River of Fire

From the time of Dead Man Walking (Vintage, 1994), Sister Helen Prejean has been a force to be reckoned with on her mission to stop the death penalty and its extraordinary application to people of color, and, even more, to people who ultimately are exonerated.  Her advocacy is simple and direct:  be present as witness to the execution of a living person by the state.  She also reaches out to families and loved ones of the victims.

Her latest book, River of Fire:  My Spiritual Journey (Random House, 2019), is a memoir of her early years as a novice nun and details what led to her becoming one of the fiercest opponents of the death penalty in this country, an advocate, as she explains in the book, who has changed the position of the Catholic Church, an organization that is notoriously difficult to sway.

The book begins with an epigraph attributed to Saint Bonaventure:  “Ask not for understanding, ask for the fire.”  Prejean has done that consistently in her life, risking her support from her community, the Sisters of Saint Joseph (CSJ), and often putting herself at odds with the Church and American law and order culture.  In the book, she describes the transition of her early life from a novice to a teacher in a white suburban parish in Louisiana to working in one of the most fearsome projects in the city of New Orleans, the St. Thomas Project, an African-American low income housing facility.  She does not simply minister to the people she meets who are often living in extremis, she lives with them in poverty and crime.

For most non-Catholics, it is difficult to imagine the sea change that the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965 initiated.  Sister Helen sketches out the revolution.  Pope John XXIII called the council in an effort to address the changing world of the 1960s with the assassinations, free love, the Vietnam War and the revision of cultural norms that had been in place since the end of the Second World War.  Moving forward, the Church would conduct liturgies in the vernacular instead of Latin, that most dead of languages; nuns would be encouraged to drop their distinguishing habits for the garb of the every woman; the priest would now face the congregation during Mass; and, most disturbing to many diehard Catholic clergy, a focus on spiritual outreach and the opening up, or reframing, of the idea of Christian vocation.  Prejean explains that “Top notch holiness was no longer only for nuns and priests…everyone in the Church is called to follow the way of Christ fully and radically.  Everyone is called to be a saint.  Everyone is called to pray deeply.  Everyone is called to act boldly against injustice.”  This will have a profound effect on Prejean and her mission as a human being.

Early on in the book, though, there are some troubling issues.  As Prejean enters the novitiate, a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, she becomes a “spouse of Christ,” which she says is the most lofty “state of life for a Christian, higher than marriage and the single life.”  In her picture of the daily functioning of the novices and their superiors, she describes surrendering any sense of self at a time when most young people are coming into self-actualization:  embracing self-esteem, a healthy self-image, developing self-awareness.  She voluntarily withdraws from “the world and its temptations” to “contemplate and achieve union with God.”  She will take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but the tension here is clear:  how to deal with being reduced to child-like status at the start of adulthood.

Prejean must ask permission to drive a community car, she must clarify where she is going when she leaves the convent, she must clear her friendships, and, most alarming, she writes:  “When you become a nun, you can never again step into your family home—not for a meal or a family reunion or a marriage or anything except for the death of one of your parents, and even then, if they live in a city away from the convent, you may have to decide whether you’ll visit before they die so you can say farewell or wait and attend the funeral.  As a nun you are strictly forbidden to sleep away from the convent.”

Some of this is attributable to what Prejean takes from her order’s founding in Le Puy-en-Velay, France that “to attain union with God demanded nothing less than ‘annihilation of self.’”  How can someone make her way in the world, fight against injustices, stand up and bear witness against oppression and discrimination, if she has no sense of self?  It seems paradoxical, but one would need a sense of self first before becoming selfless.  Nuns do not have money to purchase books and must ask the order for the funds and permission.  Nuns need the okay of the community to do the things many of us take for granted as adults in the world.  Becoming a nun, in Prejean’s account, means renouncing one’s independence and adulthood to take vows that effectively render them children.

This is never more clearly contradictory than in the chapters where Prejean describes two significant friendships in her life.  One is a fellow sister with whom she develops a life-long bond.  It is, in her words, a special friendship.  Although there is nothing overtly sexual in Prejean’s accounting, it is more like a partnership.  The two women often find themselves living apart, but they vacation together and see each other when Prejean goes to Louisiana for community meetings and activities.  The other relationship is with a priest, Father William, a fiercely intelligent yet deeply flawed man who really enters into a romantic liaison with Prejean that spans decades.  The fact that they cannot consummate the relationship in sexual love, much less marriage, makes him a tragic figure in the story.  Their union also seems to stretch the borders of chastity—they call it the “third way,” which is where a priest and a nun commit to love each other with a “preferential love” but stay in their vocations and remain celibate.  There is no sex, but the terms are really a matter of semantics in regards to commitment and fidelity.  Is not the vow of celibacy so the priest or nun can devote him or herself fully to God and the people?

The other issue here involves what Sister Helen takes as her life’s work:  opposing the death penalty.  She writes early on in the book that “For sixteen centuries the Catholic Church has unerringly taught…that the state has the right—indeed, the duty—to keep society safe by imposing the death penalty on violent criminals.”  Later on she writes that in her younger years, this support sounded “morally right” to her.  Obviously, this is building toward her awakening and realization of her life’s work, but how can a person who believes in the Imago Dei, the image of God in every person, support the execution of that person?  The Catholic Church vigorously opposes abortion of a fetus, a person or, as science tells us, a group of cells that cannot survive outside the womb.  Yet, it advocates killing a living, breathing human being because he or she is a danger to society when that same person could be locked up for the remainder of his or her life.  To me, it is a failure of critical thought:  the Church should advocate that all life is sacred.  This means coming out against abortion, but also opposing capital punishment, protecting nature, and recognizing climate change.  All life is sacred, or it isn’t.

Thankfully, though, Sister Helen Prejean had her great awakening, and her advocacy for death row inmates has led to changes in the law in some states, and changes to the policies of the Catholic Church.  There is still more work to be done, and there will need to be others who step up and take the courageous position Prejean has taken.  She, however, is not resting with that one issue.  She ends the book with a letter to Pope Francis advocating for the respect and dignity of women.  She writes:  “I am saddened to encounter over and over a very deep wound at the heart of the Church, a wound which, I am convinced, infects and weakens every aspect of Church life.  That wound…is the way the Church treats women.”

River of Fire lacks the intensity of her other books, but it does show us how the woman became the advocate.  There are some troubling issues here, but Sister Helen Prejean is a good storyteller with a good story.  It is history, culture and religion, but most of all, it is human.