The Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote, “O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” Some months ago, I received just such a “giftie” when a colleague confided to me that our co-workers in her department found me most intriguing, even “mysterious.” I laughed it off at the time, telling her that they had only to get to know me a little better and all the mystery would quickly dissipate. All the same, I wondered later what my coworkers could possibly have seen. There is, I am certain, very little mystery in me personally, but as a Catholic I live and breathe divine mysteries and, surely, some little bit of it clings to me and to every Catholic.
As a convert and a single woman, moreover, I have found my path to be tangled and tortuous at times, but also illuminated in strange and lovely ways. It occurs to me that single Catholics may be in a unique position to witness to the life of the Spirit, that the single life has a romance all its own.
I am speaking here of Catholics who, like me, find themselves single by circumstance rather than by choice. There are none of the conventional milestones to mark our pilgrimage, no weddings or baby showers, and the gloomy temptation is to see our life course as an accident and ourselves as mere leftovers, snippets of threads dropped from God’s cosmic tapestry. There are no accidents with God, however, and no waste in the divine economy, and so the threadwork of that tapestry must be more intricate than the plain weave of marriage and religious life. If the pattern seems obscure, we may need more time or distance to discover the “definite service,” as Cardinal Newman called it, that has been entrusted uniquely to us. More than any other way of life, singlehood gives witness to the distinctiveness of each person.
What kind of fragrance does this witness spread? Each path of Christian life involves both privilege and renunciation, but the single life is often seen solely in terms of deprivation, or at least of absence. Wherein lies the privilege? It may be understood as freedom to live out dimensions of the life of the Spirit that are less accessible to the married and those in religious vocations. I see three strains of this freedom:
1
FREEDOM IN PRAYER
The single may lead demanding professional lives, but their relatively unstructured personal lives permit them to move easily with the Holy Spirit, the way an open floor plan allows for a greater sense of space and movement in a house.
2
FREEDOM TO CARE
Singles have the time and flexibility to develop deep friendships, and to hear and answer the subtle cries of the modern poor, those well fed in body, perhaps, but hungering for understanding and respect.
3
FREEDOM TO DARE
In a dangerous and often vicious world, singles are less burdened if called to launch into new adventures. Whatever risks are involved, they risk only themselves, and they are free to follow the guidance of the star that lights their path.
This listing strikes me as a highly inadequate way to capture the essence of Catholic singlehood, but then … I am attempting to describe a mystery.
And today we celebrate...