Posted by What started as a day when Sister Julia Walsh planned to revisit some favorite childhood memories ended with her in an emergency room due to traumatic injuries sustained in a fall that could have killed her. As with many instances of suffering, this one led Sister Julia to reflect on her life and faith, and how her new experience of brokenness would affect both. She shares her story in the memoir “For Love of the Broken Body,” and we discussed it recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcast below).
Shortly after entering the novitiate for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at age 25, Sister Julia learned that her parents were selling the farm in Iowa on which she and her siblings grew up. The prospect of that loss made Sister Julia want to return to her old home one last time to “pray my goodbyes” and come to terms with the new direction her life was taking.
While she was there, she decided to climb down a cliff so she could go swimming in the creek below. It was something she had done many times as a child, without incident. But not this time.
Sister Julia recalled, “Unfortunately, as I climbed down, one of the rocks I stepped on crumbled, and I fell face first, maybe 15, 20 feet. My hand went up to my forehead. It protected my skull, so my knuckle and my wrist was broken. And then everything from pretty much my eyebrows to my jaw were shattered, and my glasses were broken, fell off my face. I felt teeth break and fall out of my face immediately, and I felt my jaw crack into two. So, there I was all alone in the woods. Nobody was home on the farm, and I had to make my way back up to the farmhouse. It really was a major ‘choose life’ moment for me.”
As the ambulance raced her to the hospital, Sister Julia felt ashamed that she had done something so risky as climb down a cliff because her actions were now inconveniencing so many friends and family. Beyond those emotions, however, she experienced a profound sense of gratitude and even began singing songs of praise in the emergency room.
“Only after I made my final vows and I dove deeper into the memories,” Sister Julia explained, “did I start to recognize that I was living the charism of my congregation, even though I was not yet a professed sister [at the time]. The Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration are a Eucharistic community. We’re adoring the Eucharist, the blessed sacrament, in our chapel in La Crosse, Wisconsin, all the time. I had a little bit of Eucharistic theology, but I hadn’t put it together that Eucharist means ‘thank you’ or ‘thanksgiving.’ Besides the shame and embarrassment and the pain and suffering, [I was feeling] joy and gratitude…that God had saved my life, that I was being well taken care of by a phenomenal medical team, that even the bonus of, ‘Wow, my friends drove hours to visit me here in the ICU.’ So, this gratitude was the natural thing.“
The injuries – and subsequent lengthy recovery – that Sister Julia endured made her better appreciate the incarnational nature of Christianity and how it forms a common bond with all people.
“I came to recognize that everyone has an experience of brokenness,” she said. “Everyone can unite with Christ in their own woundedness, and that is one of the ways that we can know intimacy with Christ. At the same time, we live in a society and a culture where we’re sort of taught to hide our brokenness. If our sense of brokenness is preventing us from…being a loving presence to others, then, in a way, we’re saying no to an opportunity for union with Christ. I think I came to know that through my own story, too.”
Hiding our brokenness is often an issue on social media, where users may present curated, idyllic versions of their lives. Sister Julia would rather see people be honest about both their joyful and difficult experiences. She said, “My hope is that the readers [of my book] will come to recognize the sacredness of their authenticity. There is actually something holy in being raw and real and authentic for one another because then we’re not being performative, but we’re actually showing up in our woundedness for one another. And we’re able to lean on each other. I believe that increases our compassion. Now, we don’t want to bleed our wounds all over the place either. It’s not like our messiness ought to become performative. But the type of messiness and brokenness that I’m…interested in normalizing in the Church is the type that is in service of the other.”
The communal nature of life was brought home to Sister Julia many years earlier when she spent a semester studying abroad in Africa. While there, she took an African spirituality class and learned how vital community life was to African culture and “how the common good is more central than the individual.”
That experience helped her realize, “I was called to live a life in community, and I wanted to live a life in solidarity with the poor, I wanted to live a life of service and a life of prayer. So I looked around at different ways I could do that and realized religious life was the best way to go.”
Though Sister Julia explored both the Catholic Worker movement and New Monasticism, she ultimately chose the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, with whom she has now served for 16 years. And though she has experienced much hardship, Sister Julia is no doom-and-gloom Christian. In fact, she remains a person with a joyful spirit and easy laugh.
Following her accident, she began living with an intensity as if everyday could be her last. She got a little too intense, though, leading her fellow Sisters to gently tell her to chill out.
“That was a gift that they gave me,” Sister Julia explained, “and they helped me to increase the levity, to increase the joy and find greater freedom in the recognition that every day could be my last day. That’s nothing to be afraid of because, well, maybe I’m a rare bird, but I’m not afraid to die. Our mortality is a very important part of our faith, and to be conscious of that and to be preparing for our death is a holy and good act. So as cliche as it may sound, I do want to be living every day like it’s my last. I’m trying to bring joy and light into the world, and I think it helps to have a light heart and to see the beauty in all things and all people the best we can.”
That doesn’t mean that Sister Julia doesn’t experience the occasional dark night of the soul. But as she reveals in “For Love of the Broken Body,” she knows that it is only a season of life, and there will be joy and light on the other end.
She said, “There [are] definitely some times where I feel like I’m in a ‘Good Friday’ phase, and the darkness is pretty intense and heavy. Grief can wake me up in the middle of the night, and sadness can haunt me. This is not a Pollyanna joy [that I have]. This is the type of Franciscan joy that St. Francis of Assisi talks about when he talks about perfect joy. In the midst of the suffering and the rejection and the sorrow and the misunderstandings and the accusations, I am somehow graced with this contentment that I have encountered in Christ, deep in my heart, that is central to me. It’s very grounding…All that is grace, all that is transformative. And so I do think, when you know an intimacy with Christ – which is a grace, and it doesn’t come easily to all – but when it starts to come, then we can do a dance with God together, and God can transform the heartache if we hold it out to Him.”
(To listen to my full interview with Sister Julia Walsh, click on the podcast link):
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