The Scandal of Holiness by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Author:Jessica Hooten Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity and Literature;Holiness;Imagination—Religious aspects—Christianity;Christians—Books and reading;Books and reading—Religious aspects—Christianity;Learning and scholarship—Religious aspects—Christianity;REL013000;REL012070;LIT007000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Opposite of the Virgin Mary

When I was a kid, I watched Sister Act and The Sound of Music on repeat. Those two films may not appear to have much in common, but for me, they contained my two competing dreams: to be a Broadway singer and to be a nun. Since this is a discussion on holiness, we’ll focus on the latter dream. I would fall asleep praying and wake up to read the Bible before school. I would hold my own Sunday school classes while most of the kids played at the church playground. It bothered me that nuns had to wear black and white, but I convinced myself that I could sacrifice color for God. The dream was shattered when I discovered there were no evangelical convents. O’Connor once explained why she wrote about Protestant fanatics: “If you are Catholic and have this intensity of belief, you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all.”9 O’Connor’s view, that the call to holiness was special and led to a vocation as a priest or nun, prevailed in the pre–Vatican II Catholic Church. As a Protestant drawn to holiness, I have spent many years getting into lots of trouble with people who don’t believe in much.

In Kristin Lavransdatter, set in the fourteenth century, a call to holiness meant that one left the world and joined a religious order. While we can read Kristin’s story and see the ways that God moved in her life outside of the convent, we need to assume this medieval perspective in order to understand the tension between becoming a wife and becoming a nun. In Kristin’s time, joining the convent would have been a righteous dedication, but, as Brother Edvin points out, it had become a refuge for “daughters that are lame and blind and ugly and infirm.” Or, he goes on, if parents “think He has given them too many children, they let Him take some of them back.”10 This explains why Kristin’s parents dedicate her disabled sister, Ulvhild, to the cloisters but reserve Kristin for the honor of marriage.

In contrast to the prevailing worldview in fourteenth-century Norway, Brother Edvin recognizes that the call to join the convent is to return to God what he has given you. As he paints saints on glass windows, Brother Edvin inquires of Kristin, “How would you like to offer up those lovely curls of yours and serve Our Lady like these brides that I’ve painted here?”11 For him, Kristin’s beauty is a gift. All have recognized it. She is praised over the course of her life for exceptional good looks; in Norway, that meant hair like wheat and white skin. “Give beauty back,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.

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