Searching for Sacred

Recently I watched A Nun’s Story , a 1950’s Audrey Hepburn movie. I have been chewing on this movie since viewing it, especially on the themes of sacrifice and obedience. For those who have not seen the film, Audrey Hepburn’s character was a smart, intelligent, independent, free-spirited woman who joins the convent, voices her vows, and thus makes what was intended to be a lifelong covenant with the Church. In her process of becoming a nun, she learned about sacrifice and denying herself. Her life dream was to be a nurse in the African bush. She excelled in her studies of tropical medicine. And then she was asked to make a sacrifice – to intentionally fail her medical exam in order to tame her pride. She was unable to make this sacrifice and because of this, her talents were “wasted” and she spent a year working as a nurse in an insane asylum. She is eventually sent to be a nurse in Africa where she continued to wrestle with sacrificing her natural personality and talents in o...

I had a professor in graduate school that we affectionately called, “Yoda.” He was a wise, awkward man who looked and spoke like Yoda. His psychotherapy courses contained readings that required a general knowledge of calculus in order to fully understand. I, of course, dropped out of my high school calculus course to avoid receiving an inevitable failing grade. I would read Bion’s and Bollas’ depiction of object relations psychotherapy and comprehend very little of the content and yet I knew somewhere in the depths of my mind I was grasping something. Frequently I commented in class, “I know this makes sense, and I know a part of me understands it, but I simply cannot find the language to communicate it.” Eight years later, I still do not have the language. When I think of the soul and its encounters with God the same struggle to find language and words emerges. Rudolf Otto coined encounters with God as Numinous . The Numinous experience is something wholly other and outside human rea...