“[A]s Sister Theresa said a few months ago at Saint John’s Abbey, God is walking with us regardless of what particulars we believe at any given moment, and life is long. Who knows where exactly we will end up!”
A friend of mine, Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, has just had her first book published, Blessed Are the Nones (InterVarsity Press). I first met Stina online a couple years ago through the Collegeville Institute, and then just before Covid struck, I met her in person at a newly formed writing group here in Minneapolis. Blessed Are the Nones is a spiritual memoir that tells the story of her marriage as she came to terms with her husband leaving their shared Christian faith even as they stayed very much together.
Stina meets the monastic Salesian nuns who live in an ordinary house not far from hers while she and her husband were out trick-or-treating with their young children one Halloween. Befriended by these nuns, Stina wrote that discovering that they were in her neighborhood was as if God were winking at her. These nuns and their hospitality to Stina become a doorway through which she learns to live in the vital juncture of spiritual singleness and spiritual community.
Just as a good spiritual memoir should, the story Stina tells is not just her story, and the gains and losses she describes are not only hers. Blessed Are the Nones speaks to the faith journey of so many of us. For some, the way seems to get more and more sure; for others, the way veers in a different direction. For others, doubt visits, prompting a pause of short or long or unknown duration. Stina shares Bonhoeffer’s warning to love people more than our own visions of life.
Blessed Are the Nones shows that deep love can transcend dissimilar faith journeys and that God offers community to sustain us on the way. Echoing her words earlier in the book, and shown at the start of this post, near the book’s end Stina writes, “I rest in Sister Theresa’s wisdom that everyone is on a journey with God, whether they know it or not.”