Everything I have learned about freedom in religious life was distilled into one moment at my final profession of religious vows two years ago. I was lying face down on the floor of the cathedral sanctuary in the act of prostration, spread out in the shape of Christ’s cross, feet together and arms flung wide, waiting obediently for my prioress to summon me back to my feet with a knock of her hand. As I lay there with my forehead pressed into the cold stone, I could feel every muscle in my body growing tense, as if my impending consecration was a physical weight bearing down upon me – as if I would need to push myself back onto my feet with all my strength once this act of prostration was finally brought to an end.

The prioress spoke from her seat. “What do you seek?”

It wasn’t a spontaneous question; this call-and-response is an established part of the rite. I had been asked the same question during the ceremony in which I was clothed in the habit, and again during my first, temporary profession of vows three years previously. I called out: “God’s mercy and yours.”

Silence. I closed my eyes and focused on listening for the knock. Rising at the sound of the knock is a public act of obedience; I wanted to obey swiftly and instantaneously, showing the whole church – the whole world – how I’d be practicing my obedience for the rest of my life, up to the very moment of my death.

I listened for the knock. But no knock came.

No sound at all; only that total, electrifying silence. So I waited, and waited – and still there was nothing.

Seconds stretched into a minute. (A minute might not seem like a long time, but it is when you’re lying on your stomach on a hard floor.) What had happened? I’d been to enough professions of vows to know that the prostration wasn’t meant to take this long. The prioress should have knocked by now. But she hadn’t. From my position on the sanctuary floor, far away from the congregation, I had no way of working out what might be happening behind me. So I stayed lying prostrate, silent and waiting.

And, as I waited, I began to remember.

The first time I ever witnessed a prostration was not at a profession. It was on Good Friday when I was twenty years old, visiting the sisters’ convent at the recommendation of a priest I knew. He had suggested that I spend some time around consecrated women, celebrate the sacred liturgy of Easter with them, and think and pray more deeply about what kind of life God might be calling me to. So at three o’clock on Good Friday I was not at home in London but sitting in a chapel in the English countryside, watching the liturgy unfold.

The most visually striking part of that liturgy was the veneration of the cross. The sisters all took off their shoes and lined up in their white-socked feet before a crucifix laid at the foot of the chapel altar. From my vantage point at the back of the chapel they were all indistinguishable: nothing more than a line of anonymous figures in black veils and black capes. Then the first of them moved forward to the crucifix, and there she knelt, prostrated, and kissed the pierced feet of Christ. Each of the sisters behind her followed. One after the other, slowly, silently, lovingly: kneel, prostrate, and kiss.

At first, viewing the sisters from the back as they lined up before the crucifix in their identical black veils and capes, I couldn’t see any way of distinguishing them. But as I watched, I discovered that in fact, I could. Because when each sister knelt, prostrated, and kissed the crucifix, she did so in entirely her own way. I could distinguish each sister by her act of love.

Witnessing the sisters prostrate on Good Friday, I began to understand something of the relationship between obedience and freedom. I realized that each of these women was utterly conformed to the life and work of the community and yet, at the same time, preserved in her God-given uniqueness. The joy and wonder this realization brought me was my first inkling that I was called to this community myself. But it was also the beginning of my near-decade-long reflection on the role of freedom in the religious life.

Photograph courtesy of The Dominican Sisters of St Joseph.

Three years after that Good Friday, I entered the convent and began my initial formation: the period of time before final vows in which a sister immerses herself in the life of the community and studies the principles underlying it. For me, initial formation was marked by a strange and unignorable contradiction: the number of choices I had available to me had drastically reduced, and yet the amount of time I spent talking and thinking about freedom had increased.

Freedom was a topic discussed often in the classes I was given by an older sister, who usually focused her teaching around one particular line from the Rule of Saint Augustine: The Lord grant that you may observe all these precepts in a spirit of charity … not as slaves living under the law but as free women under grace. “Free women under grace,” she would say, tapping her copy of the Rule. “Not little girls under mindless submission. It’s not real obedience unless it’s free obedience.”

As she said this, my mind would wander back to the sight of those Good Friday prostrations, to those identical but unique acts of love which had first sparked my desire for convent life. I’d known then that I wanted to be like those sisters. But now that I was inside the convent, preparing first to receive the habit and later to profess vows, I was increasingly unsure how I could get to that point from where I was now. How on earth had those sisters become free women under grace when they were living the same life with which I was slowly, painfully familiarizing myself: a life of rules, restrictions, strict parameters, and – I simply couldn’t let this go – so few choices?

I didn’t fully understand, but I knew I wanted to understand. And that desire was strong enough to compel me through all the various stages of initial formation. A year after entering, I was clothed in the religious habit and received a new name; two years after clothing, I made my first, temporary profession of vows. At each stage, there was a prostration: an invitation to once more form myself into the shape of Christ’s cross before the altar, and to respond to the question given to me by the one to whom I was giving my obedience: What do you seek?

How on earth had those sisters become free women under grace when they were living the same life with which I was slowly, painfully familiarizing myself: a life of rules, restrictions, strict parameters, and – I simply couldn’t let this go – so few choices?

The symbolism was clear. My body was showing forth what was, God willing, happening to my interior life: I was drawing closer and closer to Christ, being conformed more fully to him. But I was all too conscious of the mismatch. The Christlike shape of my body was unmistakable, and took me mere seconds to adopt. The shape of my soul seemed quite another matter. It was true that, as I prostrated myself at my first profession, I was a very different person from the one who had watched the sisters perform the same act on Good Friday all those years ago. But what exactly was different? Was I truly a free woman under grace now – and if I was, how could I tell?

As the time for my final profession approached, my uncertainty became more and more acute. Finally, I asked the sister who had given me my classes in the Rule of Saint Augustine for her advice. Was I meant to be a sister after all? I loved this life, and I loved the sisters – but this confusion within me seemed unignorable…. She cut me short with a wave of her hand.

“When you’re having these second thoughts about your vocation – and we’ve all had them – there’s only one question worth asking,” she told me. “What do you want?”

I was absolutely baffled. Years of formation, hours of classes on the Rule, and this was all it boiled down to – what I wanted?

But then it struck me that this question was an echo of a question I had been asked before, one of the most significant questions I had ever been asked, when I was formed into the shape of the cross on the sanctuary floor: What do you seek?

Each time, I had responded with the same words: God’s mercy and yours. But I knew that these words were mere shorthand for the complex riches of the life in which I had been immersing myself, a life I had come to understand more, love more, and, ultimately, desire more.

At each prostration, the words I said remained the same. But what had changed was the depth of conviction with which I said them. This, at heart, was the difference between the sister preparing for her final profession and the girl who had watched the Good Friday prostrations. That girl had choices, certainly; she chose what to wear, what to buy, who to spend her time with. When I prostrated myself before the altar, I no longer had those choices available to me. What I did have was knowledge and desire. I knew what the religious life entailed, the joys and the trials it brought and my unworthiness for it, and the very depths of me called out for it. And so I knew that when I spoke those words for the last time at my final profession, when I told the world what I was seeking, that knowledge and that desire would be stronger than they ever had been in my life.

This, I finally understood, was freedom. It was the freedom I had witnessed on Good Friday all those years ago, when I watched each sister give physical form to their deepest desire, which was to love Christ and to become like him. Year upon year of living the consecrated life, with all its disciplines and hardships, had cleared away from them those lesser desires that so easily derail and distract us, and they were free to reach out and take with both hands the goodness that God was holding out to them, free from any self-imposed hindrance.

What do you seek?

This is what the prioress had called out at my clothing, at my first profession, and now, for the last time, at my final profession. Each time, I’d made a choice to stand up and walk onto the sanctuary and prostrate myself there. But each time I’d had something more important than a choice, something that would persist even after all choices were gone: the knowledge and desire that would make this act of love uniquely, un-repeatedly mine.

Then came the knock.

There’s a very simple, and quite funny, reason why the prostration at my final profession took so long. The prioress had knocked at the expected time, but I simply hadn’t heard her – probably because I was feeling so nervous. Eventually, the priest celebrating the Mass decided to act on her behalf (perhaps out of concern that I would spend the rest of my religious life up until my Diamond Jubilee lying on the floor) and smacked his hand down on the celebrant’s chair to get me up.

The story of my unusually long prostration is now firmly embedded in convent lore. When I tell it, it’s usually for laughs. But it occupies a very different kind of place in my own interior life. For one thing, it’s a very clear, if microcosmic, demonstration of the mysterious but deeply consoling role that human freedom plays in our journey to sainthood. When living a particular state of life, be it marriage or the religious life or the dedicated single life, it is tempting to think that we have to understand it all, cope with it all, and be in charge of it all. But, in fact, all that God requires of us is that we know his goodness and desire that goodness for ourselves. This freedom is the rope by which he pulls the human person through all the strange and alarming crises that beset us (including, but not limited to, the ability to hear highly important noises at one’s final profession) as we grow into his likeness, and by which he fashions the acts of love we make for him into something entirely unique to each one of us.

My long prostration also gave me time to think: to draw a prayerful line from this moment of silent anxiety back to that very first prostration I had ever witnessed, the moment that began my journey to becoming a free woman under grace. That journey isn’t finished yet, of course. But I am finally at peace with the fact that I do not need external choice to be perfected in inner freedom. All it requires of me is to live, each day, seeking and wanting the truth of who I am and the life to which I am called; because after all, it is this truth, as Truth Himself tells us, that sets us free.