Episode 3: The School of Love // Transcript

- John Masko:
  
  Sister Hannah Maria, a woman from Norway, is 47 years old. She was a journalist and later a journalism scholar in Scandinavia. What's she doing here? Sister Hanna Maria.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  What I can say, what I remember well is that for some reason I have a feeling — I was 28 when something happened and it wasn't anything big, but it was just a kind of a very important awakening. And it was my pastor who just said what I knew, but it was something. You know sometimes it's just the moment when you're ready to hear something in a new way, when it goes deeper. And in some situations he just said, love is the most important of all. And suddenly I realized what he meant. I realized what was meant by it.
  
  John Masko:
  
  Which is?
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Which is letting go of so many other things. Letting go of how you want things to be perfect. And this is what I'm struggling with still because I still want things to be perfect. Every tiny little thing. For myself and for others. I want everybody to do the perfect thing. I want them to do everything right. I want myself to do everything right. And I know that that's not what it is about, but it's so hard to teach yourself this.
  
  John Masko:
  
  So if someone misses a note in the chorus,
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Oh, well, missing a note is not so bad, I'll tell you. It's hard because I mean, my community is a wonderful community. And when I heard the community singing before I entered, I could hear that there was a lot of things lacking in the musical unity. They didn't have the precision that the choir I used to work with have. But I knew also that they had the most important thing, because they had love. And singing with love is the most important thing.
  
  But I must admit that very often, it still bothers me that we have four different tempos when we're singing. But I know that this doesn't come out very well to people who are placed at different places in the church. A friend of mine who's a very — well, what should I say — she's a well-schooled singer, choir singer, and has worked a lot with Gregorian chant, with French choirs, and with top people of chant. And she was here visiting, and she said, you sound just like angels. And I know she's right, but it's not our voices. It's all the angels standing beside us.
  
  John Masko:
  
  I suppose angels have different tempos.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  They do. They do too.
  
  John Masko:
  
  And how have you found it over these five years? What has happened to you?
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Again, the most important thing is love. It is a school of love. And it's a good school, a very good school.
  
  John Masko:
  
  How does one learn love?
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  I think the first thing is to be loved — for most people. Some people learn it a special way, but for most of us, we learn it by being loved. And this is a community with a tremendous loving, living faith. The love of God is very strong and almost tangible in this community. And the sisters are very conscious of it being the love of God, not their own love. They know their fragility. And that is part of what it is to learn love. That is to accept your own and others' fragility.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  But I think why things surface in a different way here, it's several reasons why. One is the silence. We in live in silence. You can't live in silence without being confronted with yourself. And living in this very deep atmosphere of love, your defenses, the natural defenses that we all have, and that are needed in the world outside, you really need them to survive. One of the purposes with a cloister is to protect us enough so we can let those defenses fall down and just remove the walls inside. And that is when you get to see yourself.
  
  John Masko:
  
  Yeah. There are certainly parallels with therapy.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yeah.
  
  John Masko:
  
  The safety of the private relationship. And thereby being able to look at yourself in safety, relative safety.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  It's a daily being confronted by the truth of God, which is not apart from me. It's not different from me, not apart from me, but it is to go into my heart and to meet God in my heart. And also by repeating the Psalms day out and day in. They are so rich. There is no mood where you can't find yourself in the prayers of the Psalms. So whatever mood I'm in, you go to the office and the day is... The office, the liturgy for us, it's like the spine. It's like the skeleton of a body. It's what keeps the day for us. And it is what keeps us up.
  
  John Masko:
  
  The framework.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yeah. A skeleton, I find a better image. Because it is movable. I think of framework as a little bit square. But that might be just a mistake in my head.
  
  John Masko:
  
  No, I think you're right. It is a better metaphor.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  So you always get something and there is a newness in it. But to come to that, I think another key is the simplicity of our life. And as I said, the cloister, we are sheltered enough to move towards single-mindedness. It doesn't come easily. Doesn't come quickly. And I think you have to work with it all your life. But here, this life of the monastery is ordered to help you to do it.
  
  John Masko:
  
  To come to single-mindedness.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Single-mindedness, right. And that is the simplicity, the poverty, the simpleness of our life. It's very, very simple. And what I've found is that it opens me up to see and hear, and smell, and touch, and taste much more than I did before. Because when you just pour in, it's too much, kind of thing. It's too much. I often feel that even in the monastery, “oh, it's too much. God, stop this. Can't you give me a little rest? Let me just pause a little bit here now so I can get what you're telling me. What is this about?” And he says, “no, go on, go on, go on.”
  
  John Masko:
  
  Would you say the trappings are reduced of life — the trappings of life are reduced? And so it allows you to focus.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yes.
  
  John Masko:
  
  Yeah.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yeah. And I think our society today in the Western cities — it’s so complex and so overloaded that it's really a miracle that people are as sane as they are. If you ask me, that's a miracle.
  
  John Masko:
  
  That we survive and the complexity of it.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yeah.
  
  John Masko:
  
  Yes.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  But it shows how strong the survival is in man.
  
  John Masko:
  
  Well, I think we do find our “cloisters.”
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yes.
  
  John Masko::
  
  We have to.
  
  Sister Hanna Maria:
  
  Yeah.
  
  John Masko:
  
  And our little walls that help us to survive. But it is a challenge I think, increasingly.
  A school of love. Confrontation with self. Love as an acceptance of your fragility, we have wandered into a profound place.