Be who God meant you to be and you’ll set the world on fire.
—Catherine of Siena

I was just about to settle down to work on my computer when the in-flight Movie/TV screen flickered on. I recognized the title and sat back to get a glimpse of the establishing shot before beginning to write. It was almost two hours later before The Danish Girl ended. But by that time, I knew again, in an even more special way, how deeply important this month’s Monastic Way is. Most of all, I wondered if Catherine of Siena really understood the full implications of what she was saying over 600 years ago.

Set in the Denmark of 1926, the film is based on a true story. A beautiful young couple—both artists—find themselves in a happy marriage but struggling to deal with his emerging awareness of the sexual disjunction of his life. A lovely man, he is also a lovely but closeted transgender woman. And at the same time, their love is real.

The film is a spiritual event for us all. It gives us an inside look at the pain that comes from having the identity of one sex in the body of the other. But it is also more than that: It is just as much about the agony that comes to anyone trying to be what they are not. Not many of us have to deal with a mind/body conflict; all of us have to deal with the integration of what we can do and be with what we must do and be.

A universal call to authenticity for some, it is, at the same time, a call for universal love from those who companion us through any of life’s moments of disjunction and despair.

It is everybody’s story at one level. And its ending is meant as a life lesson for us all. The fact is that until we become what we are meant to be, none of us can ever be truly happy.

—from the June 2016 issue of The Monastic Way by Joan Chittister. Click here to order.