And you probably don’t know.
My mother spent most of her life in a convent of nuns.
The nuns ran a nursing home where only retired priests and nuns and relatives of religious were admitted.
My mother was one of the geriatric assistants.
I met hundreds of people in that convent who had lived their whole lives devoted to the faith.
Mostly nuns between 70 and 100 years old with an exciting life behind them; nuns who had been environmental activists, politicians, missionaries in Africa, and even university professors at the Sorbonne.
And I can tell you that there were three habits that these highly spiritual people had in common.
1. Reading
Every one of these elderly nuns had books on their bedside tables. And I’m not talking about the bible.
They had varied interests: history, philosophy, and psychology.
The funny thing is that they usually had several books on the same subject to contrast the opinions of different authors.
One of them said something Hippie to me one day, talking about drugs (because the nun sensed that I had started smoking marijuana).
“AG if you ever experiment with psychedelics make sure you have read a lot, because if you have nothing in your head, the trip won’t be as much fun.”
The nun had never taken drugs in her life (or at least she wouldn’t openly admit it), but she did know that the altered states of consciousness she accessed — praying, fasting, meditating — were more interesting if you had a cultivated mind 🙂
In the end, you realize that it all starts with reading.
You can’t transcend the scriptural knowledge of the tradition you process without integrating it, and you can’t incorporate it without reading it.
“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”
— Ram Dass
2. Letter writing
Another thing that struck me about these nuns was that they wrote letters by hand, then sealed the envelopes and mailed them.
One of them, Sister Angustias, told me, “Writing is the best way to think.”
According to that century-old nun, writing had ten benefits.
- You don’t communicate the first thing that comes to your mind, which avoids many conflicts 🙂
- Improves reasoning.
- Writing is a sieve that separates concrete thoughts from fuzzy ones. Therefore you are more intentional when you communicate by writing.
- It weakens your ego. Because writing confronts you with the reality of your thinking, it helps you realize errors earlier, find cognitive confirmation biases, and correct false beliefs.
- Writing helps you expand your consciousness because you discover things you didn’t know you knew when writing an essay.
- You discover your limitations. — When writing, we often don’t know how to communicate what we think we know. And that implies that we are not as smart as our ego makes us think.
- Re-reading what you write allows you to connect emotionally with those emotions you are trying to convey and refine them if necessary.
- It helps you connect ideas. When you can’t find a way to communicate something, you look for metaphors and stylistic elements to make yourself understood, and this opens gates and mental pathways that connect ideas from diverse fields, creating new thinking; new consciousness.
- You make yourself heard better since the reader introduces your text in his brain with his voice, which makes your ideas more seductive and persuasive 🙂
- Reading what you write makes you the observer of your consciousness. Reading your writing in an unbiased way is like meditating but on steroids because you don’t just observe your thoughts; you see them dissected on paper, and you can study them with the precision of a surgeon 🙂
As Sister Angustias used to say,
“People who don’t write, have superficial thinking, don’t get to the heart of the matter, and therefore are people who live trivial lives.”
Ouch!
(Harsh comment, but true.)
Writing simplifies things, turns off the mental noise, and gets you to the heart of things.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you haven’t understood it well.”
— Albert Einstein.
3. Work
The nuns do not lead only a contemplative life, as many people think.
They are very active and are always involved in communal tasks: cleaning, cooking, and helping sisters who cannot fend for themselves.
The nuns have a term for their effort “Sanctifying work.”
I once saw a nun sweeping, and she was smiling as if she had smoked a joint, and I asked her, “What makes you so happy?”
The nun answered me,
“When a nun sweeps or does any work no matter how simple it is, she does it for her lord. She gives that work to God or as you guys say now to the universe. And that fills me with joy and pleasure”.
By dint of going to the convent where my mother worked, I realized that that nun was not deceiving me,
- When a nun tends the garden, she is praying.
- When a nun cooks, she is meditating.
- When a nun helps a disadvantaged person, she is exercising her holiness.
They live spirituality through action.
“Your work is your prayer.”
— St. Josemaría Escrivá.
A virtual hug
AG