Ask for the Fire

9 October 2021: Ask for the Fire

A reflection on Sister Helen Prejean’s spiritual memoir, River of Fire

I’ve only been lucky enough to see Sister Helen Prejean speak in person once, nearly twenty-five years ago, and I still remember that evening. Some details are pretty fuzzy, frankly: An auditorium of some kind at the University of Iowa, where I was a graduate student, with only so-so lighting and sound, filled probably beyond capacity. What I remember clear as today was her voice, and beyond that, her presence. Yes, she has the Louisiana accent, and sure, it’s part of her charm, as is her capacity to spin yarns with self-effacing humor and salt-of-the-earth flavor. But beyond that, much deeper down, she’s got fire. That’s what I felt that night, even at the back of that auditorium. She told us to pursue our vocation: that place where the deepest part of you, your great gift, meets some deep need in the world, and finds great joy in trying to respond to it, even if mixed with heartbreak. It was the best articulation of vocation I’d heard, from the most convincing, walk-the-talk person I’d ever heard it from, and in that way she has guided me ever since.

            At that time, she was riding out the marvelous wave of Dead Man Walking, her story of accompanying death row inmates to their executions, which Susan Sarandon convinced her husband, Tim Robbins, to adapt for the movies, and which won a truckload of awards. Prejean claimed that night that she was currently trying to figure out how to actually look like Sarandon (who played her in the film) on an everyday basis, not just on screen, but still hadn’t quite found the right combination of hairstyle and make-up… but she’d keep trying, prayerfully of course.

            I’d been waiting a long while for Prejean to write something like River of Fire, her spiritual memoir of 2019, so when I finally heard about it (a couple years late; blame it on the pandemic), I eagerly jumped in. Unfortunately, I didn’t encounter that same presence, that fire, in the book itself, except occasionally. When it appears, mostly in the last quarter, it’s wonderful, and worth the wait. And the wait is helped along by her humor, her historical perspective on US Catholicism in general and nuns’ vocations in specific, and the oh-so-tempting notion that she’ll reveal something juicy about a priest she became romantically involved with decades ago (spoiler alert: she narrates the blossoming and withering of the relationship without revealing anything juicy at all). Anyone interested in or nostalgic about the life of a cloistered nun in the pre-Vatican II days will find much to enjoy in the book’s early chapters, even if you feel (as I do) that, for as much as Prejean extols her love of and gift for writing, she’s a much more powerful speaker. That presence—it’s just not quite there, for a good long while.

            She starts to hit her stride when writing about how Vatican II upends the apple cart, liberating her and her sisters from their onerous habits, and challenging nuns and priests alike to liberate lay people to have more confidence, more voice, more presence in engaging their faith and in shaping the Church. We see her struggling admirably to understand how best to use her nun’s power (though still much less than a priest’s or bishop’s) wisely, generously, first by gathering ordinary lay people for frank, hard, but hopefully fruitful conversations about how they do, or don’t, feel part of the Church. We also see her challenging Church authorities, not only the Mother Superiors of her Josephine order, but even Popes, on the Church’s alienating, hypocritical, and life-draining choices to turn a blind eye on capital punishment and to deny women priestly ordination. (The appendix, a copy of her 2016 letter to Pope Francis on the latter, is also worth the wait. She really socks it to him— again, prayerfully. Of course.)

            But the heat starts rising from the pages when she takes us into the spiritual and social territory she encountered when she began to walk with the poorest of the poor in Louisiana, especially at the St Thomas Project. You feel the river building speed and power.

            Of course, looking at her now, at her fire and focus and influence, we might say that she was born for her vocation as “the death penalty nun,” and that her journey must have been a straight shot, a destiny fulfilled day by day. But that’s one surprisingly wonderful thing about her, and this book: how open she is to showing us her missteps, stumbles, and outright blunders. It reminds me of something I’ve only been able to appreciate as an adult, that the saints whom we deify, sanctify, and frankly sanitize with years or centuries of distance, were real flesh and blood, people who went the wrong way, sometimes fiercely and obstinately until something both within and without them finally recognized and responded to God’s radical love.

            In her telling, she finds herself on her own road to Damascus in 1980, listening to (in fact, resisting) a simple yet radical interpretation of Jesus’ teachings offered by a fellow nun who rankled her on the regular about social justice, which at that time, Prejean still considered “too political” and distracting, not essential to her work as a nun, or even to Christianity.

            In the chapter she titles, “Lightning in Terre Haute,” Prejean slows things down and really lets us inside, where we can see her soul wrestling with Sister Marie Augusta, and beyond that, with God. It’s best to excerpt at some length here, to hear some of that struggle playing out.

            The first day of the conference… [Marie] lays out all the sad statistics of how unfairly the resources of the world are distributed…I’m listening and saying to myself: I know that life isn’t fair. I know that children are starving and women and girls aren’t educated and are being abused. I get it. All bad, sad stuff. But what—tell me, what is one lone person like me supposed to do about such gigantic world problems?

            Sorry, but misery statistics, even about little kids starving in droves, roll right over me. I feel bad for them but in a sort of general way. I don’t personally know anyone starving to death. I figure the big problems of the world are where God comes in. Planetary problems are God’s problems…

            Marie Augusta says: “Jesus preached good news to the poor.” And I’m thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know those words by heart… I’m sure about what’s coming next, what the good news of eternal salvation must be for poor people…the great, shining, glorious reward that will be theirs in heaven…

            But that’s not what Marie Augusta says.

            She says, “Integral to that good news is that the poor are to be poor no longer.”

            Poor no longer?

            There it is, the lightning that strikes unsuspecting Helen, and continues to strike her— the rest of that day, and the rest of her life. It wakes, shocks, and moves her to reconsider her vocation, and really, to change her life. If the poor are truly to be poor no longer, the systems that keep people poor, marginalized, and otherwise oppressed must be changed; and the people most privileged by those systems must change too, from the inside out. She understands in a visceral, lightning-struck way now that she is called to accompany the poor on a personal, vulnerable, relational level, and fight like hell for just laws and policy changes in the corruption-soaked state of Louisiana, and far beyond.

            The lightning doesn’t shock her in a purely singular, one-and-done way, however, and Prejean admirably shows us her conversion as a process, with plenty of false starts and ridiculous assumptions to be worked through and cleaned out, as she shifts from savior mode into a listening, accompanying, walk-the-talk pilgrim still open to learning, still hungry to understand the real stories of the most oppressed, still thirsty for God’s presence in her daily quiet prayer and in her friendships. We truly feel that the book’s epigraph, from St Bonaventure, has guided and shaped her: “Ask not for understanding, ask for the fire.”

            She receives it again, and again, in the months and years to come, and reading about just how that happens— feeling the rising of the river, the warming and sparking of the fire—is the true pleasure for me of this book, so I’m loathe to spoil much more of it for you. Suffice it to say that it is the power of personal story, told by the suffering person himself or herself, that humbles and holds her heart, and leads her to St Thomas housing project and the many injustices residents there suffer in flesh and blood, including the projects-to-prison pipeline that lands some folks on death row. She ends this book precisely where Dead Man Walking begins, with the invitation she received to correspond with a death row inmate, and the first lines of her first letter to him. Not only beautiful literary symmetry, but an invitation to us to read or re-read that book, and consider it and her broader vocation in a wider context, within a deeper river.

            She receives the fire she asks for, that’s clear. She keeps following it, and in this book, she shares it with us. Lucky us, who need the light and warmth of that hope, especially in these times.

            Now, the only question is: What will we do with it?