Guest
Dr. Mary Elizabeth Cuff is a homeschooling mom and independent scholar and writer. She holds a PhD in American Literature and Classical Rhetoric from the Catholic University of America and is a proud alumna of both Catholic homeschooling and the University of Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Crisis Magazine, Modern Age, and Law and Liberty, and she has been a guest on Guadalupe Radio and Relevant Radio. She and her husband are “homesteading-lite” in rural Pennsylvania.
Link
- Mother to Mother: Spiritual and Practical Wisdom from the Cloister to the Home (book)
- Mary’s website
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
Motherhood is the most important job in the entire world, but it comes with struggles and suffering. One mother decided to look to another type of motherhood for advice on this important task. Well, I’m Eric Sammons, your host and editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. This is what we’re going to be talking about today. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, let other people know about what we’re doing here. Also, you can go to crisismagazine.com, put in your e-mail address and you will get our articles sent to your inbox every day. Also, you can follow us on social media at crisis mag at all the social media channels, which are ever changing.
So today, we have Mary Cuff, who is a writer for Crisis Magazine. I want to just lead with that when I talk about her bio, because that’s obviously the most important thing that she does in the world, which is not actually true. But anyway, she is a homeschooling mom, independent scholar and writer. She holds a PhD in American Literature and Classical Rhetoric from Catholic University of America and a proud alumni of both Catholic homeschooling and the University of Dallas which is, my daughter actually graduated from the University of Dallas, so I know it well.
Her writing has appeared in Crisis Magazine. Like I said, that’s the one that matters. Also Modern Age and Law and Liberty. She’s been a guest on Guadalupe Radio and Relevant Radio. She and her husband are homesteading lite in rural Pennsylvania which, I’ve got to ask you about that because I feel like we’re doing the same thing here in Ohio. Welcome to the program, Mary.
Mary Cuff:
Thanks for having me.
Eric Sammons:
So actually, let’s just start with that. What do you mean by homesteading lite?
Mary Cuff:
It means that we can’t possibly actually homestead. No. It basically means that we do little bits around the place. We have seven acres, but it’s mostly just forest that the kids run around in. We have 12 chickens. We have a bee hive. I talked my husband into getting sheep next year, maybe. But nothing too crazy. We’re not trying to go off the grid or raise all of our own food. We know we can’t do that. We know it’s not practical for us to do, but we want to have a little bit of that in our lives.
Eric Sammons:
That sounds very similar to us. We have 10 acres. Most of it is woods. The kids run around in it. We’re not as into animals, though. We had quail for a while because it was easier than chickens and that worked out nicely, but then it just didn’t work out that great for us. We have a big garden. We have some cats and a bunny. I would love to get animals at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet. The embarrassing thing is, I’m actually speaking at the Catholic Land Movement Conference in a couple of weeks and I’m going to feel like a big poser when I’m there. Fortunately, I’m not talking about homesteading. I’m not an expert in that, so I’m not going to talk about that.
Okay. So you seem to be incredibly over qualified to be a homeschooling mom.
Mary Cuff:
On the contrary.
Eric Sammons:
Tell us the background of your education. Did you, immediately after getting your PhD, start homeschooling your kids? What’s your background when it comes to motherhood? Because that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is motherhood.
Mary Cuff:
Right. My mom was a stay at home homeschooling mom. I’m one of six kids. That’s the framework that I grew up in. I went to graduate school because I wanted to be like my hero, J.R.R. Tolkien. I wanted to go and teach literature and mythology and language. I still do that. In fact, I get to do that better now because I get to do it my way as opposed to some administrator’s way.
But I don’t know. I was coming home from teaching one day and I started thinking about, I was frustrated with my students. Every teacher is. Even Tolkien was. He would gripe about it all the time, so that comforts me. But I was coming home one day and I was thinking, “How do you get kids excited about learning?” Because so many people are just not excited about learning. By the time they get to college, it’s been beaten out of them. I was thinking, “How would you get them excited again?” I was thinking about my students initially. The more I thought about it, the more I was like, “Well, you need to start really early. I wish I could take a time machine and start these kids off on a better footing.”
Then I thought how cool it would be if you could do these, live history a little bit and recreate it with your kids and get them all excited about all these cool things that I love and I wish that my students loved. Then I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. That’s what my mom did with us, homeschooling.” At the time, I had a two-year-old and that was it. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be so cool to do that with her?” Then I thought, “Well, if I want to do it the way I feel like I really want to do it, I need to spend all the time doing it with her.”
I got home. I went in the front door and I said to my husband, “Hey, would you mind if I just didn’t go on the job market?” We were in grad school at the time and we were just starting that process. I was like, “Can I just not go on the job market and just you go on the job market?” He said, “I was hoping you’d say that one day, but I didn’t want to push you.” I said, “Yeah, I think I want to do what my mom did and stay home and homeschool the kids.”
That’s how I got to the place where I am. I finished my PhD and I feel like I use my PhD a lot in homeschooling. I use it a lot all around the place, so it’s kind of cool that it’s still useful. It just wasn’t useful the way I thought it was going to be useful.
Eric Sammons:
How old are your kids now?
Mary Cuff:
I have an eight-year-old, five and a half year old, just turned four year old, two year old, and seven month old.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, wow. Congratulations on all of them. So you’re really getting started. One of the things when we started, our kids are 18 years apart. So we realize at one point, we’re going to have, going 35 years my wife’s going to be teaching now. Because we started the oldest when she was in second grade and then we’re going all the way through to our youngest. My oldest is the one who graduated from University of Dallas. So it’s a long time. I’m a big supporter of homeschooling as well. That’s the understatement. It’s been great for us as well.
We want to talk a little bit about motherhood because you wrote a book. It’s called, within all your time, every stay at home mom has plenty of time with five-
Mary Cuff:
Loads of time.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. You’ve got time all over the place, I’m sure. My wife had a book come out last year, so I understand how you get snippets in here and there. You find time at maybe 5:00 in the morning or whenever it is.
Mary Cuff:
Yup.
Eric Sammons:
You wrote this book, Mother To Mother from TAN Books, Spiritual and Practical Wisdom from the Cloister to the Home. Now, I want to say something that you don’t have to say. I mentioned it to you beforehand. It’s a warning to anybody who’s listening. If you know about mommy blogs and you don’t like them, keep listening. This is not them. I just say that because I can say it. My wife is not a fan of mommy blogs, but I’m going to recommend this book to her after reading it, because it’s very different.
So anyway, the thing you’re not supposed to do when you interview somebody, you mention a book, you don’t say, “Why’d you write this book?” I never do, but I am this time because, tell us about the Genesis book because it’s so intriguing. When I heard about this I was like, “Oh, my gosh. I have to talk to Mary about this because this is not just you spouting off about what you think about motherhood.” In fact, who you went to, to find out about motherhood is very, it’s just genius, I think. I want to know how you came to this idea, I’m going to write this book. Tell us what the crux is. I don’t want to spoil it for you.
Mary Cuff:
I mention in the introduction to the book the moment where it jumped into my head. I was at a playground having a play date with a bunch of other moms and a capuchin nun was there. At least in my neck of the woods, you never see a capuchin nun at a playground. I have a feeling that probably in most people’s neck of the woods, you don’t typically see contemplative nuns at a playground, so obviously, I went over to say hi to her. We started talking and at one point she says, “Contemplative nuns are the stay at home moms of the religious vocation.” I thought to myself, “Oh, my goodness. I never thought of that before and it’s absolutely true.”
That got me thinking, what else do we have in common? More importantly, what can I learn from their experience of being moms, and specific to me, stay at home moms? So I started thinking about it. I started coming up with a bunch of questions that, if I ever got the chance, I would like to ask a contemplative nun about motherhood, the sort of things that we have in common, ways that maybe their perspective could shed light on my situation. Then I started polling other moms and saying, “If you got to ask a contemplative nun a question about motherhood, what would it be?”
Then I ended up getting five different monasteries involved; the Gower Benedictines from Gower, Missouri with Mother Wilhelmina, the incorrupt foundress. I was very excited to get them. Actually, I got them before they exhumed her. In the middle of the project they wrote me and they were like, “Our responses are going to take a while. We have an incorrupt foundress on our hands.” I was like, “Yeah, don’t mind me. I think you’ve got something more important to do right now.” But they got it in somehow, because they’re busy women, too.
So I had the Gower Benedictines. I had the Byzantine Carmelites from the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. I got the Capuchins from over here in Pennsylvania, as well. I got the Roswell Poor Clares and I got the Cistercians from up in Wisconsin. They all got involved in the project. Basically what I’d do is, I’d write them and I’d include questions, the questions that I’d come up with, and they would send back their answers, their reflections. That’s really what the book is. It’s a question and answer with nuns about common topics relating to all of us mothers, contemplative and lay.
Eric Sammons:
How did you narrow it down to those five? Did you reach out to other ones? Was there a certain standard? You thought, I want to ask this type? Obviously, contemplative, you said. You wanted to ask them. Or is that maybe the only five contemplative orders in the country? I don’t know.
Mary Cuff:
Oh, no, no, no. There’s thousands and thousands. I came up with a list. I researched monastic communities and I came up with a list of, if I could just snap my fingers and they could be in the book, these are the ones that would be in the book. It was a lot larger. There’s a lot of really cool monasteries. I wrote them all. Some of them just didn’t have time for it. One monastery, they said, “We’re really old and we’re short of hands and we don’t think we can do this.” These are the ones that had time and were interested in the project from the list that I had created. There were others that, round two, I’d like to throw them in the book, too.
Eric Sammons:
I did not know there was a Byzantine Carmelite order. That was amazing when I saw that. I was like, “Holy cow!” And that’s in Pennsylvania, you said?
Mary Cuff:
In the Pocono Mountains, yeah. They’re the only one in the world. They’ve got an amazing creation story. Actually took a seven-month-old and the two of us drove there in the middle of a blizzard. It didn’t start as a blizzard, but it ended as a blizzard. And spent the weekend with them and they’re incredible. I love them. I want to go back there and hang out with them again.
Eric Sammons:
Do they take visitors?
Mary Cuff:
Yeah, they have a guest house. Last year and the year before, they actually had a pilgrimage for the Feast of Saint Therese of Lisieux. I guess a lot of people went to that. I tried to go and ended up having a conflict, so I couldn’t go. But yeah, they’ve got this beautiful little monastery there. It’s sort of like east meets west. They follow a lot of the eastern traditions, but they’re still Carmelites, which is a western tradition. They take a lot from the Trappists in their spirituality because monasticism was the eastern desert fathers and desert mothers and then the western monastic’s Benedict and all that, they came and learned from the eastern fathers. They’re trying to bridge that again and live the bridge, is what I would say.
Eric Sammons:
I have three daughters still at home. We took them out to Gower, actually, earlier this year, which was amazing. We like to visit a few other places, but that place, I was like, “Wow, I got to get there. That sounds awesome.”
Okay. We both know, in the eyes of the world, the idea of a celibate woman living with a bunch of other woman would know nothing about motherhood. What in the world could somebody like that say about motherhood? What is the common denominator? Why is it that you look to them for advice on motherhood? What brings together you as a, for lack of a better term, physical mother, and them as spiritual mothers?
Mary Cuff:
I think the important thing to remember is that when we call them spiritual mothers, when a sister in the monastery refers to her Mother Superior as mother, this isn’t just a cute term of endearment. It’s real. They really mean it seriously. One thing that’s beautiful about all the orders that I worked with is that they reflect often about the home life at Nazareth. They think of themselves very much as called to emulate and to model Nazareth, the domestic church of Christ, and Our Lady, and Joseph at Nazareth.
It turns out that there ends up being a lot in common between a lay mother and a spiritual mother. First, and I think most important, the thread that runs throughout is that both of us derive our vocations from Our Lady, so we are called to emulate Our Lady in our vocations. With that as our common goal, we end up having a lot to talk about. Nuns are called to emulate Our Lady in that she’s the first nun. Perpetual virginity, contemplating Christ in the silence of her heart, that’s the definition of a nun. Our Lady did it first and did it best.
She also was literally physically the mother of God, the Theotokos. We are called, lay Christian mothers, we are called to be the mother of the children of God. Our children are God’s children. We are supposed to seek Christ in them and we are supposed to model the motherhood of Our Lady in serving our children and serving our communities as mothers.
So we have Our Lady as our common goal. Nuns are also supposed to model her motherhood. I think lay mothers often forget that we are also supposed to contemplate Christ in our hearts, in the silence of our hearts as well. We emphasize one aspect of her more literally than nuns do, and nuns emphasize the other aspect of her more literally than lay mothers do, but both of us are supposed to emulate both parts of her insofar as our vocations emphasize that. So obviously, lots of complements there.
Eric Sammons:
How would you say though, besides the obvious, that they don’t have physical children, what would you say are the differences, though, between the motherhood that you practice and the motherhood of a Mother Superior? Even a sister, in a certain sense, is a mother, who’s not the Mother Superior. How would you say they’re really different as well?
Mary Cuff:
There’s the obvious differences, right? I think some of the differences that we are called to do is that nuns have a more literal stripping away of the world than is possible for lay mothers. In a chapter of my book, I talk about sacrifice and the concept of martyrdom. Actually, the medieval church split what we call white martyrdom into two separate categories, which I think really shows the differences between the motherhood of a nun and the motherhood of a lay mother.
Obviously, we know what red martyrdom is, but white martyrdom is when you’re not literally being fed to the lions, but you are sacrificing yourself to the will of God in a death to self and death to world. The nuns, in the medieval concept, are the white martyrs. They separate themselves from the world to practice a radicalness that is not possible, or even prudent, for a lay person to try to emulate. They are called to be the white martyrs, separating themselves radically from the world for the pursuit of Christ.
Lay people, in the medieval construction, have what’s called either blue martyrdom or green martyrdom. It comes from a homily, an Irish homily, and they didn’t have a distinct difference between those two colors. But we are supposed to die to our self within the world. So there is that radical difference where we talk about poverty, we talk about silence. We talk about isolation in the book. Nuns’ call to radical poverty and my call to poverty are going to be different. They have to be different. Doesn’t mean we can’t learn from each other. They reflect upon the concept of poverty in a more spiritual way than I do and therefore, they have more that they can say to me about poverty that I can then use to emulate insofar it is part of my calling as a lay mother.
Eric Sammons:
It’s always been true that the monks and the contemplative nuns, people who take this extreme vow of poverty, it is supposed to be an example to all of us. Not that we’re supposed to emulate it exactly, but we are supposed to look at it and say, “Yeah, we’re supposed to die to the world. They’re dying to the world as literally as possible and we’re also supposed to die to the world.”
Now, we might end up, because of just having to care for our families in that we might have more material goods and things like that, but it should prick our conscious when we see them, how they live like, “Oh, I probably should go a little bit closer to them than I just did my latest Amazon order,” or something like that.
Mary Cuff:
Right. Exactly.
Eric Sammons:
We’re all called to holiness. We’re all called to this discipleship, to this type of martyrdom in fact. What specifically about motherhood, what specific to motherhood in living that out that, for example, I wouldn’t have as a husband and a father or even a lay woman who’s not married, what is it specific to motherhood that are the challenges and the ways in which a mother can grow in holiness and grow closer to Christ?
Mary Cuff:
Right. I think that the uniqueness with motherhood, and sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint exactly because you say, “Mothers are called to do this,” and all the men in the room are like, “We can do that, too.” It’s like, yes. For instance you say, “A mother is called to nurture.” Men can nurture, too, but obviously and deeply, we can instinctively sense the difference, if it’s done right, by a mother versus a father. A father’s nurturing has this masculinity to it that a mother can’t and shouldn’t try to provide.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, we throw the kid up in the air and catch them.
Mary Cuff:
Exactly, way high up in the air.
Eric Sammons:
Let’s see how high we can go.
Mary Cuff:
Yeah, the tough love, the wipe some dirt on it thing. Moms do that, too. Moms need to do that, too. There’s nothing worse than an overly stuffy mom who’s like, “Ooh.” It’s too much. You create weak adults from that sort of motherhood. But there is this soft nurturingness that only a mother can provide.
There’s the healthy extension of being in the womb, that comforting home. It’s instinctual. It’s so surrounding, like an embrace. Our Lady provides that for the church. Lay mothers and spiritual mothers are supposed to provide that as well, that surrounds, that provides a warmth, a sense of belonging, a sense of place for our children, for the children of God in the church. So only a mother can really do that in a feminine way.
Part of my book, I reference a theologian who splits and he says, “Don’t split it too radically or too literally,” but men stand for the doctrinal aspect of the church, the teaching, logo centric aspect of the church, and women are much more the tradition. Tradition people, especially these days, don’t quite understand the purpose of tradition. Tradition is our sense of belonging, our sense that we are at home. As opposed to, we are at a place. There’s a distinct difference between a daycare and a home, a living room in a home. We can feel it. We can feel the difference. That difference is a mother. That surrounding, almost like oxygen in the room is what mothers are called to provide.
Eric Sammons:
That’s beautiful. That’s very true. Now, you ask these Mother Superiors about some specific topics, which I thought were very good. I wanted to go through a few of them. I obviously recommend the book, Mother to Mother, to get more in depth, but I wanted to get some of their, because I thought it was very good, some of the insights they had and applying them to lay mothers.
The first is just the relationship between work and prayer. We joked about it earlier. You wrote a book while being a stay at home mom with, it was five, right? Five kids.
Mary Cuff:
Yes. Five kids, yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Five kids eight and under. Been there. That is a challenge, to find time. We think of contemplative as, their work is prayer. So what insights did they give, though, to you about how a lay mother can balance that work and prayer and integrate them in their life?
Mary Cuff:
First of all, nuns do a lot of work. They very much are the homemakers of the monastery. One nun said, “This is Christ’s home. It’s His house. We want to make sure that it’s nice and clean for Him.” They end up doing a lot of chores around the house. It takes a lot to keep a monastery afloat. They’re not just always in the chapel, praying. They also have lots of work that they have to do. Especially a Mother Superior, because she has this added layer where she is orchestrating the whole thing and taking care of her spiritual daughters.
How to balance prayer and work. The nuns had a lot of really great suggestions that I’ve been incorporating in my own life. First of all, they emphasize that you can pray in moments where you wouldn’t necessarily think to pray and in ways that I didn’t necessarily think of as prayer. It’s a cracking open the box of prayer. You can have something they call holy gratitude. Practicing holy gratitude in the business of your life. You’re handling this kid while trying to do the laundry while trying to teach math while trying to do this, that, and the other thing. Cultivating a holy gratitude is a form of prayer. It can be a word list prayer, sort of an entering into the presence of God in that moment because it’s a moment that He wants you to be in.
That was another cool emphasis that they had was that, think of every moment that you are working in your vocation, in your family life as an aspect of your vocation. It’s a moment that God gave to you to fulfill your vocation in. Because you are doing God’s work in that moment, even though you might have forgotten that doing the laundry and being nice to the two-year-old who’s been having a tantrum all day is your vocation. Yes, it is your vocation. It is the will of God for you in that moment.
You can use those moments to pray, using gratitude to God, praising Him through your actions as you encounter the work that He’s giving you in that moment. All of that can be part of prayer. Work can be transformed and be holy. The idea that Saint Therese, the little flower had, where you’re picking up a pin out of love of God, can be a great act for God’s glory.
So they had all these great tips about refocusing how we think about what it is we do and gearing it towards prayer, which I have found very helpful, personally.
Eric Sammons:
I wanted to also agree with the fact that they work a lot. When we visited Gower, have you been there?
Mary Cuff:
No. I keep meaning to go.
Eric Sammons:
You got to go. You got to go. But we were there for just a day and we could see, while we were there, you can’t go back, but you can see from one part. You can see behind the convent where their garden and stuff like that. So we see the sisters there working hard. I think at one point, a couple of them were dragging a tree that they had cut down or something like that. Then later, all of a sudden, a riding mower goes by and one of the sisters is on it, mowing the grass and everything. I realized they had to keep up. I don’t know how big their property is, but it’s acres and acres. They have a garden. It’s a lot of crops there.
I know from my own house how much work it is and I have a lot less than they do. It’s a lot of work, and yet, they are contemplative nuns, so their primary vocation is to pray, of course, but I think that’s great, the idea that they integrate it. I think anybody, we all should do that, but those are good insights.
I want to bring up the radioactive issue when it comes to mothers and wives, which is obedience because this is something, everybody agrees that the vow of obedience for religious is a great thing and it’s pretty absolute. Saint Thomas says no obedience to another human being is absolute. It’s only to God. But essentially, there better be a really good reason that you wouldn’t obey a religious superior. Lay people, of course, don’t have that same level of obedience. Yet, Saint Paul talks about wives being obedient to their husbands.
You have a whole chapter on this, which is great. What did you learn from their practice of obedience, how it then transfers or helps you understand the wife’s call to obedience?
Mary Cuff:
That chapter actually was one of my favorite chapters because of the things the nuns said in it. Yeah, it is the radioactive topic, isn’t it? But it doesn’t need to be and that’s what they kept emphasizing. They were like, “Yeah, everyone’s so scared of obedience these days. It’s such a naughty word. Everyone thinks that if you obey someone, then you are under them, which means that you are less important than them.”
One of my favorite comments that one of the nuns said was, “Christ, in the New Testament, after they find Him in the temple, He returns with His parents home and is obedient to them.” Obviously, Christ is the most important, highest being in and out of the cosmos and He is obedient under humans. Not even just Our Lady, who’s the most perfect of all humans that He has made. So, the uncreated God is underneath a human that He has made, but also Saint Joseph, who’s not even immaculate. Saint Joseph, good for us. I’m sure he was the only person in that nice little house that was ever at fault. Yet, Christ is obedient to him, too. As the head of the house, He’s more obedient to his father, his foster father, the father that He has chosen for Himself.
So obedience does not mean that you are less than, that you are inferior to. Christ put Himself in humble obedience to these two humans, to show us the great beauty of obedience. That just blew my mind. It’s like, wow, that’s true. There’s nothing offensive about being called in obedience to someone else because the church has this great tradition of holy obedience being what God is calling us to do. Obeying the proper authority, wives obeying our husbands, children obeying their parents, us obeying the hierarchy of the church in the proper ways is us obeying God. That can’t be offensive. That can’t be, how dare you. You think you know better?
In the proper ways, we are called to obey God. We are obeying God through the person who has been set for us as the channel by which we can obey God. The humility that we are called to cultivate in that call to obedience will make us holier people, will bring us closer to God. That’s what this is all about. Is it hard to do? Yes, of course, it’s hard to do, but God didn’t promise us the easy way to Heaven. If you found an easy way to do it, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Yet, the nuns kept emphasizing the joy of holy obedience, too. When you know that, by humbling yourself, by obeying, by saying, “Not my will, but Yours,” they are drawing closer to God. They are fulfilling their vocation. They are doing what it was that they were set on this Earth to do. There is a joy and there is a freedom and there’s a dignity to that, which is very important to remember.
You find, too often, when lay Christians have weighed into the obedience battle, they keep talking about the hard structure of it like, “Obey, obey, obey, obey.” Why can’t we emphasize the joy and the freedom aspect of it, too, hand in hand with that? Because it is a beautiful thing. It’s a loving thing. Another nun said, “When we fall in love, we desire to fulfill the desire of the other.” That’s obedience. So when we fall in love, we want to do the will of the beloved. When the beloved is ultimately God working through the person that He has put in our life to serve as a conduit towards that, that is a joyful thing and a loving thing to do.
Eric Sammons:
I’m sure your husband’s great, by the way.
Mary Cuff:
He has his moments.
Eric Sammons:
There’s a lot of situations where, we’re talking about obedience and the joy of it. Do you have any insights, though for, there are situations where the wife, the mother, maybe she converted or reverted to her faith after they got married and the husband’s not Catholic or he’s not practicing Catholic. He’s not really on board with a lot of the faith. What about in those situations? Is there any insight you gained to help mothers? Because those are difficult situations. What would you say to them?
Mary Cuff:
First, I would say that I think a lot of people in the modern world, and I’m sure that we did this before the modern world, so I don’t want to say it’s just us. But we often look at the exceptions to the rule and then want to destroy the rule or say, “It’s a bad rule because there’s exceptions to the rule.” You shouldn’t have a joint bank account with your spouse because what if they’re stealing all of your money. Okay, that’s an exception. That’s not the rule. You shouldn’t trust people ever because what if they’re untrustworthy. There’s the standard. There’s what we strive for. And then there’s the exceptions. I do believe that the exceptions do not undermine the rule in most cases.
Those exceptions, I think, need to be a more case by case basis. Obviously, in situations that are like that, especially if it’s someone who has taken our faith significantly more seriously than their spouse and their spouse is not living up to the role that they are called to have, then I would say, get a spiritual director involved. Don’t go at it yourself. Get a spiritual director who understands and who respects the standard, as opposed to someone who’s just helping you ditch the standard. Because we are still called to that vow.
Nuns can have a bad superior. They still have that vow of obedience, so they have to walk a very fine line where they uphold that vow of obedience, but are also attempting to do the will of God when maybe superior is not living up to the role that they have been given by God. We all encounter that from time to time. I think that part of holy obedience is that we can call out our superior in a loving way.
We see this throughout church history, that people have had to do that. Is it Saint Catherine of Siena going to the Pope and saying, “Hey, you’re doing this wrong.” She wasn’t even a full nun. She was a lay sister. She’s, in some ways, the lowest of the low if you will, and a woman in the Middle Ages. People didn’t do that and yet, she did and that wasn’t a bad thing. She was called by God to do that. She did it in a loving, respectful, obedient way. She’s calling him to his obedience, reminding him, her spiritual father, of his obedience to God. That’s very important, I think, is that when we are called to correct them who we owe obedience to, that we are calling them to their obedience so that we can obey them better.
Eric Sammons:
I especially think the idea of each individual case has to be taken care of individually because, with somebody who knows the people in the situation very well. Another topic you address, which I think is particularly directed towards stay at home moms, and that’s isolation. I know, from just talking to my wife and her friends and people like that, especially early on when you’re not having adult conversations with a three-year-old, so you might literally not have an adult conversation all day. Maybe if your husband works outside the home, he gets home and he, frankly, does have no energy to have a long, drawn out conversation, it can feel very isolating. You have a whole chapter dedicated to that. What did the Mother Superiors, what was their advice for mothers who struggle with isolation?
Mary Cuff:
Part of it, they gave tough love and they gave understanding sympathy because nuns can also struggle from isolation. They’re in a community together, but they are very much misunderstood by the world, in many respects. A lot of them are misunderstood by their families, who weren’t entirely sure that they did the right thing by entering a monastery. Even within the monastery, sometimes isolation is something that people struggle with.
The tough love was, they said, “Maybe make sure that we’re not throwing ourselves a pity party, that part of this is part of our vocation, and we are called to self-sacrifice.” Something that the modern world, I find, is also kind of scared of where they’re like, if it’s, don’t throw yourself a pity party, they’re like, “Oh, no, no. You need self-care. You need self-care.” You do need self-care, but sometimes we can think that we need more self-care than we actually need. So they said, “Be careful not to feel sorry for yourself in situations like that when maybe you need to embrace the sacrifice.” That’s hard to hear, but I think it’s important to hear, that part of this is something that we are called to offer up in sacrifice.
But then part of it is not. Part of it’s the real, human need for a community and especially, I think, in today’s world. A lot of women don’t have the village that we used to have. That can be hard. So cultivating spiritual friendships can be an important way out of this. One of the nuns said that she has a friend in Heaven that she talks to when she is feeling alone or she is feeling overwhelmed. It’s another nun from her order who died 100 years ago. They never actually met, but she said she considers her a spiritual friend that she turns to in those moments of isolation.
I actually included, at the end of the book, two of my own spiritual friends because I’ve tried to cultivate that as well. They’re two saints who were nuns. I picked them because they embody the sorts of mothers I was talking to throughout the book. They’re two saintly nuns that I’ve just grown close to throughout the years, Saint Hilda of Whitby, long, long, long ago, and Mother Maravillas de Jesus, who was very recently canonized, I believe by John Paul II. When I’m having a day that I just haven’t had an adult conversation and I really need one, I turn to them. I pray, but it’s almost a mom chat format in my head, doing the dishes and sometimes it’s a rant. But if you think about a phone call with a friend when you’re just like, “I just need to talk to someone, but there’s no one to talk to.” I call them up, as it were.
Eric Sammons:
Right. It’s like imaginary friends, but real.
Mary Cuff:
But real, who can actually really help.
Eric Sammons:
But actually more real, in some ways, than the people we interact with because they’re in Heaven, so they’re very real. They’ve got complete realness. One last thing I want to talk about was, one of the things in general I think that is a problem today in the Catholic world is, we really don’t have interaction with sisters, with nuns. I think that, I’m very fortunate. In my parish, we have an order of nuns, Carmelites, who basically, their convent’s right next door to the parish. So they teach catechism. They’re at Mass every week. They’re around. They’re always involved in our activities in the parish. I’ve noticed that it’s such a difference from other parishes I’ve been in because they give that feminine touch, motherly aspect. You always have your priest. They’re the fathers, if they’re doing their job, so you have that, which is good.
But it does seem like we’re living in a single parent parishes or family often because the nuns are all gone. I just wanted to get your perspective on interacting with them. I know you don’t have them right there with you, but interacting with them. What do they bring to the Catholic community? We think of them as the prayer warriors. I get that, but I feel like there’s so much more than that. I think they can give us real spiritual direction, which is what they’re doing in this book. I just bring that up because talking made me think about it. I just want to get your thoughts on that as well.
Mary Cuff:
I think what you said, that we live in single parent parishes is very true. That maternal aspect is largely missing from most parishes. It’s sad because we feel the lack. A lot of times, we don’t realize that’s what’s missing. It’s those nuns that traditionally have been attached to parishes that have done stuff. A lot of those are the active orders, but we used to have a lot of contemplative nuns closer at hand and people would go to them for spiritual direction. Sometimes a woman needs to speak to a wise spiritual mother about topics that are more common to women that men just can’t really give as much or the same type of insight to.
A lot of that is missing in the world, which is part of why I wrote the book. I wanted to bring the monasteries closer to mothers, so that mothers could have conversations with these nuns via reading this book. I thin, too, that when Catholics are more aware of contemplative monastics and what they can actually give to us and help us with, we can seek them out a little bit more. It turns out that there are more monasteries around us than you might think.
I live in a very rural area, a bunch of tiny, little, small towns and there are two contemplative monasteries 20 minutes away from me. I didn’t know that until I started thinking, “Are there any nearby me?” It turns out there’s two and you can go there. You can go to Mass. You can talk to the nuns. I’ve had some wonderful conversations with the local contemplative nuns, but I didn’t even think to look for them until after I had written this book. I think that, if Catholics are more aware of what contemplatives can do for us, we might start looking them up in our own zip codes and you can go to monasteries. You can talk to the monastics. They want to talk to us. We are their spiritual children. They would like a visit from their spiritual children. They have a lot to offer us.
Eric Sammons:
I think that’s great advice, to try to find, to see if there are contemplative monasteries nearby. One thing, I know people might think it’s a little funny to talk about spiritual direction from a woman, but this is actually very traditional, that nuns gave spiritual directions. They have done that for centuries. It’s not something, some modernist thing. I’m not a big fan of the lay spiritual direction, to be honest. I admit it. I know that’s become a thing because there’s been such a dearth. There’s no spiritual direction available for most people. It’s very difficult to find a spiritual director, but the reality is, is that nuns have supplied that. Like you said, they give, especially when they’re directing a woman, they can give certain insights that only a woman can understand.
I’ll second that. Look around. Maybe there is a monastery nearby. If nothing else, maybe make an effort to visit one like we did this year. We made it part of our vacation. We were going to a couple different. We’re going to go out of our way and make sure we stop at Gower. That was, personally, my favorite day of the vacation was just being there all day. My daughters got to talk to some of the nuns. We got to go to Mass and things like that, and of course, see Sister Wilhelmina.
So the book is, again, Mother to Mother: Spiritual and Practical Wisdom from the Cloister to the Home, from TAN Publishing. I will put a link to it in the show notes so people know exactly how to find it and buy it directly from Tan. You can buy it at the other place, but let’s buy it directly from the publisher as much as possible. Are we able to buy it directly from you, or should we just buy it from TAN? I should have asked that.
Mary Cuff:
From TAN. TAN’s better.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Okay, great. Okay, perfect. Is there any other way we can find out about stuff you’re doing? You write at Crisis. Do you have a website or just basically find you by Googling?
Mary Cuff:
I have a brand new website. My father-in-law helped me come up with it. It’s called marycuff.com.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, perfect. I will put a link to that as well, so people can go to it. I didn’t see that, so I’m glad that you told me about it. We’ll make sure-
Mary Cuff:
It’s brand new. It just showed up.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, perfect. Perfect. Just in time. Well, Mary, I really appreciate this conversation. Like I said, as soon as we get finished with it, I’m probably going to go take this book to my wife and tell her, “I know you hate a lot of this mommy stuff, but this is one that I think you’re going to like.” So I appreciate you writing it.
Mary Cuff:
Good to know. Good to know. Thank you very much.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, everybody. Until next time. God love you.