"The relationship between today's more socially engaged sisters and the church hierarchy appears to be more tenuous by the year. Sisters describe the situation — no, they define the situation — in different ways, and often with a dry, dark sense of humor. I was familiar with the expression 'defecting in place,' coined years ago by Sister Miriam Therese Winter, who wrote a book by that title, but things seem to have taken a new turn. 'Think of us,' says another Sister Anonymous, 'as loitering in place.'
"And she adds, obliquely, 'You know, it took Moses forty years in the desert to convince his people they were not slaves. And it's taken forty years for the sisters to realize they are free.'
"Benedictine writer and speaker Joan Chittister says much the same thing, though in a considerably more somber key:
" 'There is no doubt that women need to tell their stories. But at the same time, there comes a time when you are too tired of trying to be heard in a place like the church where no one wants to hear you. Then, you walk out of it, past it, beyond it. And often invisibly. They think you're still there, because your body is, but your heart is long gone and your spirit free. I know.'
"As to the question that hangs in the air, 'Why do we — I — continue to align myself with an institution so closed, so heretical, so sinful? Because Jesus stayed in the synagogue until the synagogue threw him out, that's why.'
"But let's close with Sister Helen's own formulation, because instead of looking back in grief or anger — at the synagogue, the cathedral, or the convent — it turns our attention gently toward the radiant mystery of what is yet to be. 'God is everything in this, the power and the life that brings you into the big waters, then dissolves the boundaries quietly, gently, like the unfolding of the petals of a rose.' "
