When our capitalist culture tells us we need to be thinner, richer, fitter, or younger, we recognize that someone, somewhere is trying to sell us something. Still, when bombarded with these messages, we can slip into a spiral of doubt. We might start thinking we really do need to reinvent ourselves—or at least curate a more delightful facade to show the world.
If we turn to religion as a respite from this onslaught, we often find a different set of mandates: Work harder to be holy. Say more prayers. Give up more pleasures.
Given these relentless demands for perfection, how can flawed humans live in community with other flawed humans, especially when our wounds and scars cause us shame? This is the challenge that Sister Julia Walsh explores in her memoir, For Love of the Broken Body (Monkfish Book Publishing), a story of wounds and healing.
Early in her novitiate with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, Walsh made a visit to her family’s farm as a ritual farewell to the life she was leaving. While climbing on a cliff near her childhood home, she slipped and fell, landing on her face in a creek bed. In her memoir, Walsh tells the story of her accident and the long journey of recuperation, sifting through memories and musing on friendship, vocation, sexuality, and embodiedness to arrive at a deeper understanding of the grace that is present in our brokenness.
Some people involved in disability justice are wary about using terms like broken to talk about bodies. How can we talk about brokenness in a way that’s not dismissive, dehumanizing, or ableist?
Our culture tends to think that when something is broken, it’s no longer valuable. Because that’s the common association, it makes sense that people would resist that language. But I am a Catholic sister operating through a sacramental lens and a eucharistic mindset, and for me, brokenness is sacred. I don’t think anyone’s value is diminished because of their physical abilities, traumas they’ve experienced, or their own sense of self. Everyone has gifts they can contribute, and no one has to be perfect to share who they are with others.
I connect this to the Eucharist, because we have communion in the church through the body and blood of Christ being broken and shared. We ourselves are the broken body of Christ. But I also think about the resurrected Christ, who still bears his wounds as he tends to his confused and hurting friends. I believe that’s everybody’s call: to show up in our woundedness and serve through our wounds. This can be liberating for everybody, because we can all give of ourselves no matter how wounded or broken we are. We don’t have to be totally healed or perfect to live in solidarity with others.
The pursuit of perfection is a trend in the Christian tradition. Is this approach potentially harmful for a person’s spiritual life?
I touch on this in my book, For Love of the Broken Body—how convent culture over the past 70 years has shifted away from the pursuit of perfection toward an approach that’s more holistic and that respects each person for who they are and helps them to grow. On social media, and in many other systems in our society, people try to present the shiniest, most beautiful version of themselves. But these picture-perfect scenes of devotion, family life, or parish life can be harmful; they can exacerbate people’s insecurities and diminish the value of our brokenness where, again, there is sacredness.
When someone follows Jesus and lives the gospel, success isn’t the point. Success isn’t a gospel value. Jesus’ invitation is to be loving and holy, and these attributes are about attention to the other and dying to self. In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says, “Be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” I read that not as a command to be perfect the way only God can be but as an invitation to surrender to God’s mystery and grace. God has greatness and perfection covered. And when we focus on union with God through contemplation and service, God’s perfection can shine out of us. If anyone sees God’s perfection in us, that’s grace.
Being perfect isn’t mentioned in any gospel other than Matthew, but in Luke, Jesus says, “Be merciful just as your Father is merciful.” Mercy, for me, is a clear gospel value, and something I desperately need to receive and offer.
We are God’s children, but we are all fumbling along in need of kindness and compassion. And we are all pursuing union with Christ through our discipleship, which allows us to experience the perfection of God. Recognizing that it’s God who is perfect, not us, requires humility and surrender, but ultimately this leads to freedom and joy. The more we embrace that mercy and share it with others amid imperfection and brokenness, the better for the whole church.
In your book you talk about the importance of physicality and ritual. How do we pay attention to physical ritual while not fixating on external details?
When I had my accident, my face was broken. I felt ugly and deformed and didn’t want people to have to see me. Those feelings invited me to contemplate where my personhood is found—and I recognized that it’s not about how I appear to the world but about what’s going on interiorly.
I believe that each of us, in our communion with Christ and one another, is doing this constant dance of attending to the interior and the exterior lives. Our rituals, the ways we pray and worship, and our receptivity to grace ought to align with what’s happening interiorly. It’s this reciprocity that occurs between the interior and the exterior. Ultimately, we have to tend to what’s going on in our souls, our hearts, our mental health, and our spirits. Then, through community and our relationships, we express that in rituals and prayer.
How can ritual help us move through life’s transitions?
Ritual helps integrate the external with the internal. It allows transformation to occur in both places and helps us accept and adapt to change. When ritual is done well, it’s done with great intention and thought, and we can construct meaning out of the things that happen. In my book, I talk about getting a tattoo as part of a ritual with a few close friends to signify accepting the fact that living with religious sisters had changed me. There was no going back.
But the ritual wasn’t just the tattoo. It was the contemplation in community, the breaking of bread and sharing of wine, the readings that we experienced. It was the accompaniment. It was even the wincing and pain from getting the tattoo. All of that somehow confirmed that yes, this change has happened. I’ve been living with the sisters, and they changed me. It allowed me to say yes in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I’d just kept moseying on through life.
Your accident happened while you were visiting your family farm. What would you say to someone who might view such an experience as a betrayal from God?
I think if someone who has gone through something similar experienced it as a betrayal, it’s important to name that and reflect more deeply on what is going on in their relationship with God. What does this reveal about their intimacy with Christ? Do they have a theology of God making bad things happen? And if so, I’d maybe push back against that, because I don’t believe in a God who wants any of God’s children to suffer.
For me, I already had that belief system. I was really grounded in it. I knew it was an accident, a bad thing that happened, and that God was with me. I could feel Christ’s presence powerfully. That helped me trust that in this hardship I was encountering God in ways I hadn’t before and was loved in ways I hadn’t been before. It allowed me to be receptive to that.
In my case, I didn’t go to anger; I went to shame and guilt. I felt like it was all my fault and like I was inconveniencing so many people, costing so much, and taking resources from others. It’s a wound I still have that probably hasn’t completely healed, even though I proclaim and believe that everybody has value.
For me, the great spiritual challenge is to trust in the truth in our tradition: Every person is worthy of their life being protected, honored, and celebrated.
How can we make space for others in our community amid our own brokenness?
After my accident I had this shame and temptation to vanity; I didn’t want people to have to see me. In our culture, we’re taught that we need to present ourselves in ways that are appealing and attractive to others. That colored my feeling of disgust with myself. But if we share and witness through our wounds, the goal is to be other-centered.
When we interact with another person, there’s this back and forth of noticing who we are or how we’re feeling, then focusing on the other and how we are affecting them. It’s this constant both/and of trying not to take more space and attention than is ours and to allow everybody’s experience to be one of wholeness. As a minister, I sometimes encounter people who are still struggling with trauma, and it’s like their wounds are bleeding out everywhere—it’s all they can think and talk about, and they might not really have the capacity to be present to others or even interested in them.
In my own healing process, I remember wondering, “How can I be in relationship with people right now when this is all that is consuming my energy and my emotions?” I’m grateful that I had good health care workers, psychologists, a psychiatrist, and others who helped me recover from my PTSD and move to a place of greater integration and healing. It took ritual, intentionality, and a lot of prayer. I needed to be received with compassion and offered mercy from those who cared for me. I needed spaces where people I trusted held and listened to me.
We have to be conscious of what’s going on in ourselves and invite Christ to be the wounded healer who ministers to us in the midst of whatever we’re feeling. If it’s shame or guilt or a disgust with ourselves, Christ can heal that—and if we keep our gaze outward and upon Christ, we will also be concerned with how our choices and attitudes affect others.
You had to cope with radical alterations in your body in a flash of time. How can we—especially women—accept changes in our bodies when society tells us to look permanently young and perfect?
I’m reminded of a man I recently met who’s also a physical trauma survivor. He survived an explosion and has major burns. He is physically scarred on his face and arm and can’t really use one of his hands anymore. He used to be in a band, but now he can’t play his guitar. Even though that is part of his story, he is joyful. He has this attitude of, “Yeah, that was hard, but I can still play drums and sing. I’m learning the harmonica. I can play the piano.” He says he can still be a musician and make music in all these other ways, and it was probably good for him to not be on the stage in a major rock position anyway. This life is better for him. He has this total acceptance and humility about it all.
There’s a power in the attitudes we take. If we’re just obeying society’s norms and expectations, we’re not going to have the freedom and the joy to change, transform, and let our bodies age and shift in size and shape or be scarred. We should be able to say, “This shows I’m a survivor. Look at what I’ve been through.”
That’s what I witnessed in this man; he takes pride in being a survivor. I look at my own face and see the scars and wonder how my life would be different had I not fallen off a cliff when I was 25. But I am also so amazed that my body’s still doing all this and that I’m still here.
You write a lot about learning to care for both your body and your mental health. How do these two connect?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Being a whole person means mind, body, and spirit, intertwined and interconnected. We can be anxious in our mind, our body, or our soul, so we must tend to them all.
We need to ask: What is leading me in this moment? Which dynamic of my personhood needs attention? Is it my spirit? My mind? My body? Instead of these parts of ourselves being in competition, we need to recognize that we’re called to be unified in ourselves, holding all these elements of the person in balance.
In some Christian traditions, anything associated with desire is viewed with suspicion. How do we understand vocation as a fulfillment of desire, even though it might mean not getting the things you want?
I was influenced by faith traditions that encouraged what I would now call an immature spirituality: They put everything in black and white and tried to oversimplify what was right and wrong. As I was going through my formation, I had to unlearn a lot of that. The sisters were constantly inviting me to a deeper understanding of morality and integrity.
The sisters helped me understand that part of discernment is being honest about who you are and who God is. And part of who you are, is your desires. Desire is something that is layered—think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We have our basic physiological desires to attend to first, like food, water, and rest. But as a person becomes safer and they feel acceptance and belonging, they’re able to develop, grow, and become more creative, spontaneous, and secure in who they are. This happens through a process of tending to one’s deepest desires. This happens with maturation.
I certainly could be living a life of simply succumbing to my desires and pursuing what feels good. But I take my faith quite seriously, and this compels me to seek a greater awareness about the deeper desires I need to attend to. For me, those are my desires for communion with Christ, saying yes to God’s love, and serving God and God’s people.
My lifestyle as a sister, and my vows in particular, really enabled me to develop to that stage of self-actualization, as Maslow names it in his hierarchy of needs. I was able to become my truest self. What a grace and what a gift my sisters gave me by helping me to be in touch with my deepest desires along the journey, mirroring that back to me and being patient with me as I struggled and boomeranged. I do think that’s how real spiritual formation programs work, whether they’re in a parish, a family, or in a religious community: We’re helping a person develop and grow to a stage where they have the confidence and creativity to be in union with Christ.
There’s a lot of misuse of the language of obedience in some religious circles. How do we think about obedience in a good way?
My sense is that when a person has an immature faith, they want to be told what to do. They don’t have confidence in their own ability to discern how God is guiding them, so they want authorities to tell them. That can cause a lot of harm, and that’s why it’s important to encourage people to mature in their faith and be more comfortable with paradoxes, non-dualism, and the complexities of what is true. Truth is not black and white.
When I first entered religious life in my 20s, I wanted the sisters to make the vows simple for me. I craved strict guidelines—“you can do this, and you can’t do that”—and the sisters refused. They forced me into this maturity, and I came to understand that obedience is about listening. It’s about a loving, trusting relationship with God and oneself and trusting that God speaks through community. Discernment is a communal act, because Christ is in the people of God.
For me to be obedient, I have to pay attention to what I am resisting and why and what I am happy to say yes to and why. Then I bring that into conversation with other sisters and hear their perspectives. And I trust the words of Gamaliel in the Book of Acts, where he says that if something is of God, it won’t die. For example, I felt called to write this book. There were times when I thought it was about to die out, but then God would create a resurgence and something else would happen in the book journey. That helped me recognize that it wasn’t up to me, and I was in relationship with this greater power, the God of love, who has the bigger picture in mind.
You also wrote about finding freedom in celibacy. Can you talk about what that means?
For me, it’s the freedom to love whoever God puts in my life and the freedom to let people come and go, not to cling to them and possess them, because they belong to God and not to me. I can love everyone in different ways but not sexually. And that’s fine. The church has known since its beginning that when a person says no to sex and yes to radically loving God, this power can be released that can be transformative for more people.
That’s my experience. I don’t know if that’s the experience of everyone who knows me well. But there’s a lot of freedom in that. It’s also this freedom to show up and be who I am: a little messy, a little broken, and definitely scarred.
This article also appears in the August 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 8, pages 26-29). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Courtesy of Sister Julia Walsh
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