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 Sister Jan Barnett joined the Sisters of St Joseph, founded by Mary MacKillop, aged 19. Her 41-year commitment to God has outlived many marriages.
Unpack the issues...
And if, like some marriages, the relationship began with idealism, it has evolved over those years into a rich, complex and constantly changing union that keeps this keenly intelligent nun on her toes. “When I was in my final year of school one of the nuns who taught me asked if I’d ever thought about being a nun. I said yes, but I thought it wasn’t for me because I wanted to get married and have kids. She said so had she. I started to think about it and I made a decision. I wanted to help save the world, make a difference and build the world that was described by Christ in the Gospel. “I saw it as a personal, committed relationship but I don’t think I saw it in terms of being a bride [of Christ] though that was the image that was used at the time. I saw God/Christ more as friend, companion, visionary, and prophet; someone who was intimately engaged with the life of the world and who was calling people to engage as well. “Initially, there was the vision and the romanticism. Then there was dissatisfaction and critique of the way I saw that engagement being lived. “Your vision changes enormously over time. When I became a nun there was a sense of God as being stable, the universe as being ordered and sin as disorder. But I see God more now as that living dynamic presence in the whole of creation: the God who is beyond and the God who is within. “I loved the old nun in The Painted Veil when she said she and God were like an old married couple, disillusioned with each other, not talking a lot. That’s one image but for me there are a million different images of God. “I like the Hubble images of the planets and the stars, the beyond and the beauty of it. “I saw two huge paintings a couple of years ago: a smiling Buddha and the suffering Christ. My friend said she thought she’d change religions because the Buddha was so obviously happy and Christ was in anguish. When you got up close to the images, however, the Buddha was made up completely of tiny computer images of the suffering Christ and the suffering Christ was made up completely of images of the laughing Buddha. For me it was an image of life and the fact that everything is related to everything else. “Sometimes I think of God as dance and the dance of life. Sometimes I think of God as a stranger that in welcoming becomes a friend. “We still revert often to childhood images of God. I was lucky because as a kid I was taught God as loving parent rather than God as judge. I laugh at myself though because you think you’ve developed all these deepened theological understandings of life and the world and God and then you notice yourself with the image you saw as a kid. “I’m in admiration of young people who make this commitment because in this day and age it’s not the norm. When I became a religious 65 of us were professed. The sort of religious life I have led doesn’t mean a lot to most young people. I think they’re searching for different ways to live a commitment to God but I don’t think that commitment is any less real — they have a lot of challenges that probably we didn’t face. “Hopefully if I’m faithful to what is at the heart of who I am and who God is I grow into God each day and God grows into me and the two become one.”
Unpack the issues... Discussion points - What is the joy and what is the challenge in the relationship with God and the whole of creation?
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