I remember being perfectly settled about my decision to enter the monastery—intent on it, in fact—until I saw the looks on people’s faces.

Some people responded with disbelief and disapproval. Some reacted with disdain. I could feel quiet reluctance even from people I was certain would value the idea—and me, for doing it. So, as Shakespeare puts it, I had “to screw my courage to the sticking point,” and wrestle with the very thought of it again.

What was the turning point? I told myself that if I did not go to the monastery as I planned, I would regret forever my failure to at least try what I felt was my genuine call in life.

It is this step into the true self that makes all the difference.

To fall prey to image-making dooms us to the loss of the true self. To be accepted, to be approved, we bear the loss of psychological freedom and call the store-bought decisions we make our own. Until. Until they wear out in life. Until we can’t make them fit anymore. Until the part of us that is true cries out for liberation so loudly there is no possible way to ignore it anymore. Then we either break our chains or break down under them.

Choosing to be myself—to think my own thoughts, to make my own choices, to choose my own path, to take my own public positions—may risk the Good Housekeeping seal of approval from those who want their own decisions confirmed by me. But it also gets me my most important possession—my self. “Everybody,” Shirley Abbot wrote, “must  learn this lesson somewhere—that it costs something to be what you are.”

We live in a world that talks about individualism and then expects everyone to conform—in styles, in priorities, and in ideas. Nevertheless, it is the personal development of the self which, in the end, really enriches a society.

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else,” e. e. cummings wrote, “means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”

Clearly, the central question of life may be, “Why am I trying so hard to be what everyone else expects of me rather than what my best self expects of me?” And just as important, “What is the cost to everyone else of my doing it? Of my not becoming who I want to be? Who am I at the very center of myself? Who does the world need me to be?”

At the end of the day, at the end of every decision, the measurement criteria must always be whether what I am doing is serving my false self or my true self. Because at the end of the day, wherever we are, whatever we choose to do, the self is always the greatest strength, the greatest gift we have to give. If we do that, it is then that the gift can be given.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 1: Conformity is the enemy of the soul. It substitutes order for personality, obedience for reflection.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 2: The problem with conformity is that it is too often for the sake of the ruler rather than for the development of the ruled.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 3: It is one thing to cooperate with other people. It is another thing entirely to give over to them our own responsibility to judge the best way for us to go about life.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 4: When we begin to see outside the boxes that are the rules of life, we begin to grow up intellectually.

MONDAY, JANUARY 5: When we learn to see beyond what we have been told to see, we take our place among the world of adults. Then we are obliged to take responsibility for the consequences of our own actions.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 6: There is more to each of us than what shows above the surface of our lives. It is knowing how to become the best of ourselves both inside and out that life is really all about.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7: Growth comes from a willingness to go beyond the familiar and the ordinary and the traditional to find out what being alive demands of us. Then we learn to become more of who we really are. As Peter McWilliams puts it, “Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort.”

THURSDAY, JANUARY 8: It is in stretching ourselves to the edges of our spirit that we ourselves find out of what we’re capable. To live without stretching is at best only to breathe.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9: Beware of being satisfied with the self. Self-satisfaction leaves so much of us in embryo.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10: It is in setting our spiritual sights on discovering more of the world that we discover more of ourselves in the process.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 11: When we settle down in life on the grounds that we are too old, or too tired, or too limited, or too restricted to reach out and learn more of what life is about, we not only delimit ourselves, we shrink the rest of the world to our own small size, as well. As Thomas Edison said, “We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present.”

MONDAY, JANUARY 12: When we spend our lives running in place, learning only what we already know, talking about nothing we do not already know, life goes to dust in us. We become little more than a shell of our own possibility. “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare,” Seneca says. “It is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 13: The rabbis tell that Rabbi Zusya taught, “When I die and stand before my Creator, I will not be asked, ‘Why were you not more like Abraham? Why were you not more like Moses?’ Instead God will ask me, ‘Why were you not more like Zusya?’”

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14: “Being myself” does not give me the right to intrude on other people’s space or deny other people’s needs. It simply means that I will resist allowing my own soul to get stuck in yesterday. Normal Mailer explains it well: “Every moment of one’s existence,” he says, “is growing into more or retreating into less.”

THURSDAY, JANUARY 15: Becoming the moreness of ourselves is the challenge of the full life.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 16: We stay with the labels we’ve been given in life––nice, stubborn, wild, selfish, weak––because we’re afraid of what it can cost to change in ourselves the person other people expect us to be.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 17: The truth is, however, that we have a choice: We either repeat or remake the labels we live under every single day. As Max De Pree puts it,“We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 18: The real problem in life is when we accept what other people say we are. We learn not to change, not to try, not to begin all over again. But the poet Rumi says, “You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?”

MONDAY, JANUARY 19: Even if we aspire to become what we are not equipped to be—a great pianist, an outstanding student, an ultimate figure in any public field—we will be better for simply having tried. It is not our degree of competence that counts. It is our degree of effort that makes the difference.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 20: Inside ourselves is a star, different, exciting, free, and fearless. All we need to do is set her free.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21: Failure is essential to being able to succeed. Learning to accept ourselves as we are is key to being able to be more than we are because then we are free to fail—which means, of course, that then we are free to try til we succeed.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22: Failure enables us to surprise ourselves by someday doing what we could not do because we refused to stop trying to do it. “My great concern,” Abraham Lincoln said, “is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”

FRIDAY, JANUARY 23: Inside each of us is another self. We can only come to know the rest of us by allowing this other part of us to develop. “We cannot teach people anything,” Galileo wrote. “We can only help them discover it within themselves.”

SATURDAY, JANUARY 24: When we refuse to take a step out of the boxes of life—the ones that tell us that we can go this far and no farther, that what we want to do can’t be done—we become our own jailors. “If you only do what you know you can do,” Tom Krause writes, “you never do very much.”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 25: There is no one who can stop us from becoming the real soul of ourselves—except, of course, ourselves. “Holy One,” the disciple asked, “What must I do to be free?” And the Holy One answered, “Who ever put you in chains?”

MONDAY, JANUARY 26: It is a total waste of a life to sit around wishing for another life while I completely ignore what I must do with the one I have. “Life,” Charles M. Schulz writes, “is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 27: Life is a series of opportunities, a series of challenges, a series of mistakes, and a series of possibilities meant to force us to make a better life for ourselves rather than to spend life moaning that no one else is doing it for us.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28: Life is meant to be learned one day at a time.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 29: It isn’t what we did before that life is about. It is about what we are doing with life as we live it now that is meant to make a better future.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30: When we refuse to be trapped by past decisions, when we refuse to quit before the game of life is over, then we are fully alive. “There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination,” Anaïs Nin writes. “Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment.”

SATURDAY, JANUARY 31: And while you go through life, know how wonderful it is that you’re going at all. Baby mosquito, the story tells, came back after its first time flying. Its mother asked, “Well, how do you feel?” And baby mosquito answered, “It was wonderful! Everyone was clapping for me.” Go on and on and on. Don’t quit.

LET’S SHARE OUR THOUGHTS
The following discussion questions, Scripture echo, journal prompts, and prayer are meant to help you reflect more deeply on The Monastic Way. Choose at least two suggestions and respond to them. You may do it as a personal practice or gather a group interested in sharing the spiritual journey.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What does it mean for you to “choose to be yourself”? Has this been a struggle throughout your life, or something that came easily to you? Are you accepting of other people being themselves in turn?

2. Which daily quote in The Monastic Way is most meaningful to you? Why? Do you agree with it? Disagree? Did it inspire you? Challenge you? Raise questions for you?

3. After reading The Monastic Way, what is one way that you can put Sister Joan’s teachings into practice in your own life?

4. Joan Chittister uses other literature to reinforce and expand her writing. Find another quote, poem, story, song, art piece, novel that echoes the theme of this month’s Monastic Way.

5. On January 26, Sister Joan writes, “It is a total waste of a life to sit around wishing for another life while I completely ignore what I must do with the one I have.” Do you think that acceptance of one’s life goes hand in hand with acceptance of one’s self? What relationship is there, if any, between being happy with who you are being happy with your circumstances?

JOURNAL PROMPTS

Prompt 1: Here are a few statements from this month’s Monastic Way. Choose one that is most helpful to you and journal with it.

• It is in setting our spiritual sights on discovering more of the world that we discover more of ourselves in the process.

• There is a dancing soul in each of us. The only question is whether or not we allow her to be herself.

• There is no one who can stop us from becoming the real soul of ourselves—except, of course, ourselves.

Prompt 2: Spend a few minutes with this photograph and journal about its relationship to this month’s Monastic Way.

You can do that with prose or a poem or a song or....

SCRIPTURE ECHO

“Am I saying this now to win the approval of people or God? Am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be Christ’s servant.’” ––GALATIANS 1:10

PRAYER

Dare to declare who you are.
It is not far from the shores of silence
to the boundaries of speech.
The path is not long, but the way is deep.
You must not only walk there,
you must be prepared to leap.

—Hildegard of Bingen