrinth, the group established some routines.

They held Millennial Monday discussion groups, Friday night Shabbat dinners (courtesy of the two millennials who were brought up Jewish), and a dialogue series on the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. Scripture study on the Hebrew prophets and occasional outings to shadow the sisters in their numerous off-site ministries were also part of the residency.

“The core of our inquiry is, What does it take to live in spiritually grounded, socially active community?” said Adam Horowitz, the 32-year-old Santa Fe-based cultural organizer and activist who co-founded the Nuns & Nones collaborative and was part of the pilot residency. “What kind of structures might be in place in our own lives to orient ourselves toward lifelong, sustained social action?”

The sisters, for their part, said they felt honored to share the way of life they have cultivated over the past 50 years with young, thoughtful people who expressed many similar longings.

“For me personally, it has drawn me into such a bigger world,” said Sister Gloria Marie Jones, a Dominican nun who lives in Oakland and served as a mentor to the group.

“I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to such a diverse faith group. Their desire for spirituality is very alive. I have been really blessed finding a resonance of values, hopes and dreams, and openness to the Spirit.”

A window of opportunity

The six-month residency came about because of a particular urgency.

There were 44,000 Catholic sisters in the U.S. last year, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, a sharp decline from the 161,000 sisters 50 years ago.

Although some women still join Catholic religious orders, they are not nearly enough to replace those who are dying. A 2014 study found that there are more sisters in the United States over age 90 than under age 60.

Millennials are quite aware of the window of opportunity.

“They want to do this now, because there’s a limited amount of time,” said Kaya Oakes, who writes about Catholicism and is the author of “The Nones Are Alright,” a look at the lives of young millennials.

“They see these women as successful activists who they can learn from,” Oakes said.

Indeed, Catholic sisters continue to build on a long legacy of founding hospitals and schools, safe houses, and affordable housing communities, to name a few. Even in retirement, they remain committed to ministering to the sick, the prisoner and the stranger.

O’Donnell, for example, is 77 and officially retired. But she volunteers daily at a dementia care facility and serves on the board of a local Catholic high school and two immigration coalitions. She also works part time at a local mortuary, attending to grieving families, and volunteers at a San Francisco center that offers spiritual and psychological support to addicts and substance abusers.

“I do a whole potpourri of things in my post-retirement,” she said.

In the years since the Second Vatican Council ushered in many church reforms, the U.S. sisters have carved out independent lives. They no longer wear the habit. They work in academia, law and other professions, and they govern themselves along a horizontal organizational structure — electing their leaders for fixed terms and through a long consultative process of discernment — rather than the traditional top-down leadership of the Catholic Church at large.

Those factors appeal to idealistic millennials, who value social justice, meaningful work and collaboration.

“The millennials have a desire to create a new and better world not driven by the consumerism and polarities and power,” Jones said. “They look at the sisters and say, ‘This is a group of people who have made a difference. How did they do it?’”

One thing the nuns have been willing to set aside is any effort to proselytize. Only one of the dozens of millennials involved in the Nuns & Nones project has returned to the Catholic Church. And so far, few if any of the nones have affiliated with a particular congregation.

That’s fine by the sisters.

“This experience is beyond church, and it’s beyond belief,” said Sister Judy Carle, who guided the residency program. “One of the first questions they asked us is, ‘What’s your spiritual practice?’ It was not, ‘What do you believe?’”

Several sisters said they wanted to remain open to whatever the relationships may bring.

“For me, it’s been a very sacred journey into mystery,” Jones said. “They have helped us see our lives with new eyes and appreciate it in new ways. All of that is part of the blessing and joy and gift of this journey with them.”

Creating new communities of meaning

Ever since the 2007 Pew Research Center religious landscape survey, Americans have been awakened to a changing religious landscape in which a growing share of people are religiously unaffiliated and perfectly happy to remain so.

Among American millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996, as defined by Pew), the share of nones is some 35% — compared with 23% in the general population — and researchers predict an even higher concentration among Generation Z.

But though they may not go to church, many millennials are socially conscious, eager to work for change and looking for ways to ground their social justice work in spiritual practices.

That’s certainly the case for the millennials of Nuns & Nones.

The group got its start around 2015 when two of its founders — Horowitz and the Rev. Wayne Muller, a Santa Fe psychotherapist, author, minister and community advocate in his mid-60s — met through a mutual acquaintance.

Muller, who had worked with the Maryknoll Sisters years ago during a sojourn in Peru, was aware of the nuns’ radical commitment to social justice. On many long walks in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Muller suggested to Horowitz that he and his young activist friends might learn something from the example of the Catholic sisters.

The two organized the group’s first official gathering in November 2016 at Harvard Divinity School.

In recent years, the school has become a hub for those wanting to study community, spirituality and social activism outside traditional religious institutions, and both Muller and Horowitz had attended conferences there.

One of the gathering’s co-sponsors was How We Gather, a millennial-led startup begun at Harvard in 2015 by two divinity school students, Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, who wrote a white paper on how millennials are finding and building communities of meaning and belonging apart from traditional religious settings.

That same spirit of innovation drives the millennials in the Nuns & Nones group. Horowitz, for example, has founded multiple nonprofit ventures, including a grassroots action network of artists and organizers called the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture and a pop-up Jewish learning community called Taproot. He considers himself Jewish.

At around the same time as the Harvard gathering, Katie Gordon, a millennial from Grand Rapids, Michigan, formed the first regional Nuns & Nones group in that city.

Gordon, who worked at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Grand Valley State University, had come across the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids and begun talking initially with one sister and eventually with others. Then she brought fellow millennials with her.

That group, now called Sisters & Seekers, has been meeting every other Sunday evening at the Dominican Center at Marywood since April 2017. The group leader will typically begin the discussion with a feature story that the group has read. Sometimes the group will discuss a recent episode of “On Being with Krista Tippett,” the public radio show that explores what it means to be human. Both the millennials and the sisters are fans.

Gordon, who is 28, has since moved to Boston, where she started another Nuns & Nones group. She graduated this year from Harvard Divinity School and remains intensely interested in nonreligious community building. She is spending the summer with the Benedictine sisters in Erie, Pennsylvania.

“When I started a few years ago, I wouldn’t have called myself spiritual,” Gordon said. “Through the language sisters use and the mysticism of that tradition, I’ve learned this contemplative orientation. It doesn’t make me more religious or affiliated with any tradition, but it’s deepened my spiritual practice in a really significant way.”

But if there’s one thing that has eluded millennial innovators, it’s how to create a viable model of community living.

That’s what led Horowitz and Muller to begin investigating the potential for a residency that might allow the nones a deeper immersion and learning experience.

At a meeting of sisters and millennials in April 2018 at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Horowitz and Muller approached Carle about the possibility of a residency at the Mercy Center in Burlingame.

“I wasn’t sure I could commit to it,” Carle said. “When I came home, I talked to the leader of our retreat center. Then I talked to our [regional] leadership. It took about three or four months to get the essentials down.”

In time, and as she got to know some of the Bay Area millennials better, she became more convinced that the residency could benefit both groups.

Sarah Jane Bradley, a Berkeley-based millennial who had co-founded an alternative graduate school community called Open Master’s, was eager to sign on.

“A lot of the concerns and questions of my generation are around how we share resources and how do we be in right relationships with people in ways that aren’t objectifying or a power over others but loving and consensual,” Bradley said. “How do we remove the ego in our decision making and make it more about inner listening and dialogue?”

These questions led Bradley, who had grown up Catholic but moved away from church practice, to organize a series of discussions with the Mercy Sisters around their vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. For many, the series opened up a world of possibility for how millennials might anchor their commitments to their most deeply held values.

Some, including Bradley, began to think about how to craft vows of their own — a vow to live simply, for example, or a vow to share resources with others.

“A lot of young people don’t have anything like that in their lives,” Muller said. “They now realize they can do new and hopeful things. It broke open their imagination.”

Stones rubbing against each other

By mid-May, the time had come for the millennials to pack up.

Before leaving, they drafted an online survey to help themselves and the nuns reflect on the experience. The nuns have submitted their own report to their regional leaders in Omaha, Nebraska. The two plan to draft a public report at a later date.

The experience was a learning curve, and the road not always easy to travel together.

Among the highlights for both groups were the Shabbat dinners, the April 19 Freedom Seder, as they called the Passover eve ritual meal the millennials hosted, the many formal discussions on vows, and the many more informal exchanges in the hallways and in smaller groups.

The two groups did not interact daily. The sisters’ quarters were in the convent side of the campus, and the millennials were housed in the retreat center.

The millennials kept their remote nonprofit jobs, and they found it challenging to balance their outside commitments while also learning alongside the sisters.

“This has not been the period of rest, prayer, contemplation and study that one might imagine,” Horowitz said. “It’s been full-time work in a very intense communal environment.”

In some ways, the millennials had thought ahead. Before they arrived, they had set up a joint bank account to pay for food and make monthly contributions to the Mercy Center.

But they did not fully consider what kinds of commitments to make to one another. Should they meet daily, and when? What if some didn’t choose to join in? How should they handle disagreements?

“Burlingame has opened their eyes to ‘This is not easy,’” Jones said. “And it doesn’t happen because you’re living together.”

Living together is like holding a bag of stones, Jones said. They rub up against each other and over time become smoother, shinier and more polished, but there’s a lot of friction along the way.

Still, the taste for intentional community was tantalizing for most of the millennials, and Horowitz said he sees the residency as “setting up the tent poles” for future residency programs.

One common interest that repeatedly emerged was climate change and ways to heal the earth — a concern shared by many of the nuns. There was talk of establishing a community in the East Bay, focused on ecology and education. Some talked about residency with nuns along the U.S. border with Mexico.

For now, there’s no agreement on the next steps. The five millennials will continue to be a part of the leadership team of Nuns & Nones and participate in monthly conference calls.

The residency had begun on a dark November day when California was burning. On move-out day in mid-May, the atmosphere was clear and bright, no longer choked with ash and smoke, but filled with the promise of new possibility and the mystery of a new spiritual opening.

No one knows for sure exactly when the St. Olaf Christmas Festival at St. Olaf College became the gold standard for holiday-season musical performances — specifically, choral celebrations of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.

Some people contend it was when other colleges started copying the event, putting on their own Christmas festivals. Others argue that it was in 1983, when PBS first broadcast the festival nationwide. But for Anton Armstrong, the festival’s artistic director, the moment of recognition came via a phone call several years ago.

“I got a call from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” he said. “I mean — the Mormon Tabernacle Choir calling us and asking for advice on how to put on a Christmas festival?”

He shook his head as if he’s still having trouble believing it.

Held every year since 1912, the festival is one of the oldest musical Christmas celebrations in the country. Though the performers are students, their skill and artistry have earned the event an international reputation. This year, viewers from 30 countries watched a live stream of the festival’s final performance.

“I would say that makes this a world event,” said Michael Kyle, St. Olaf’s vice president for enrollment and college relations. At least one family came from Europe to witness the festival in person, he said.

With five choirs, performing separately and as a massed ensemble, plus an orchestra, the festival has some 550 participants onstage and another 60 working behind the scenes. That’s about 1 in every 5 students on the 3,000-student campus, located in Northfield, Minnesota, about 40 miles south of Minneapolis.

A St. Olaf alumnus, Armstrong participated in the festival four times as a student and has served as its artistic director for the past 29 years, since returning to the school in 1990 as a professor of music and the conductor of the St. Olaf Choir. Today, he is the Harry R. and Thora H. Tosdal Professor and Chair of Music at St. Olaf.

After all that time, you might think that Armstrong has the template down pat and that leading the festival requires no more than filling in a few blanks. A Scripture reading here, a hymn there — the planning is done!

Constantly changing

But that’s not how it works. The festival is constantly changing, because the world around it is constantly changing, Armstrong said.

“We ask: What does this campus need to hear?” he said. “What does the wider community, the world, need and want?”

The festival is a huge draw for alumni, who show up by the thousands for the four presentations, held this year Nov. 29 through Dec. 2. Many come out of a sense of nostalgia — which challenges Armstrong and the planning committee to balance convention and innovation, the school’s unique Norwegian heritage and a changing world and society.

The task, Armstrong said, is to “celebrate a tradition but still make everyone feel welcome.”

Part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, St. Olaf College was founded in 1874 by Lutheran Norwegian immigrants. This year, Armstrong’s goal was to acknowledge the first two of those historic elements while focusing on the third — the immigrant experience.

“We have a different kind of immigrant now,” Armstrong said. While the festival still honors the school’s Lutheran and Norwegian ties, it has long since expanded its musical selections to include music from around the world.

This year’s festival — the 107th — included Scandinavian music, together with carols from France, Poland, Nigeria and the United States, including an African-American spiritual and, for the first time, music sung in Arabic.

“All the world needs to be represented,” Armstrong said.

The focus on diversity and the international community fits with the college as a whole, which puts a strong focus on global involvement, Armstrong said.

The school is consistently among the top colleges sending students abroad, with more than 67 percent of the class of 2017 having studied internationally.

“We look at the world in a global context,” Armstrong said.

That, he insisted, is also a tradition.

‘A little, radical church school’

“St. Olaf has always been a little, radical church school,” he said. “It was founded by people who wanted to be prepared for life in the new world.”

Armstrong has witnessed and experienced St. Olaf’s growing diversity firsthand. When he arrived on campus as a student 44 years ago, he was one of the few African-Americans.

“Everything was white,” he said — and not just the student body. When he first visited, the preceding January, the campus was covered with snow and the cafeteria that day was serving chicken, mashed potatoes and cauliflower.

“Even the food was white!” he said.

Now when he looks around the campus, he sees students and faculty from 79 countries representing a wide cross section of ethnicities.

“When I hear colleagues say they don’t feel welcome, that hurts me,” Armstrong said. “I know the battles and have fought them.”

The Christmas Festival is about much more than the music — though that clearly gets the top billing. Liturgy and theology are equally important to the planning committee.

“The theme of the festival starts with theology and the mood of the country,” said the Rev. Dr. Matthew Marohl, the college’s pastor. “This year we focused on the [country’s] increased divisiveness. Students couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving without a checklist of topics they could discuss.”

Once a theme is selected, Marohl researches and compiles various scriptures that illustrate and convey the chosen message. He also writes an introduction to the program that touches on the festival’s theological content.

‘Good News of Great Joy’

For this year’s program, titled “Good News of Great Joy,” the introduction addressed the good news of binding up the brokenhearted and the joy of easing the load of the burdened.

The festival has become an important part of the college’s image, said John Ferguson, who retired in 2012 as conductor of the St. Olaf Cantorei and professor of organ and church music. Ferguson took part in the festival for 29 years, officially — and still participates in an unofficial capacity.

“People see us do the festival with the integrity that reflects the integrity of everything we do here,” he said.

In addition to being televised, broadcast on radio and livestreamed, the festival is carried by the armed forces TV and radio networks.

“From having been overseas as a student, I realize how much that connection to home can mean,” Ferguson said.

Obviously, the festival is also important to the students on campus. Not only do a fifth of the students participate in the event; they take part, committing to numerous rehearsals and four performances, at the worst possible time for college students, the weekend before final exams.

Ferguson said he knew that not much studying happens during festival weekend.

“That’s how much the students appreciate the opportunity to do this,” he said.

Later, they come back to the festival as alumni and realize all over again what the festival meant and continues to mean to them.

“When they find us afterward, they don’t know what to say,” Ferguson said. “They realize what an incredible experience they had.”

‘Consistently excellent’

Armstrong said the festival has managed to be consistently excellent over many years for a variety of reasons.

“The first is consistency in leadership,” he said.

The festival has had only four artistic directors in its 107 years — and the short-timer of those four served for 22 years. The festival’s founder, F. Melius Christiansen, was in charge for 32 years, and Armstrong, after 29 years, is fast closing in.

“I’m going to catch him,” he said with a smile.

The St. Olaf students have also played an important role. “We have always had wonderfully talented and really hardworking kids,” Armstrong said.

A liberal arts college with an emphasis on the arts, St. Olaf attracts young people who are more results-oriented than career-focused, he said.

“Through the arts and music, we create a community that is caring, passionate and intellectual,” he said. “Our students aren’t interested in being the ones who make the most money after they graduate. They want to make a difference.”

Members of the community strive to create a supportive atmosphere on campus.

“It’s a place where issues of faith and values permeate not just the religion department but the entire fabric of the institution,” he said. “One of the reasons I chose St. Olaf [as a student] was because of the values of this place, the love of neighbor.”

Changes in planning and infrastructure

When Armstrong took over the festival, he made a few changes in the infrastructure. For starters, he brought in some new blood to the planning committee, expanding it beyond the music department.

He added the college pastor to ensure that the festival had a basis in liturgy and Scripture. And he invited a representative of the art department to serve as visual designer.

The school’s basketball arena is the only venue on campus large enough to hold the event, and Armstrong figured that getting a designer in on the ground floor could only help. This year, Christie Hawkins, the festival’s visual designer and set production chief, hung large colored banners behind the stage to create the impression of stained-glass windows.

Armstrong also changed the way the festival is planned.

Before, the planning committee would choose the music and then develop an appropriate theme. But Armstrong decided to do the opposite.

“I decided that we’d come up with the theme first and then express it through the music,” he said.

Almost as soon as one festival is over, planning starts for the next one. The first planning meeting for this year’s festival took place last January. In a few weeks, planning for the 2019 festival will begin.

“One reason is that we want things to still be fresh in our minds,” Armstrong said. “We want to go over whatever feedback we got.”

Dealing with the unexpected

But even with a year to plan, the unexpected can happen and things can change. In 2017, the committee jettisoned its original theme after a year that had been filled with racial unrest.

Several unarmed young black men across the nation, including one in Minneapolis, had been shot and killed by police. After a report of a racial incident on campus — which turned out to be unfounded — the students held a sit-in that shut down classes for a day. Other colleges in the state were having similar experiences.

“We were living in a mess,” Armstrong said.

The festival planners put together a new program based on social justice. That was also part of this year’s festival, although more subtly.

“Last year’s festival had lots of big [musical] numbers,” Marohl said. “This year, the first third was quite soft — but not soft in a weak sense. It was kindness and grace coming in sweetness.”

The power of music to make a difference — whether at St. Olaf College or in the world — should not be underestimated, Armstrong said. In fact, he’s convinced that if he could put together a choir from the members of the U.S. Congress, he could dissipate much of the rancor that marks modern politics.

“Choral singing is one of the last few places where people put aside their differences,” he said. “We have a lot of political views up there [in the choir]. We have lots of religious beliefs. But we can put aside what divides us, because when you are doing choral singing, you have to listen to the people around you.

“Music helps us find the common good, find the unison and find the harmony.”

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Lord, grant me to greet the coming day in peace.
Help me to rely on your holy will.
In every hour of the day reveal your will to me.
Bless my dealings with all who surround me.
Teach me to treat all that comes to me throughout the day
with peace of soul
and with the firm belief that your will governs all.
Guide my words and deeds, my thoughts and feelings.
Teach me to act firmly and wisely
without embittering or embarrassing others.
Give me the strength to bear the fatigue of the coming day
with all that it shall bring.
Direct my will. Teach me to pray. Pray yourself in me.
Amen.

— Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, 1826-1867

For several years, this prayer has been one of my favorite morning invocations. I first ran across it in the small book “Praying Our Days: A Guide and Companion” by Frank T. Griswold, former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and friend from a summer community in New Hampshire.

In “Tracking Down the Holy Ghost: Reflections on Love and Longing,” Griswold writes that he first came across the ancient prayer by the Russian Orthodox Church leader while serving as presiding bishop. “On many mornings,” he writes, “I would enter into the new day asking myself how I could best deal with what might lie ahead.”

Nearly 200 years after it was composed, the prayer still speaks to Christian leaders. The words affirm that God is in us, blessing, guiding and teaching us as we lead complex communities. God’s presence is embedded in our lives through our stories, experiences and relationships. Our job is both to notice God’s presence and to acknowledge, through our words and deeds, the difference God is making.

The prayer begins by asking God to help us set aside our worries and our anxieties about what the day might bring. We pray that we can place our trust and reliance not on our own strength but on God’s. Philaret’s reference to God’s will is less, Griswold writes, “about obeying an order and more a response to the joy of being loved.” It is a prayer to “sit lightly with my own expectations and make space for new insights or ways of seeing that may come from God’s desire rather than my own.”

In the third line of the prayer, we recognize that we will need reminding of our intention to greet the day in peace, “in every hour of the day.” In the early morning hours, seated in my Ikea happy chair, peacefully drinking my coffee and reading my morning devotion, it is easy to think that I will be able to take this peaceful spirit with me throughout the day. Instead, by midmorning I already realize that I need God to be more like time-release plant fertilizer, delivering sustenance not in one dose but in every hour throughout my day.

Serving as a parish priest and then a denominational leader, Griswold writes, he came to see the church as “a relationship to be lived,” and all those around him as members of Christ’s body, regardless of personality or behavior. Serving in a particular church was “an invitation to a deeper encounter with God mediated by interaction with the congregation.” Acting “without embittering or embarrassing others” became even more important with this realization. When he became bishop and so “a pastor of systems,” he writes, the qualities of “peace of soul” and the ability to act “firmly and wisely” became paramount.

Christian leaders need this prayer as they wrestle with issues that divide families, churches, communities and institutions. The call to love one’s enemies takes on new import as moral and political divides widen. What would it mean, then, for us to pray, with Philaret, “Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering or embarrassing others”?

Griswold acknowledges that he inevitably loses his bearings in the course of a day. “Rather than judging myself at such moments as deficient or unfaithful,” he writes, “I find rest in the fact that the Spirit of Christ prays within me continuously below the level of my own consciousness.”

I like the beauty and simplicity of the last line of the prayer. These days, my list of intercessory prayers looks more like a spreadsheet for God. I am very detailed about what I want for each of my loved ones. The three petitions in this line strip away my need to control even God’s actions and remind me of what’s essential.

They also remind me that the Holy Ghost is actually the one doing the praying in me. Some translations of the last petition read, “Pray thou thyself in me.” I envision the Holy Spirit being poured into me, like water on a plant, so that I can absorb that life-giving stream to sustain my life and my work.

The rite began with a question: “What do you ask?”

The reply: “The mercy of God and of the Order.”

Midmorning on a Saturday in May, Sister Mary Joanna Casanova, 31, spoke those very words. It was the start of a ceremony in which she would make a final, solemn promise, dedicating her life to Jesus as a cloistered nun. After eight years at Valley of Our Lady Monastery, a Catholic Cistercian community in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, Sister Joanna formally asked to become a permanent member of the convent.

In an era when many young people — both Catholic and Protestant — are fleeing the church, the vows, taken in what is called a rite of solemn profession, are increasingly rare. Today, fewer women become nuns and fewer still commit themselves to the ancient communal religious life known as contemplative monasticism.

The number of religious sisters in the United States has dropped every year since 1970, decreasing overall by 72 percent — from nearly 170,000 in 1970 to 45,600 in 2017, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

The women of Valley of Our Lady Monastery are an exception to that trend.

Their community, one of the few Cistercian monasteries in the United States, has grown in recent years. Although their numbers are not huge, the convent is nearly at capacity, attracting a handful of millennials who have left behind degrees and career paths to live a life of prayer.

Sister Joanna joined 18 other nuns, including Sister Christina Marie, 34, a former entomologist, Sister Mary Benedicta, 37, who studied to be an aeronautical engineer, and Sister Mary Bede, 31, a would-be professional violinist.

Sister Joanna, whose birth name is Katherine, grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and entered Valley of Our Lady soon after graduating from college. She had wanted to be a nun ever since she was 4, and in college she decided to enter a contemplative, cloistered order rather than one whose members work in the world. Bringing a modern twist to an ancient vocation, she found Valley of Our Lady online.

The Cistercian Order, of which Valley of Our Lady is a part, was established by medieval Benedictine monks in 1098 in the French village of Citeaux — in Latin, “Cistercium” — hence the Cistercian name. In 1957, six nuns from a Cistercian convent in Switzerland founded the monastery in Wisconsin, naming it in honor of the city where their home convent is located, Frauenthal, which translates to “valley of our lady.”

Today, the convent encompasses several buildings on 112 acres of farmland about seven miles outside Prairie du Sac, a town of about 4,000. But as traffic increases in the area and the monastery reaches capacity, the nuns hope to build and relocate to a new monastery in an even more rural area, about 40 miles away. They plan to start raising money soon for the new monastery, which will house 30 sisters and be located on 200 acres near Brigham, Wisconsin, population 800.

The mystery of vocation

The first time she visited Valley of Our Lady, Sister Joanna knew immediately that she had found what she had been searching for, she said.

“I thought, ‘This is it.’ No more questions, nothing,” she said. “It was an interior conviction. I felt an immense peace, an immense joy.”

Vocation, she said, is a mystery that cannot be described: “You just know.”

She entered the monastery in 2010 as a “postulant,” a one-year, probationary role that gives a taste of convent life. She then became a “novice,” receiving a white religious habit and a new name. A year later, she professed temporary vows and entered into a prolonged period of discernment in which she and the community would determine whether she was called by God to make her final, solemn vows — for life.

Every Cistercian sister sheds her first name and is given a new one, always including a form of the name “Mary.” Each woman can request a name, but ultimately the monastery’s superior chooses what the sister will be called. Sister Joanna requested the feminized version of “John,” after John the Baptist.

Although Sister Joanna knew instantly that Valley of Our Lady was where she wanted to be, she didn’t realize the full scope of convent life until later. It is a distinctly austere way of living, one that is not well understood by the outside world.

But in an age when social media, career advancement and general busyness can overwhelm daily life, the simplicity of the Cistercian lifestyle is attractive for many young women, said Sister Mary Bede, who, as novice mistress, works with sisters in the years leading to their permanent vows.

“People are more and more finding that busyness doesn’t satisfy our hearts,” she said. “We can distract ourselves, but only to a certain extent. There is this longing for something deeper. Even as the culture becomes more and more crazy, more and more people are realizing that’s not the right way.

“So these young people want the real thing — they’re looking for religious communities that have kept the habit, kept the traditions, kept the Gregorian chant.”

Life of solitude and silence

The sisters live and work in nearly complete solitude in buildings and areas that are closed to the public except on rare occasions. After Sister Joanna’s profession ceremony, for example, guests were allowed to enter a few areas that would typically be closed, such as the bakery, where the sisters generate income for the monastery by making communion wafers for parishes across the country.

The nuns keep silence, speaking to one another only during a half-hour period each evening and a brief recreation period two or three times a week. They live simply and frugally, making their own clothes and subsisting on a simple diet.

The point and purpose of the nuns’ existence is prayer. Their lives embrace a Cistercian spirituality focused on the simplicity and poverty modeled by Jesus. They pray throughout the day, both informally, in silent, constant prayer as they work or study, and during seven formal prayer times — the liturgy of the hours — that begin at 3:30 a.m. each day.

The rite of solemn profession, which takes place during Mass, is akin to a wedding, and attendance is by invitation only. On that recent May Saturday, as the Mass began in the monastery’s chapel, a beaming Sister Joanna stood in the choir loft with the other sisters, chanting psalms in Latin.

Afterward, she led the sisters in a procession down from the loft and stood in front of the altar.

With the sisters gathered around her, she faced Abbot Anselm van der Linde. The head of a monastery in Austria, Abbot Anselm flew in at the sisters’ request to preside over the ceremony. Sister Joanna’s family and friends, many of whom hadn’t seen her in nearly a decade, filled the pews.

She still wore the long white, capelike mantle and veil of a “temporarily professed.” But soon she would receive a black veil, a sign of penance worn by the “solemnly professed,” and a “cuculla,” a robe with long, wide sleeves.

In a brief homily, Abbot Anselm explained how the vows are part of a life filled with the gospel, the good news of Jesus. Both are fixed on the truths of mercy and grace, he said.

“It’s about service and dedication and being a part of a community,” he said. “The church, above all, is a community of believers. Christ founded this church not so much to be a splendid or victorious, a mighty institution but to be an institution of believers in him, an institution of sinners.”

Reciting the vows

After the homily, Sister Joanna, with a printed copy of the vows in hand, recited them in front of the superior of the monastery and then took the document to the altar and signed it.

Stepping away from the altar, she knelt in front of the cross and, in Latin, chanted Psalm 119:

“Uphold me, Lord, according to your word, and I shall live: and let me not be confounded in my expectation”

The chant is an expression of hope, Sister Bede explained in an interview: “It says, ‘I’m putting all my trust in the Lord, and he’s going to give me the grace to live out what I just promised’ — because without that, none of us could do this.”

Moments later, Sister Joanna lay prostrate before the altar to receive the solemn monastic benediction.

The move signified that Sister Joanna was dying to her old self, giving everything over to God, Sister Bede said.

It was the culmination of a long journey — and the beginning of another. Throughout her years of preparation at the monastery, Sister Joanna said later, she came to more fully understand that kind of grace and ultimate reliance upon God, and she prays daily to live cloistered life well.

“I’m going to pray for perseverance to the end, till the cemetery,” she said.

Every day, she said, she asks for God’s help: “Help me persevere, because I can’t do it; only you can.”

Early life in a Catholic family

Sister Joanna grew up in a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college. She was baptized when she was a month old and met her first nun when she was 8, as she was preparing to receive her first Holy Communion.

When she was in middle school, her mother, Diane Casanova, introduced her to a religious order.

“I even got to go to their Mother House, where formation and celebrations of jubilees happen, because my mom arranged for me to spend the weekend,” she said.

And when she was in high school, she became acquainted with another order of sisters whose convent was attached to the school. She spent two weeks at the end of her senior year helping them with projects.

Parents of cloistered nuns can struggle, wondering how a child could “give it all up” for the convent, never to return home. The nuns are not permitted to leave the monastery, but families can visit them once a year.

Sister Joanna said it was difficult to tell her family that she would be living a cloistered life and only rarely able to see or speak with them.

“However, they are doing well with it and know that it helps me to continue to grow in love of God and them,” she said.

All of her immediate family members traveled from out of state to attend the ceremony. Her father, Michael Casanova, a retired sales manager, served as the crucifer, leading the procession in and out of the chapel. Her mother, brother, Joseph Casanova, and sister, Alesia Casanova, took part as well, serving as lectors and bringing up the wine and bread for the Eucharist.

“They were so proud and happy, and still are,” Sister Joanna said. “Even my extended family and my friends were proud and happy that I had finally found the community God wanted me to spend the rest of my life in. They had many questions, but all knew that I was happy, which made them happy.”

At peace with her new life

Though she misses her family, Sister Joanna said she feels content with what is her chosen family on earth, her Cistercian sisters, and is at peace with her new life.

“I miss them; I love them,” she said of her family. “But it feels like, in my relationship with God, they are somewhere in that. So they hold a special place in my heart, and I offer them to God every single day.”

Her hope and trust in God and God’s promises are cornerstones of a faith that has grown immensely during her spiritual formation at the monastery, she said. She could have chosen other cloistered communities, she said, but Valley of Our Lady has a distinct vibrancy.

“It is a fervent community,” she said. “It is on fire. They push you to live your vows and the life well.”

Her faith and in trust in God have grown most fully in one-on-one meetings with the novice mistress, Sister Joanna said. Such conversations require vulnerability, and at times, an openness to correction from elder sisters.

“It’s a cross between overseeing and giving you correction, but not in a harsh way — in a loving way,” she said. “Like, ‘I want this for you because you can be a better person, and God is calling you to more.’”

Whether in the monastery or in the world, we all experience internal and external strife that comes from our woundedness, Sister Joanna said. Recognizing the potential and possibility of healing is crucial to growth.

“It’s a matter of finding that healing from God and being open to it,” she said. “You have to trust in God that this is what he wants, and he will help you.”

A week after the ceremony, Sister Joanna said she felt better than she ever has before. She has immense peace. She smiles often.

“This is my life, for the rest of my life,” she said. “This is where I want to be. Now, it’s a reality.”

My first Bible lessons were taught in 2-D — flannel storyboards with cartoonish paper-cutout versions of Queen Esther and baby Jesus. Everyone in the Bible was white, a generic Eastern European shade of nude, and everyone moved across the same flat plane of the flannel board.

Jesus’ resurrection had to make the jump into a multidimensional world and come alive in my imagination. Where was the Jesus who ate with sinners and threw shade at the religious leaders of the day? What was it like to see people healed from blindness and disease? What did people whisper when they realized that an unclean, bleeding woman had walked freely in the crowd, only to be healed and called “daughter” by Jesus? What did Jesus mean when he said he could feel the power leave his body?

Very few people in my childhood seemed interested in asking those questions. Instead, I was encouraged toward a type of blind faith that claimed belief in miracles but was insufficient to help me explore how mind, body and spirit are real and interrelated.

Yet I was curious, and I hungered to connect my mental, physical and spiritual experiences both inside and outside the church. The yearning intensified as my children reached school age and the physical demands of parenting shifted, giving me time and space to feed my craving for both prayerful stillness and vigorous activity. I would go from praying silently over coffee to sweating in a cardio class with a pounding bass line and loud encouragement from the instructor. At church, I would murmur the Lord’s Prayer while planted in the pew, only moving to greet others during the passing of the peace.

And then yoga came to me.

This is a common phrase among practitioners of yoga, and it is similar to the way evangelicals describe their conversion stories: God chases after us — God comes to us — and then we find God.

The schedule at the gym had changed, and yoga was available when I usually exercised. It felt strange for me to be invited in a gym to sit quietly, to listen to my breath and to try to silence the voices in my head that demand attention. We are invited to do this at church for moments, but not for an entire hour.

Yoga has now been a part of my physical and spiritual disciplines for almost a decade. The loud, bass-driven soundtracks to weight training, kickboxing and other cardio classes remain, but over the years they have taken a back seat to yoga.

The challenge of confining myself to a small space and maintaining silence was not new. As a Christian, and particularly as an evangelical, prayer — usually silent — is meant to be a daily practice. Though not confined to a physical mat, “quiet time,” the practice of praying alongside reading the Bible, is meant to be done in the still of the morning, before the busyness of the day. If I could pray in my head and listen to God in silence, why was I so afraid to listen to my breath?

Some of my evangelical friends were curious and concerned about the Eastern religious roots of yoga. But perhaps because I am Korean-American — a child of immigrants whose folk medicine and cultural traditions do not mirror those of the Western evangelical church — I was less concerned about inviting evil and more concerned that my U.S.-centric faith had lost some of the spiritual formation practices familiar to Jesus.

My yoga practice continued to evolve, not only in the physical poses, but in the way my soul and body craved the centering, peace and stillness that came first in being on the mat and then transferred into my daily life. When I lost my breath as I moved through my day — became lost in my mind — I learned to stop and notice, quiet the thoughts and self-critique, and be present to God.

The yoga practiced in the U.S. is not unlike our brand of embodied faith. It is limited. It is deeply influenced by Western values and norms. There is a movement in the American yoga world to make sure it is accessible to a diversity of people — diverse in race, ethnicity, gender, class and body type.

The conversations among yoga teachers about diversity, influence, access and power are not that far removed from those happening in evangelical spaces. Being deeply invested in those conversations pushed me to pursue training as a yoga teacher, with the aim of deepening my physical and spiritual practices both on and off the mat and somehow translating those into my Christian faith and my experience in the pews.

I wondered about my faith and how I articulated and embodied my evangelical beliefs as I sat through my first training session — 10 days with 10 strangers learning not only about the asanas, the physical poses most people associate with yoga, but also about meditation, energy fields within and outside the body, and the philosophy of nonviolence to oneself and the world.

I’ve been an evangelical and an American long enough to know that plenty of people see yoga only as exercise or an excuse to wear spandex, while others see it as a gateway to Hindu worship. I don’t want to remove completely the cultural and religious roots of yoga, but I am not yet sure what that will mean in practice. I grew up with folk and Eastern medicine. For instance, after childbirth, I was told not to drink or touch anything cold, because my body was “hot” — even as my parents and in-laws prayed Christian prayers over my newborns.

What are those clear lines between Christian and non-Christian when your culture intersects worlds Western evangelicalism doesn’t even imagine? I wasn’t sure what to think about chakras, the seven basic energy fields within the body, but as a Christian who says she believes the power of the Holy Spirit moves through and in me, was it such a stretch to consider that there were fields of energy I did not see or understand?

So I’m training to become a yoga teacher with no set plans about what that means, except to return to my breath, my body, my faith.