The Nun's Question

What do they really need?

Hello. After some heavy lifting on the threeness of the world, and a long-form reflection on climate change for Perspectiva earlier this week, I wanted to share something gentler and shorter about a micro story that’s been coming to mind. The vignette is adapted from the book, Soul Food by Kornfield and Feldman (1996, p124).¹

The Nun’s Question.

There’s a nun who will never give you advice, but only a question. I was told her questions could be very helpful. I sought her out.

‘I am a parish priest,’ I said. ‘I’m here on retreat. Could you give me a question?’ ‘Ah yes,’ she answered. ‘My question is, “What do they need?”’

To tell the truth, I came away disappointed. I spent a few hours with the question, writing out answers, but finally I went back to her.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. Your question has been helpful, but I wasn’t so much interested in thinking about my congregation during this retreat. Rather I wanted to think seriously about my own spiritual life. Could you give me a question that will help?’

‘Ah, I see,’ she said. ‘Then my question for you is, “What do they really need?”’

I have known about this vignette for twenty years and still don’t know how to feel about it. Initially I found it a bit troubling, as if the question as answer missed the point of the question as question. But it is beginning to make sense to me.

I spent the first part of my adult live travelling the world playing chess, and following my bliss. It was great while it lasted, but I have no wish to go back there. I am now in a phase of life where I regularly need to make myself available to colleagues, friends and particularly family in need. This pattern of responding to the needs of others often leads me to feel I need a break from responsibilities and time to myself, which can feel strange given the extent to which my self is constituted by and for others.

On a daily basis, I find am relieved to sit down with a coffee I have just made, or that I put my shoes on to head out for a walk, or that I am eager to go into an event in central London, only to discover that I can’t quite yet fully breathe into my own time, because someone needs me to do something elsewhere, ideally before I do my own thing. At such moments I am torn, because I notice that the abiding question of my life is what they need, not what I need, and it feels strenuous to try to tease them apart.

I don’t think there is an easy answer to this predicament. I am reminded of Stephen Batchelor’s book title Alone with Others which elegantly captures this paradoxical quality of being human, namely that we are always at once alone and together. The self is always constituted by others, but it remains in some ways separate too.

The practice of Karma Yoga or selfless service comes to mind, and I know that many spiritual retreats - I suspect the better ones - include apparently menial work as part of the process of dethroning the ego. It has also been said that the most important person in the world is, at least momentarily, the one you are with. And it’s a blessing to feel needed.

But it’s not easy.

I don’t quite mean Ubuntu, roughly ‘I am because you are’, because that risks being facile. The truth is that we can come to miss ourselves, miss the parts of ourselves that haven’t played for a while, and it’s a struggle to find them again, which is why the Nun’s question is so pertinent.

So does ‘working on ourselves’ mean taking flight from others, or surrendering to their needs? Or does it perhaps mean commiting more deeply to ourselves through the lives of others? My instinct is that what the Buddhists call Right View here probably takes the analytical structure of bothbothandandeitheror.² By that, I mean that I suspect our primary duty is indeed to others, but our capacity to fulfil that duty necessitates periodic retreats from others too.

So what then of the Nun’s question?

Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster, who founded the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, Queen of the Apostles in Misouri, and died in 2019 at the age of 95. *This is not the nun in the story, but I wanted to share an image of a nun, and I searched for one that I could imagine asking the question.*

Does the nun’s re-emphasizing of her original question invite the stressed priest to challenge his assumption that his own wellbeing is being drained rather than fed, by his ministry? Is the exchange an illustration of unexpected learning, in which the Nun was teaching, but not in a way the learner initially understood? Is the Priest in effect blaming the nun for not resolving his own issues?

Or is the force of the really about drawing the priest’s attention to the universality of the deepest human needs?

Yours Aye,

Jonathan.

1. Back in the day, I did a PhD thesis about what it means to become wiser. That’s a whole conversation for another time. The point was not to nail wisdom down, and nor did I pretend I was becoming any wiser myself. I just wanted to understand the apparent academic reluctance to study wisdom and to hang out with related material for a while. It took four years of reading and writing, and in the end, it was mostly a (meta)theoretical study. However, as a nod to all the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) training we received on research methodology, I figured I had better do something empirical. So I collected teaching stories that alluded to or intimated wisdom in some way, and then talked them over with others to tease out patterns that might help. I made use of about forty in the end. There were some real gems, and some that have never left me, including The Nun’s Question.

2. Yes that’s a real word, or at least it should be. Bothbothandandeitherorism (!) is about discernment beyond binaries and relativism. I first mentioned it in my essay on Jordan Peterson where I said this (p206): “The truly inclusive approach – the real “both/and” – contains “either/or” and “both/and.” Perspectivism of that kind is chastened objectivism, in which we forgo the immaturity of mad relativism but insist on putting perspective at the heart of realism. We learn from relativism but don’t submit to it; we have a both/and perspective but don’t lose our either/or discernment or resolve. That kind of perspective is the cultural pattern waiting to manifest”. I developed this idea further in my reflection on The McGilchrist Manoeuvre.