Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine Nun and writer. I had the privilege of meeting her some years ago when I invited her to speak at Washington National Cathedral.
Her order which is based in Erie, Pennsylvania, runs a kids’ café that provides a safe after-school environment for over 250 children. A young man who grew up in the neighborhood, but moved away years ago and (I suppose) wanted desperately to put the experience behind him took her to task one day.
“Look, why are you doing this? Why spend so much time and energy?”
She looked him squarely in the eye and responded, “We are doing it because you moved away, but I’m going to give you a second chance.”
I worked for years as a volunteer in a Catholic hospital and I witnessed this kind of in-your-face spiritual direction more than once. It is a role that nuns play particularly well. Like our mothers, they can sometimes tell us things with the kind of direct, brutal honesty that only a handful of people can tell us in a way that gets through our defenses and takes root.
The broader message she taught the young man and the message we all need to hear, I think, is this:
We have two things we can do with painful experiences: We can run from them or we can mine them for insight and compassion. There is nothing wrong with transcending our circumstances, but there is great and good reason for listening to even painful experiences and learning from them.