Happy Endings

The headline is potentially deceptive: this blog post is about having reread a favorite novel. No endings to report, happy or otherwise, in my life at the moment. 

Recently I picked up, for the sixth or seventh time, The Nun's Story, by Katherine Hulme, published in 1956. Stop reading here, please, if you do not want to know how the story ends.

The protagonist is a young Belgian woman, the daughter of a respected physician. Set in the 1930s, it begins as she dresses in the clothing of a postulant, about to begin life in the convent.She is educated as a nurse and serves in what is then the Belgian Congo. Ultimately, she finds that she cannot love the German soldiers and finds herself lying and deceiving to protect patients from them. She resigns her vocation, aiming to join the resistance in Belgium. 

Each time that I've read it, it makes me a little wistful that she had to choose, that she had to resign so that she could resist. This time, it didn't make me feel that way. It seemed instead a natural progression of Sister Luke's development as a woman religious. 

The bishop of the ELCA's North Carolina Synod shared this about a month ago:
Remember your vows 

Maybe it was the confluence of this powerful reminder from the bishop of the vows that I made through the church and congregation that called me - and the novel of the nun that I've read before. But this story has touched me differently this time.

When you, when I, when all of us, live with hearts open to the divine breath of the Holy Spirit - what happens in our relationships to one another? Which is always the point.